The FBI public corruption case in El Paso has involved up to 25 agents at a time, has been under way for at least two years, and involves potentially dozens of people from the political, business and legal communities.

Newspaper Tree sat down with Special Agent in Charge of the El Paso office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Manuel Mora, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge, Tim Kinard, and Special Agent Andrea Simmons, the office's spokeswoman.

The subjects covered included the scope of the investigation, the impact on the community, and the timeline for wrapping it up.

The interview took place in SAC Mora's office, and took place Friday, Aug. 17, the same day as the release of the third guilty plea related to the investigation. Thus far, three people have pleaded guilty to charges related to the investigation -- Travis Ketner, former chief of staff for County Judge Anthony Cobos, in June; former County Commissioner Betti Flores in July; and architect Bernardo Lucero Aug. 17. [ketner information] [flores information] [lucero information]

Other action involving the case includes an unsuccessful effort by Martie Jobe to force the recusal of U.S. District Judge Frank Montalvo, and a successful effort by the government to stop lawyer Mary Stillinger from representing three men who were named as potential targets of the investigation. [overview]

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity:

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NPT: One of the concerns in the community at large is where this thing is going and where is it going to end up. There is a delicate balance between telling us where it goes and the ability to get there. We've heard 50 indictments, we've heard 200 pleas. Can you be specific about that?

Manuel Mora: If we had completed the case, completed our investigation, and had an opportunity to sift through all the records that we have, and all the recordings, all of the interviews, we would have an idea of the numbers of subjects we would propose for indictment, but the ultimate decision would be with the United States Attorney's office.

If it was just one aspect of government we were looking at, we would have a finite number of individuals, but that's not the case. There are a number of different governmental entities that are involved in the investigation and each one seems to have a number of subjects. So as you get into one you start developing the information, and often times you get cooperation from someone that results in the identification of new subjects, and then you venture off to try to prove the case against those new subjects. Some of them you can and some of them you can't, so it's really kind of hard to say how many subjects we have. I have absolutely no idea.

NPT: Do you have pressure from the community because of this uncertainty?

Mora: The short answer is no. There has not been any one or group of individuals or organizations that have come to the FBI and said, 'When are you going to finish this?' That doesn’t mean that I don’t feel a sense of urgency in trying to bring this thing to a resolution, only because I know it's out there. I know people are waiting to see it come to an end, and our responsibility is to try to bring this thing to a conclusion as quickly as we can because of the sensitivity of the case.

You have folks' reputation, it's hanging out there, and you would like to be able to clear their name if they're not guilty of anything. At the same time, if they are, we want to bring them to justice. So internally I feel a sense of urgency to try to bring this thing to a conclusion, but I cannot sacrifice the integrity of what the agents are doing just because of my urgency to want to bring this to an end.

NPT: Going back to the Ketner thing, did he perhaps say things that went beyond what you all are able to prove?

Mora: Absolutely not. We have an understanding of potential violations that have occurred in this investigation, Ok? And then as you bring somebody in and that individual begins to cooperate they identify other aspects that maybe you didn’t previously know. Before we take that individual to the United States Attorney's office and maybe to court we've gone back and either proven or disproven whatever that individual may have said.

We cannot allow a subject to come in to court and plead to something we can't prove. That will never happen.

Tim Kinard: The counts that that person is charged with when they plead to the information are only those counts that can be proven. Like Mr. Mora described, if we can't go back and prove it and document that it actually happened, then it just doesn't go in the information.

NPT: One example of that could be, (Overt Act 8) in the third count, he's (Ketner) talking about all these things he did and all of a sudden in the middle of it he says, 'By the way, these two guys told me that they did this.' That was different from the other things he was saying, which were things he was directly involved in.

Kinard: The information is not going to include a series of allegations, so if that was simply an allegation there would be no point of putting it in. If it was part of a greater scheme that we could prove then we'd put it in.

NPT: Speaking of that and people coming forward, is this taking longer than you imagined, people coming forth with stuff you didn’t know about. Does it keep growing?

Mora: We have our own investigative strategy, and as we pursue that strategy events occur -- individuals come forward -- that sheds light on what we're doing. I'm having to exercise a great deal of discipline to make sure that we're not off chasing a bunch of rabbits.

As with any investigation you've got to make sure you keep the thrust of the investigation focused, and especially when you have limited resources, and I've got limited resources, the U.S. Attorney's office has limited resources. This thing is massive, this investigation, and we follow where it takes us but we have to exercise some sense of prioritization.

NPT: When you say massive, are you talking about a fourth or a fifth of your agents?

Mora: I'm talking about the complexity of the case. I'm not talking about the number of resources that I have. I've got 125 investigators in this office.

NPT: If you have 25 of them (working this case), is that an indication of how massive it is, and is there a precedence for having one case take that many? Can you confirm that number?

Mora: At one point or another I had 25 people working this case. That's not how many people I have right now.

NPT: That's not how many you have dedicated night and day or whatnot?

Mora: No.

Kinard: But there is precedence for that kind of thing. It's called Bureau Special, and you could have hundreds of agents working on a Bureau Special.

NPT: Is this a Bureau Special?

Mora: No. It's certainly an Office Special, because I'm taking resources from other programs like drugs, violent crime, white collar crime, and I've redirected them to help me work this public corruption case just because it's the kind of thing that you have to just push as hard as you can.

NPT: What is the national perspective?

Mora: This case is one of those cases that is briefed to the Assistant Director (of the FBI), and that means it's achieved a certain level of prominence within the organization. We're one of 56 field offices, so that's pretty good, the fact that the Assistant Director of the FBI has specific knowledge of this specific case. There are a lot of public corruption cases out there with the FBI.

NPT: Is there a (strategy) of indictments following pleas, or a certain amount of pleas, then indictments, then more pleas?

Mora: I don't think we necessarily have a strategy for that. It all depends on what is presented at that moment as we move forward with the investigation. I would like to see this case indicted, but there are a lot of factors that come into play, and a lot of different schemes that we're looking at.

So trying to come up with an indictment is going to require a great deal of sifting of evidence and personnel and targets in order to come up with the most comprehensive indictment, because that will spawn other activity, without a doubt. We're not there yet.

NPT: Can you put a number to the amount of people coming in?

Mora: No.

NPT: How many target letters have you sent out?

Mora: The United States Attorney's office sends out target letters.

I don’t have that number. And I'm not sure we can disclose that. There is a privacy issue associated with that. The fact those target letters became known to the media is due to the fact that someone who received one made it known. It would be a violation of DOJ policy to disclose that.

NPT: You've addressed the length of this investigation. I think it's been going since 2004.

Mora: I got here in September of 2005. It was already ongoing when I got here. Off the top of my head I don’t know what date it was actually opened. No one's ever asked me.

As a matter of fact, I tried to make it clear; a lot of folks thought this investigation was initiated as a result of the activities at NCED, and so I purposely put out, and some people picked up on it and others didn't, that this thing was already underway when I got here. I got here in September of '05. NCED didn't occur until '06.

Kinard: We said it was connected to NCED.

Simmons: We were purposely not all that clear initially, so it was a little fuzzy.

Kinard: I think people have been saying it's been going on since '05, but nobody has pinpointed a date for when the investigation was opened, and I don’t know if we necessarily (want to discuss it).

NPT: How about what sparked it, what was the original allegation?

Kinard: From a complaint from an individual, but I can't really tell you.

NPT: Or several?

Kinard: Or several.

NPT: You went to the county in a well-publicized, highly visible (search). Have you done the same research at the city in a less public way? Have you been accessing documents at the city or other (government repositories)?

Mora: I don’t have specific knowledge of that.

Kinard: I don’t think we could answer that if we did.

NPT: You couldn’t say specifically for example, 'we've been to the city clerk to review voting records, or agendas, campaign contributions, contracts'?

Mora: I don’t know. And you know, at Mr. Kinard's level and mine, we wouldn’t get briefed up on something like that. We would ultimately become aware of certain pertinent data that might come from it but we wouldn’t know whether an analyst Googled this or physically went out and visited a clerk's office.

NPT: So at any one time you might have an undetermined amount of people specifically working it, and each one of them knows their end of it. Do they report up to a supervisor who reports to you at some point?

Mora: Let's say we've had a couple of operations where we've gone out and executed multiple search warrants. …The investigative team would sift through the data -- the records, the documents, the interviews -- and that would be brought to the attention of the supervisor who is over this case, and he would brief the ASAC (Assistant Special Agent in Charge).

And you know we've had a number of operations in this particular case, the courthouse, the search warrants at various places, NCED, and in some of those instances we used a lot more than 25 agents, just because it takes a lot of people to do these operations. But they weren't dedicated to this case for long periods of time. Just to help us out in those operations.

Kinard: On a regular basis, a lot of that goes to the judgment of the investigator, the supervisor, the ASAC. The investigator might be on an interview; well, he's not going to run back and tell his supervisor … but if something really key comes up he'll come back and tell his supervisor, 'Hey boss, you need to know about this.' If it's something really significant and it's going to impact (the investigation) he may come up and tell me. If it's something I know the boss is going to have to deal with I'll go and tell him.

We've got multiple people out doing multiple aspects of the investigation on a daily basis, so it gets filtered up based on the level of importance that's put on it at each level.

Mora: We have scheduled meetings where everybody comes together to talk about the various aspects of the case, and it's important for everybody to know what everyone else is doing, because sometimes it crosses over, and an individual who’s not pertinent to one team all of a sudden might be recognized by another team.

We do that frequently because in a case of this magnitude, there are a lot of things that can be dropped if you don’t have that kind of coordinated effort. So we do a lot of strategizing, probably more meetings than the guys here want to have, but they're important, and from it the managers make decisions. U.S. Attorney's office personnel are often present at some of these meetings, and offer their strategic guidance.

NPT: You said you don't know the end result. Do you know when this will be wrapped up? Would you like to have it wrapped up by December?

Mora: You heard I'm going to retire by December? I would love to have an indictment by December. But that's the wrong reason; because the SAC is going to retire by Dec. 31 is not a reason to indict somebody. I would love to see some indictments by the end of the year but I can't tell you if that's even going to happen.

What I can tell you is we're always, and I'm always, having everyone reevaluate where we stand so we can get the proposed indictment brought to the prosecution at the soonest available date. I wish I could come up with better than that but I can't.

NPT: Because of the complexity and the number of people coming forward, the number of agents working this case, and the number of coconspirators already mentioned, is it reasonable for us to expect as a community that we're talking about dozens of people … who will either plea or be indicted?

Kinard: Here's the thing, if we knew who was guilty and not guilty at this point beyond a reasonable doubt, we would have the indictments Mr. Mora is talking about. Because the investigation is ongoing we can't tell you, 'Yes it's reasonable to assume we're going to indict dozens of people.' We're not the ones who make that call. We collect the facts, we present to the U.S. Attorney's office, they're the ones who decide who gets indicted, so for us to project would be making us the judge in this case.

Mora: If you just take a look at it, you've logically deduced in your mind at least, that there are dozens, and you've done that by what? Just seeing what's already out there, and looking at the number of individuals in the first information, how many CCs were there. And that was just one small portion of what we're doing. Arrive at the number that you can. It would be inappropriate for me to even come up with a number, but this investigation involves a number of people.

Kinard: We're talking about public officials who may or may not be guilty and there's a fine line when we're talking about these things -- Did they step over the line and commit a violation of law? -- and putting their reputation on the line.

NPT: And there has been pushback already against the federal judge by Martie Jobe … there already have been attempts to question the legitimacy of what you are doing.

Simmons: You asked about reasonable doubt. Our standard internally is stronger than reasonable doubt for those reasons.

Mora: Certainly in the area of public corruption, the bar is very very high before we move forward to suggest or recommend that somebody gets indicted. We feel very very solid about cases we present for indictment, specifically in the public corruption arena because they've gone through a great deal of review and examination. … You got so many eyes looking at these things. We don’t just write up an indictment and send it to a grand jury.

NPT: What do you see as the role of the community and media in this, what we should be doing and what you consider responsible behavior on our part?

Mora: This type of investigation cannot be successfully resolved without the involvement of the community. The types of activities that occur in these illicit acts are always closed, they're always in confined areas, and in order for us to become aware of them someone has come forward, generally, or there's been an overt act, a document or something that just brings it to the attention of a law enforcement officer.

So all I could ask is for the community to continue being vigilant to the actions of their elected officials, and if they have concerns about certain activities they need to bring it to the attention of law enforcement, whoever that may be, whether it's the city, the District Attorney's office or the FBI.