Happy 100th, FBI!

In the early part of the 20th century, the Justice Department had no agents of its own. Instead, it had to ask the Treasury Department for help when it wanted to conduct investigations. In 1908, Congress moved to address the situation, creating a Bureau of Investigation.

In a speech yesterday, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey detailed what happened next to the organization that would eventually take on perhaps the best-known acronym in government -- the FBI:

The bureau had 34 agents at its beginning. Expectations, at the time,

were correspondingly low. In his annual report to Congress six months after

the creation of the bureau, one of my predecessors, Attorney General

Charles Joseph Bonaparte, made brief reference to the creation of a small

force of special agents, and added, these are his words: "the consequences

of the innovation have been, on the whole, moderately satisfactory."

One hundred years after that somewhat tepid endorsement, I am happy to

report that the FBI's current contribution to the investigation,

prosecution, and prevention of crime has gone from moderately satisfactory

to absolutely extraordinary.