This “exclusive” by NBC News about Bassem Youssef, FBI agent who is suing the justice department for descrimination, is anything but news.

“Bassem Youssef is the FBI’s highest-ranking Arab-American agent. He’s fluent in Arabic, ran the FBI’s offices in Saudi Arabia and is a terrorism expert. In fact, Youssef’s undercover work helping to infiltrate the terror organization of the so-called “blind sheik,” Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, earned him the intelligence community’s most-prestigious award, the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal.

But now, for the first time, Youssef is speaking out against the agency he loves.”

Well NBC not the first time. Fact is that the Washington Post wrote about this back on July 18th:

“The Justice Department has concluded there is “reasonable cause” to believe that senior FBI officials retaliated against the bureau’s highest-ranking Arabic speaker for complaining that he was cut out of terrorism cases despite his expertise. An internal investigation by the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility found “sufficient circumstantial evidence” that Special Agent Bassem Youssef was blocked from a counterterrorism assignment in 2002 after he and U.S. Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) met with FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to discuss Youssef’s complaints. The 12-page report, dated last month and provided to The Washington Post by the office of Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), represents a rare endorsement of a whistle-blower’s allegations by the Justice Department’s internal review office. It also represents another setback for the FBI as it struggles to attract Arabic speakers and informants in its fight against Islamic extremists”

Unfortunately though this story is true an shows that the FBI – and specifically Mueller still have a major problem and this crap needs to get cleaned up and fast. Youssef is as close to a super agent as one gets and his getting passed over for promotions and assignments is simply inexcusable.