When some in our city heard that the forensic audit at Brownsville Independent School District was supervised by a former F.B.I. agent, that was all they needed to know. To them perhaps, the F.B.I. represented professionalism, extreme care, competence, high technology and impartiality. In the case of the BISD audit, those assumptions might be wrong. Danny Defenbaugh, the CEO of Defenbaugh and Associates, not only has a checkered history with the F.B.I., he may have inappropriate ties to some on the BISD board of trustees, rendering the audit merely a tool for their agenda.
Mr. Defenbaugh was employed by the F.B.I. for nearly 33 years, primarily as a terrorist/bombing expert. He is a certified bombing technician. One of his most important assignments was the Oklahoma City bombing. Timothy McVeigh was convicted in that bombing and eventually executed. It is alleged that during that investigation Defenbaugh unethically withheld hundreds of necessary documents from the defense. Some interviews were "lost". Others were turned in with the witnesses names slightly misspelled so that they could not be found on a database.
Here is a brief excerpt from a Dallas Morning News article about the case:
Dallas Morning News, 2/19/02: "There is also the suspicion that even now Defenbaugh is not being forthright and giving full disclosure so as to hide the truth about what he and the FBI have known about for almost seven years: withheld and/or falsified FBI documents and FBI 302 interview notes and lead sheets and surveillance tapes, FBI 302 reports for interviews with John Doe witnesses that were deliberately not written, names of suspects and witnesses which were deliberately and repeatedly misspelled so they could not be found in database searches, fingerprints that were deliberately not checked, sketches of John Does deliberately not made, and FBI 302 reports that have been written to cast doubt on original and earlier FBI 302 reports that put government foreknowledge and cover-up in a bad light (this tactic is discussed numerous times with examples in McVeigh defense attorney Stephen Jones’ book, “Others Unknown”).
This background on Defenbaugh is instructive as one reads the $250,000 forensic audit prepared by his firm. Add to this the revealing research by Bobby Wightman-Cervantes, illustrating the close ties between HealthSmart and Defenbaugh, Cata Presas-Garcia and Defenbaugh. Bobby's blog, Brownsville Voice, has that evidence, much of it in the form of links to the paperwork.
All of the above might explain why the "audit" includes editorializing and some blame assessment to some previous administrators known to favor the lawsuit against Healthsmart to recover $14,000,000 in overcharges.
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