As brought up elsewhere, this seems to be treating the FBI as both competent and honest in this interaction. I don’t see a reason that has to be true. Yes, it would have been hard to de novo corrupt all of the relevant officers- but a culture of looking the other way on behalf of other law enforcement seems more likely than not. And it may not be the difference between a not saying “the CIA was here” vs. reporting no tampering, it may be more like “detecting tampering is noisy, things fail all the time, people will definitely overreact if I give equivocal results, so why don’t I just say it definitely wasn’t tampered with?”
A counterargument to this is that the CIA and FBI have been antagonistic in the past, but law enforcement is really good about closing ranks against outsiders.
As brought up elsewhere, this seems to be treating the FBI as both competent and honest in this interaction. I don’t see a reason that has to be true. Yes, it would have been hard to de novo corrupt all of the relevant officers- but a culture of looking the other way on behalf of other law enforcement seems more likely than not. And it may not be the difference between a not saying “the CIA was here” vs. reporting no tampering, it may be more like “detecting tampering is noisy, things fail all the time, people will definitely overreact if I give equivocal results, so why don’t I just say it definitely wasn’t tampered with?”
A counterargument to this is that the CIA and FBI have been antagonistic in the past, but law enforcement is really good about closing ranks against outsiders.