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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.