Civil Liberties and the FISC revelations
A recent congressional hearing and subsequent internal FBI audit report raise reveal disturbing violations
The FBI abused the Section 702 surveillance database used to gather intelligence on foreign nationals upwards of 278,000 times between 2020 and early 2021, including 23,132 inquiries executed after Jan. 6 alone, according to a recently unsealed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinion court filing.
The heavily-redacted 127-page opinion was unsealed on May 19 by the FISC, but is over a year old, having been filed in April 2022.
According to the filing, queries were run on Jan. 6 suspects, George Floyd protesters, and congressional campaign donors.
One FBI employee “conducted a batch query for over 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign,” that the employee claimed was a target of foreign influence.
The filing says that the FBI employee(s) who ran the queries after Jan. 6 did so “to find evidence of possible foreign influence, although the analyst conducting the queries had no indications of foreign influence related to the query term used.” However, according to the Justice Department, only “eight identifiers used in the query had sufficient ties to foreign influence activities to comply with the querying standard."
Another search run in June 2020 included over 100 people arrested during riots and racial justice protests.
Additionally, an FBI employee “conducted 360 queries in connection with domestic drug and gang investigations, domestic terrorism investigations, and the Capitol breach.” The employee who conducted that search “provided no information to support a reasonable basis to believe that foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime would likely be returned."
"FBI officials said the violations predated a series of corrective measures that started in the summer of 2021 and continued last year. But the problems could nonetheless complicate FBI and Justice Department efforts to receive congressional reauthorization of a warrantless surveillance program that law enforcement officials say is needed to counter terrorism, espionage, and international cybercrime," the Associated Press reported.
The FISC opinion document was dropped just a day after a hearing held by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
The subcommittee heard from three FBI whistleblowers who described retaliation by FBI leadership for coming forward with various concerns that the FBI was being weaponized against American citizens as well as specific examples of policy and procedure violations.
Garret O’Boyle, Whistleblower; FBI Special Agent - testimony
Steve Friend, Whistleblower; former FBI Special Agent - testimony
Marcus Allen, Whistleblower; FBI Staff Operations Specialist - testimony
"Chris Wray told us we can sleep well at night because of the FBI’s so-called FISA reforms," tweeted Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the weaponization subcommittee. "But it just keeps getting worse."
In 2021, FBI Director Christopher Wray said he had enacted reforms to the FBI’s use of Section 702. But an internal audit released on May 11 by the FBI’s Office of Internal Auditing (OIA), recommended more reforms.
Among the findings was that the FBI's "current FISA query compliance monitoring program needs enhancements" and that the current method "does not require the user to document how the query meets the justification standards" at the time an inquiry is made.
The internal audit report showed the FBI had a 96% compliance rate for FISA queries compared to its past 82% rate; a 14% improvement from OIA’s first baseline audit conducted before Wray's 2021 reforms.
Section 702 expires at the end of 2023, however, it could be renewed by Congress as it did in 2018.
The Biden administration wants to see Section 702 reauthorized.
More To The Story
The FISC opinion comes after the release of the Durham Report, which cited that the FBI should never have opened the so-called "Trump-Russia collusion" investigation.
Durham's 316-page report said the FBI failed to act with "appropriate objectivity or restraint in pursuing allegations of collusion or conspiracy between a U.S. political campaign and a foreign power."
The report blasted the FBI's decision to open a "foreign influence" investigation into members of Trump's campaign team that included applying for electronic surveillance search warrants through FISC, stating the investigation likely didn't meet probable cause standards as it was "based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence."
The Durham Report also said the FBI "discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia."
Durham's findings align with a 2019 Justice Department Office of Inspector General (OIG) report that found FBI agents seemingly regularly made omissions when it came to information that undercut probable cause rationalizations in the warrant applications to surveil and wiretap former Trump campaign staffer Carter Page.
In a report the following year, the OIG found the FBI regularly ignored its own guidance and processes with regard to FISA warrant integrity. That report cited that 25 out of 29 FISA warrant applications reviewed by the OIG had "inadequately supported facts."
All of this information, coupled with the recent revelation that Bank of America turned over financial information on thousands of citizens - without a subpoena - who were in the D.C. area in the days before, during, and after the Jan. 6 protest, raises disturbing questions about the surveillance of American citizens by its premier law enforcement agency.