WASHINGTON (Daily Mail) – FBI officials misused key surveillance tool when searching for Americans involved in the January 6 Capitol insurrection and the George Floyd protests of 2020, according to a new court document which outlines the latest in a string of black marks against the agency.
The violations were first outlined in a secret court order from April 2022 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The Office of the Director of the National Intelligence (ODNI) released a redacted version of the report Friday, which found the FBI did not follow its own standards when using Section 702 to conduct warrantless searches.
Section 702 under Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows U.S. federal intelligence agencies to conduct targeted searches of foreigners, but sometimes Americans are improperly searched in the process.
The report details how the FBI used Section 702 to “query” - or search - names of individuals who were suspected of being on the Capitol grounds during the January 6, 2021 riot, Black Lives Matters protestors, victims of crime and their families and donors to one congressional campaign.
Due to clear violations of standard procedures on FIA, FBI agents then obtained information on Americans despite it not having any “analytical, investigative or evidentiary purpose”.
The report follows damning conclusions in Special Counsel John Durham’s final report published on Monday - including the dismantling of the Steele dossier and “salacious” claims against former President Donald Trump. He concluded the FBI did not have any “factual evidence” to investigate Trump-Russia collusion.
The report states 13 people connected to January 6 were inappropriately queried in order to determine if they had “foreign ties”.
In addition, over 130 individuals were searched in the database who were linked to the social unrest and riots conducted by Black Lives Matter activists in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
The FISA search was conducted to gain information on whether they were connected to any counterterrorism plots - which DOJ wrote in the report was “reasonable”, but the high level of redactions don’t allow for a fuller explanation.
There was also a “batched inquiry” of over 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, which was unnamed.
The FBI analyst who conducted the search said the campaign was a possible target of foreign influence.
However, the Department of Justice said there were only “eight identifiers” used in the search in total that “had sufficient ties to foreign influence activities to comply with the querying standard”.
Additionally, FBI FISA searches were conducted on crime victims, including “individuals listed in police homicide reports, including victims, next-of-kin, witnesses, and suspects”.
DOJ said these queries were inappropriate because there was “no reasonable basis” to expect the individuals would be linked to foreign intelligence through those searches.
In total, the FBI misused Section 702 over 278,000 times - according to the document.