FBI officials repeatedly violated their own standards when they searched a repository of foreign intelligence for information related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and racial justice protests in 2020, according to a heavily blacked-out court order.
FBI officials said the thousands of violations, which also include improper searches of donors to a congressional campaign, 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.
At issue are improper queries of foreign intelligence information collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables the government to gather the communications of targeted foreigners outside the U.S. That program expires at the end of the year unless it is renewed.
In repeated episodes disclosed Friday, the FBI’s own standards were not followed. The April 2022 order, for instances, details how the FBI queried the Section 702 repository using the name of someone who was believed to have been at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot. Officials obtained the information despite it not having any “analytical, investigative or evidentiary purpose,” the order said.
In addition, the FBI conducted what’s known as a batch query for 19,000 donors to an unnamed congressional campaign. An analyst doing the search cited concern that the campaign was a target of foreign influence, but the Justice Department said only “eight identifiers used in the query had sufficient ties to foreign influence activities to comply with the querying standard.”
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