As a postscript to “Next stop Belarus,” it seems someone at the Department of Commerce has “watched too many ‘Mission Impossible’ movies” and took to surveilling hundreds of persons inside and outside the department (Washington Post):
The Investigations and Threat Management Service(ITMS) covertly searched employees’ offices at night, ran broad keyword searches of their emails trying to surface signs of foreign influence and scoured Americans’ social media for critical comments about the census, according to documents and interviews with five former investigators.
In one instance, the unit opened a case on a 68-year-old retiree in Florida who tweeted that the census, which is run by the Commerce Department, would be manipulated “to benefit the Trump Party!” records show.
In another example, the unit searched Commerce servers for particular Chinese words, documents show. The search resulted in the monitoring of many Asian American employees over benign correspondence, according to two former investigators.
The office “has been allowed to operate far outside the bounds of federal law enforcement norms and has created an environment of paranoia and retaliation at the Department,” John Costello, a former deputy assistant secretary of intelligence and security at Commerce in the Trump administration, said in a statement for this story.
Costello believes the unit’s efforts rest on “questionable legal authority” that displays “poor management and lack of sufficient legal and managerial oversight.”
It’s as if “someone watched too many ‘Mission Impossible’ movies,” said Bruce Ridlen, a former supervisor. Hired in March 2020, Ridlen resigned in October over concerns of violations of free speech.
Biden officials ordered a pause in all criminal investigations on March 10 and suspended all activities on March 13, pending an ongoing review. Career supervisor George D. Lee led the group for over a decade. According to sources, keyword searches flagged emails across the political spectrum, but particularly targeted “ethnic Chinese foreign guests/visitors and employees as well as other ethnic personnel.”
Multiple former investigators said Lee would rarely close cases, even if evidence of wrongdoing did not materialize.
As of Oct. 23, the office had 1,183 open cases, nearly half dating to 2018 or earlier and the large majority still in preliminary stages, an internal document shows.
This story adds to the Washington Post report by Devlin Barrett from May 10 that the Trump Department of Justice obtained its reporters’ phone records and attempted to their email records during the period the paper was reporting on Russia’s role in his 2016 election:
In three separate letters dated May 3 and addressed to Post reporters Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller, and former Post reporter Adam Entous, the Justice Department wrote they were “hereby notified that pursuant to legal process the United States Department of Justice received toll records associated with the following telephone numbers for the period from April 15, 2017 to July 31, 2017.” The letters listed work, home or cellphone numbers covering that three-and-a-half-month period.
Cameron Barr, The Post’s acting executive editor, said: “We are deeply troubled by this use of government power to seek access to the communications of journalists. The Department of Justice should immediately make clear its reasons for this intrusion into the activities of reporters doing their jobs, an activity protected under the First Amendment.”
Bruce Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, released a statement saying, in part, “the Justice Department has guidelines in place that require, with only narrow exceptions, notification to an affected news organization before federal prosecutors can seize a journalist’s toll records.” Not years later.
“This is a thing that happens regardless of who is in power,” reporter Devlin Barrett told CNN’s Brian Stelter. “Obviously there are some Trump-specific things to this example, but this broader institutional push—this desire for control—has existed within the Department of Justice for a while now. And it’s been growing.”
There are reasons for concern. They are growing, too.