The FBI should never have opened an Assessment on CWA in the first place.
Forget Tucker Carlson and his fact-free ranting about NSA spying on him. I want to know why the FBI considered targeting the venerable Concerned Women for America for an “Embezzlement of Non-Profit Organizations/Corporate Fraud” investigation with no criminal predicate. First, some background. For more than two years, the Cato Institute has been conducting a form of “citizens investigation” of the FBI and other federal agencies and departments that in the past were known to have engaged in domestic surveillance and related political repression operations. The most infamous of those FBI activities was its Counterintelligence Program, more commonly known by its acronym, COINTELPRO. When COINTELPRO and related domestic spying activities conducted by the FBI, CIA, and NSA were exposed by the Church Committee in 1975, various laws and congressional oversight mechanisms were enacted that were designed to prevent a recurrence of those abuses. But there was a catch. Instead of passing legislation to explicitly bar the FBI from engaging in politically-tinged surveillance (or worse), then-Ford administration Attorney General Ed Levi effectively pre-empted legislative action by promulgating what became known as the Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations. Sold as a way to prevent a return COINTELPRO-like activities, the AG Guidelines, as they became known, were a failure almost from the outset. During the Reagan administration, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) was targeted by the FBI on a nationwide scale for surveillance and related activities. In the early 1990s, it only took one zealous FBI agent in Chicago to start one of the largest, and worst predicated, “international terrorism” investigations targeting Chicago area Muslims in the ironically named Operation VULGAR BETRAYAL.
