The FBI should never have opened an Assessment on CWA in the first place.<\/b>
\nForget 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 \u201cEmbezzlement of Non-Profit Organizations\/Corporate Fraud\u201d investigation with no criminal predicate. First, some background. For more than two years, the Cato Institute has been conducting a form of \u201ccitizens investigation\u201d 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\u2019s 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, \u201cinternational terrorism\u201d investigations targeting Chicago area Muslims in the ironically named Operation VULGAR BETRAYAL. In the years after the 9\/11 attacks, even the relatively weak and ineffectual internal safeguards ostensibly provided by the AG Guidelines effectively disappeared. In December 2008, then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey modified the AG Guidelines by creating an entirely new class of FBI proto-investigation known as an \u201cAssessment\u201d. Unlike a normal FBI investigation, an Assessment requires no criminal basis to be opened\u2014just the broad and nebulous formulation of an \u201cauthorized purpose.\u201d And while FBI agents can\u2019t\u2014in theory, at least\u2014utilize wiretaps when conducting Assessments on people or organizations, they can still conduct physical surveillance of Assessment targets, scour public and classified databases for information on them, and run confidential informants against them. It\u2019s a prescription for abuse. Which brings us to Concerned Women for America (CWA). Earlier this month in response to a Cato Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the FBI provided a redacted but still very illuminating\u2014and alarming\u2014FBI Washington Field Office (WFO) \u201cCharity Assessment\u201d on CWA conducted in July 2016. The Assessment was opened \u201cto determine the possibility of fraudulent activity.\u201d Not \u201creport of fraudulent activity\u201d\u2014just the \u201cpossibility.\u201d It was a pure FBI domestic surveillance \u201cfishing expedition\u201d for the digital age, with the agent focused on CWA\u2019s alleged \u201ctwo-star rating\u201d from Charity Navigator, as well as searches of other commercial and government databases (all conveniently redacted by the FBI). I note here that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), responsible for approving FBI electronic surveillance under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, has repeatedly chastised\u2014but not punished\u2014the FBI for unwarranted digital database searches involving American citizens. Despite alleged \u201cred flags of fraudulent activity\u201d (also redacted), the agent concluded, on the basis of \u201cno derogatory information\u201d in the many databases consulted, that opening a full investigation of CWA was not warranted. The FBI should never have opened an Assessment on CWA in the first place. At no time was there an allegation of actual fraud or embezzlement\u2014just an FBI agent looking to meet a quota for how many Assessments they had opened during the reporting period. This is exactly what happens when fundamental constitutional standards for obtaining warrants or conducting searches and seizures are ignored, or, in the case of the AG Guidelines, effectively subverted as a matter of official policy. Related Articles Mandatory masking of school children is a bad idea\t Biden right to criticize licensing rules\t Unions clash over UC outsourcing provision\t Black Americans must overcome negative self-concepts to succeed\t Just forbid all the sidewalk sleeping?: Letters\t Congress can fix this problem by passing legislation that bans quasi-investigations like Assessments, as well as reassert the requirement to establish probable cause that a crime has been committed in order to open an investigation on an individual or civil society organization. It should also investigate the current scale of the FBI\u2019s misuse of Assessments to determine how many other domestic groups have been subjected to similar unwarranted investigations like the one on CWA. Engaging in public debate and advocacy should not be a trigger for the FBI to investigate law abiding Americans. Patrick Eddington is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He previously worked as a senior policy advisor and CIA analyst.<\/p>\n