FBI Searched Jan. 6 Protesters in Spy Database

Weaponized agencies won’t focus on real threats, just targets dictated by their Dem overlords.

The FBI violated civil liberties against George Floyd protesters and Jan. 6 participants through the improper use of a surveillance tool, according to a filing from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) unsealed Friday, that undercuts claims by FBI Director Christopher Wray that the bureau had reformed its process for using it.

The revelation is certain to place pressure on Congress, which must decide this year whether to renew the law permitting the bureau’s use of the Section 702 database. The April 2022 opinion from the FISC, which the Washington Post obtained, indicated that the bureau had improperly made use of the database more than 278,000 times, including against the aforementioned groups, crime victims, and political donors.

The FBI insists it has reformed its use of the database, though the bureau’s critics, among them conservative lawmakers

“Chris Wray told us we can sleep well at night because of the FBI’s so-called FISA reforms. But it just keeps getting worse,” said House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan to Just the News.

The FBI may only access the Section 702 database when seeking information related to foreign intelligence or evidence of crimes.

Wall Street Journal

The Federal Bureau of Investigation improperly searched a trove of intelligence gathered through a foreign spying law for information on people suspected of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and the George Floyd protests, a court opinion released Friday showed.

Despite a lack of evidence, the FBI performed more than a dozen searches of raw foreign intelligence data related to people believed to be involved in the Capitol riot to hunt for foreign ties, the court said. Separately, three Jan. 6 searches were conducted that used more than 23,000 search terms such as an email account to look for evidence of foreign influence in relation to an unidentified group involved in the riot. The Justice Department later determined there was insufficient factual support for the searches.

……In a separate incident, the bureau ran the names of 19,000 American donors to an unnamed congressional campaign through the foreign intelligence database. An official said the search involved a congressional candidate and not a current member of Congress. A later review by Justice Department lawyers concluded that only eight of the thousands of individuals had a plausible connection to foreign government activity.

FBI officials also ran more than 400 U.S. defense contractors and holders of security clearances through the foreign intelligence database despite no evidence they were being targeted by a foreign power. And between 2016 and 2020, the FBI routinely ran names of people who appeared in police homicide reports, “including victims, next-of-kin, witnesses and suspects.”

The revelations were contained in a heavily redacted opinion of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which said the violations were significant and often due to analysts not understanding existing search rules. The names were searched in a vast database of phone calls, text messages, emails and more gathered under a foreign eavesdropping law known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Intelligence and surveillance activities under the law are supposed to be limited to targeting foreign nationals located abroad who are believed to be agents of a foreign power or members of an international terrorist group.

But because of the nature of modern, globally linked digital communications, U.S. spy agencies collect a great deal of information about Americans through the program, such as when an American is talking to someone abroad. Under existing law, the FBI may search its data about Americans in some instances, without having to obtain a warrant.

Biden administration officials say the law is one of the government’s most vital national security tools, but privacy advocates from both ends of the political spectrum have pushed for changes in part due to how it has been used to search data belonging to Americans.

The revelations are the latest examples to demonstrate what critics say are inappropriate uses of the spying powers at issue. They underscore many of the concerns that privacy advocates have raised about U.S. intelligence programs after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: that the vast troves of internet data collected by the federal government ostensibly for intelligence gathering are being routinely used in domestic criminal matters.

The FBI used to be known for law enforcement. Now, it engages in violating civil liberties, suppressing evidence of Biden family crimes, destroying exculpatory evidence, targeting Catholics, suppressing free speech, encouraging citizens to turn in their “extremist” relatives, violating the right to privacy, and rounding up dissidents.

All in the name of “national security”.

Meanwhile, Antifa and BLM thugs rampage across the U.S. committing arson, murder, assault, and vandalism of property. They even set fire to the FBI’s main territory in DC. None of them were tracked down and hauled off to Biden’s Gulag.

The FBI and the DOJ need to be dismantled from the top down. The criminal malfeasants in both agencies should be indicted and prosecuted. We know that won’t happen because agencies weaponized by Dem regimes trample all over the Constitution while Congress does nothing. All the hot air and indignation during oversight hearings are a dog and pony show.

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