This weeks episode has a lot of interesting research in it, so I will try to have links for all of it, but I encourage you to dig in on anything that stands out for you.

1. Patrick's bio: https://www.cato-unbound.org/contributors/patrick-g-eddington/
2. FOIA and state record request guide: https://www.rcfp.org/open-government-guide/
3. Church Committee findings: https://archive.org/details/ChurchCommittee/Church%20Committee%20Book%20I%20-%20Foreign%20and%20Military%20Intelligence/
4. Washington Coalition for Open Government Donations: https://www.washcog.org/donate

This week, I'm sharing an interview with Patrick Eddington.

Someone whose work I find absolutely fascinating.

He's not only a foil expert, but also shares my interest in the activities

that the American intelligence agencies, particularly the FBI.

This interview was recorded in May, 2022 long before any of the finger-pointing and

mistrust that has followed the Mar-a-Lago search and other related accusations.

Uh, in 2023.

I had a couple of health crises and did not get back on schedule for recording

and editing audio very quickly.

So keep in mind as you listen, that this is perspective that Patrick

gave without knowing what was going to happen next and the long history

of controversy surrounding the FBI.

Patrick Eddington first came across my radar because of his

work on civil liberties and surveillance for the Cato Institute.

But I really got into his work.

When I learned how frequently he uses the freedom of information act

to assess surveillance activities.

This week, Patrick and I are going to talk about two discoveries he made when

submitting foyer request to the FBI.

And really both discoveries should scare you.

No matter what side of the political spectrum you find yourself on.

If you're gonna fight the government, you actually have to

know what the government is doing.

, that's really what it comes down to here.

And it's especially important in the national security arena, uh, and the

intelligence arena where so much stuff takes place behind this CLO secrecy, which

more often than not is not justified.

, it's always interesting to me to see how someone like Patrick

got into making foyer requests.

it actually

started when I was working at the central intelligence agency.

And I actually FOD my employer, for a bunch of classified material, which I

had personally seen and had access to because I was convinced it was completely.

To a lot of the illnesses that were being reported by desert store and veterans

that being of course in 1991, Persian Gulf war, uh, so long story short, doing

that actually was one of the first things that triggered a counter intelligence

investigation by the CIA, against me.

That's not something that should happen under FOYA.

It is not something that is actually allowed under FOYA,

that doesn't stop folks in the executive branch from doing things.

So that was actually my first experience.

And then as I continue to work this whole thing called Gulf war syndrome, after I

left CIA in October of 1996, I wound up doing an enormous amount of foyer work.

, and doing a number of cases there in order to force an awful lot of stuff

out into the public domain, mainly about how ill prepared we were for any kind

of chemical agent exposures, among veterans and so on and so forth.

And I think, what surprised me when I got to Cato was how few people

actually engaged in using FOIA.

For me it was like a real anomaly, because when I think about, trying to

engage in citizen centric oversight, and that's really what FOYA is all about

at the end of the day, you can't do it.

This reluctance to use foyer requests is actually fairly common

in my experience, even though Patrick found it to be anomalous.

As far as I've seen advocates seem to feel like only special people get to use foil.

And this could not be further from the truth.

Anyone could submit a foil and is entitled to a response from the agency.

If you're not sure how to submit a foyer request, but think that you

have something that you want to know.

There's a link in the podcast notes to a good, how to guide.

Patrick left the executive branch in 96, but he did get involved in

monitoring that branch and stayed abreast of what was happening there.

Recently he's become more interested in the federal bureau of investigation.

, in terms of your potential for interaction with federal law enforcement, it's

the number one federal law enforcement agency that you're likely to come into

contact with, unless you're a fairly frequent in, international traveler,

in which case it would be customs and immigration service and so on.

But, in any kind of, of criminal or civil context, it's gonna be the FBI

that you're gonna be most likely to have to deal with, at the federal level.

Once you turned your attention to the FBI, where did you start your investigation?

When I look

at essentially how a federal agency or department a law enforcement entity

kind of operates in this space and in some respects, I'm kind of playing

counter intelligence officer when I do this, because I'm trying to put myself

in their shoes to a certain degree.

And so that means that you have to understand the

structure of the organization.

You need to understand what its basic operating guidelines are, principles,

statutes, all the rest of that.

And then really understanding the history and the organizational

culture I think is absolutely key.

With respect to the bureau.

It's been around since July of 1908, it was created completely outta whole

cloth at the department of justice.

It's never had any authorizing legislation.

Just a quick interruption to explain why the weird legal issues at play here.

When Patrick says that the bureau has never had any authorizing legislation.

It may sound like he's saying it has less power because it never got

Congress's explicit grant of authority.

But in practice, what really happens is that when an executive agency out acts

without a specific grant of authority,

It really means that the limits of that agency's power are too vague to enforce.

So an agency that doesn't have authorizing legislation can just keep growing in

power with no way to force it back into the box that Congress intended.

Okay.

Back to what Patrick learned and becoming familiar with the

FBI's culture and background.

And then just the history of the bureau itself.

This is an organization that.

Actually kind of sprang from the secret service.

Most people don't know that, but the original core of agents that formed the

so-called bureau of investigation that then attorney general Charles bona apart

put together in the summer in 1908.

Most of them came over from the secret service.

They were ex secret service, agents.

And the secret service was the first federal agency to engage in, in domestic

surveillance of a political nature.

A lot of folks don't know that, but they did.

And they did that for, at least the first 20 years, of the 20th century.

I tend to think it's gone on longer than that, but the bureau wound up,

uh, taking over an awful lot of that mission, particularly during world war

I, but definitely after world war I.

And when you look at, at the overarching history to just kind of

bring it to the historical part, to kind of close here, what most folks

who have any familiarity with this particular issue probably think about.

Is the FBI's infamous counterintelligence or co Intel

pro operation, which was designed essentially to infiltrate disrupt.

And if not outright destroy, a number of domestic civil society

organizations, it wasn't just targeted at the communist party USA.

That's how it started.

But of course it didn't, , remain focused on that.

It spread out to looking at the Southern Christian leadership

conference and a whole range of the black Panthers, a whole range of

other groups from a civil society standpoint, but it didn't end there.

And that's really one of the big reasons why, I chose to stay after it because

when you actually look at the history of the 1970s and the revelations about

not just COINTEL pro, but the NSA, Shamrock and Minette programs and the

CIA's MH chaos and all this other stuff.

The NSA and CIA programs that Patrick just mentioned are a little outside

the scope of this particular podcast.

But I definitely recommend a quick Google.

It is incredibly interesting and terrifying.

But the FBI's COINTELPRO program is right where we need to be for

Patrick's discoveries to make sense.

COINTELPRO is a portion of the FBI that then director J Edgar Hoover, dedicated

to squashing speech that he believed to be too disruptive and dangerous to allow.

It was used against a lot of groups ranging from the black Panthers to

MLK, to women's liberation groups.

I'll include a link to some resources on it in the show notes, but that

context is really important here.

When you consider the impact of what Patrick found, once he

started digging into the records.

Just don't forget that the FBI has a history of using its power against

advocacy groups, engaging in intimidation and assassination under Hoover's.

Control.

Patrick's discoveries, echo this abusive power now and expose ongoing need

for limitations on the FBI's power.

What Patrick found after the break?

When the mini abuses by intelligence agencies started

to come out in the early 1970s.

The Senate conducted an investigation, using a special committee called

the select committee to study government operations with respect

to intelligence activities.

But commonly known as the church committee for Senator Frank Church who chaired it.

The committee on covered tons of really horrible things, including torture

propaganda programs and assassinations.

All worth checking out in the notes.

These discoveries did lead to some changes in the intelligence

community but not lasting oversight

you get a series of reform efforts that come out of that whole church

committee period, you get the, inspector general act in 1978, you get the foreign

intelligence surveillance act, which is designed to prevent spying on Americans.

It's actually been inverted to become a principal dual for spying on

Americans, unfortunately, , and then you get the creation of the house

and Senate intelligence committees.

But the one thing that didn't happen, even though a lot of folks had it on

their agenda was creating an actual statutory charter to essentially put some

boundaries around what the FBI could do.

And there were, legislative proposals that were actually on

the table and the 1976 to 1978 era.

But president Ford's attorney general, Edward Levi, issued

what became known later on as the attorney General's guidelines for

domestic investigations by the FBI.

And so Levi doing that had the effect essentially of thwarting or essentially

making moot in the minds of many, the need for any kind of legislation.

And so those attorney general guidelines have been through a whole series of

revisions over the last quarter cent, or well, more than that now over 40 years.

And the last major iteration took place at the very end of the Bush

43 administration in December, 2008, when then attorney general, Mike ESY

created an entirely new category of proto investigation called assessments.

And the scary thing about that category is that they don't have to have any

kind of criminal predicate to open an assessment on you, me or any

domestic civil society organization.

They just have to have what they call an authorized purpose and guess who gets

to decide what that authorized purpose.

The FBI and the department of justice.

And that's because we don't have a statutory charter to put

some boundaries around this.

So one of the key things about assessments is that, they also, um,

somewhat limit the kind of tools that FBI agents can use when they want to, open

essentially one of these assessments.

So for example, they cannot engage in wire tapping, however they can

utilize, uh, confidential human sources.

They can run those sources against individuals, or, groups, and they

can conduct physical surveillance against individuals and groups.

They can also, utilize existing FBI databases, both unclassified, , the

kind that you, you basically buy for, let's say you wanna buy from ER, or, you

know, whatever one of those vendors or they use existing government classified

databases, which contain just troves of information on individuals and groups.

At the end of the day, they also have the ability to reach out to other federal

state and local law enforcement partners for any information that they might have.

Right?

So there's an enormous amount of data that they can pull and a fair amount

of surveillance that they can do.

They can get away with all of it without ever having to go

before a judge to justify it.

There's also, as I like to tell people, essentially, a bureaucratic incentive

that that's at work here, right?

If you stop and think about what it is that cops and prosecutors get judged on,

they get judged on the number of cases.

They open the number of cases they close, et cetera, et cetera.

So there's a huge statistical, um, imperative, if you will, to show

that they're doing something right, and of course people's promotions,

are tied to activity, right?

So the bureaucratic incentives to engage in surveillance are already there.

And, and when you put that together with, with a mindset that essentially

kind of sees most citizens as suspects first and citizens, a very distant

second, it becomes a lot easier to understand why these abuses take place.

And I started by basically putting in FOYA on a wide range

of civil society organizations.

So groups on either side of the abortion debate, for example,

second amendment related groups.

Women's groups, religious groups, groups involved in the immigration

space, um, groups operating in the civil Liberty space and so on and so forth.

It also includes in many cases, certain kinds of corporations, uh, VPN providers,

for example, and on and on and on and on.

Really quickly, you begin to understand that you're gonna get into hundreds

or thousands essentially, of entities.

And my attitude going into all of this was that even though that was going to be

very labor intensive, it was also going to be essentially a great way to figure

out, what they might have been doing, who they might have been focused on.

Just again, thinking about historical patterns and the like.

I would have a list of, let's say 50 or maybe 75 groups that were

operating in the immigration space.

What I was looking for were any records as defined in statute, and there's a specific

statutory definition at the federal level.

What constitutes a record, any records that actually mention those organizations?

Now I would usually put some boundaries around that or try to

put some boundaries around that.

In other words, I wouldn't care about press releases.

Um, and I wouldn't care about press clips unless.

That clip was essentially part of a larger package of federal documents,

talking about the significance of the clip, what they were going to

do about what the group was saying publicly and so on and so forth.

So Patrick started submitting his requests and the DOJ handles the

FBI's responses to FOYA requests.

But he started to get some weird responses, including a Glomar response

about keto, the Institute, where he works.

the Cato Institute was one of 23 organizations for which we received Alomar

responses from the department of justice.

Um, and these were a wide range of civil society organizations.

Can you explain what a Glomar response is?

Glomar, uh, refers to, uh, a ship that was previously owned by the late Howard

Hughes called the Glomar Explorer.

It was a deep sea exploration vessel.

And my former employer, the central intelligence agency approached to

use back in the late 1970s about borrowing his ship in order to go and

basically salvage a sunken, uh, Soviet nuclear submarine in the Pacific.

And they developed a cover story, uh, which was actually a credible cover

story, you know, mining for, uh, deep sea mining for magnesium nodules, which

apparently can be fairly lucrative.

Uh, I had no idea about this until I started poking around on it, but

not shockingly, um, because of the very nature of what they were doing.

Uh, at least a couple of journalists figured it out, got wind about it,

started asking around about it and that prompted then, uh, DCI, um, Colby,

Richard Colby, to go around essentially and try to get every news organization

that had called about this to just walk away, you know, don't go there.

This is too important, you know, don't do it.

Uh, but there were some reporters who decided, no, we're

gonna, we're gonna go there.

Uh, and they went into federal court, they filed Foz and were told we're not

gonna confirm or deny anything, uh, having to do with, with that particular issue.

And this goes all the way up to the, to the federal apple level.

And the reporters lose because the, the government or the judges

in the case say that, no, this is a national security related issue.

And if they were to confirm or deny it could cause problems.

And I'm, I'm very, very, very heavily now kind of editing essentially

what the judges said to kind of, you know, keep us on track your time

wise, but the agency won the case.

Uh, and this is, this is where this whole concept of we refuse

to confirm or deny comes from.

And it's tied directly to that Glomar Explorer case.

But that's a prime example of, one of the obstacles that you can run into with

FOYA is because of a lot of the deference that federal courts have shown, uh,

to the executive branch, particularly with respect to national security or

law enforcement related things over the decades, it has had the effect

of making FOIA sometimes a little bit less useful than it otherwise could be.

So that's the kind of response that Patrick got related to many

of the advocacy organizations that he put in foil requests about.

Including his own.

And something seemed off to him about that

And I had a feeling that, that Glomar, uh, was indicative of

something, you know, being there.

And so we filed a follow up FOYA using a different set of keywords

and sure enough, you know, they they've coughed up a number of things.

There are other things they have not coughed up, um, that I know exist

on the basis of other information I have, which I can't discuss publicly.

So Glomar responses are annoying and I think wrong.

But not mind blowing or a big news story.

But what Patrick is about to get into are the two discoveries

that really made his foil.

Research so important.

The first that he's going to talk about is about assessments.

And this is a type of investigative tool that he found to be used broadly

against all types of organizations.

With no justification or reasoning as to why those organizations and not others,

or why those organizations became the focus of government interest at all.

One of the most recent ones, uh, that we dealt with was last summer.

That's on concerned women for America, which is a, a pro-life,

uh, women's group that's been around for the better part of four decades.

They have a, a spotless, uh, reputation, never been connected to any foreign

terrorist organization or any foreign, uh, intelligence assets, anything like that.

Uh, and we got a response back from the bureau.

They actually turned over a redacted version of the

assessment from July of 2016.

And this is what makes these things very, very scary.

These, these assessments, this particular Washington field office agent simply

sat at his or her desk and did what they called a charity assessment.

And that was literally my first time seeing that specific designation

in connection with an assessment.

And they simply used, um, existing commercial databases and some classified

databases, uh, of access to the FBI to engage in a fishing expedition,

uh, about whether or not there was any kind of financial impropriety

by concern women for America.

They had no, they had no criminal predicate to do it.

Nobody had come to them to say, Hey, I think this, the CFO is, is on the take.

Or I think the CEO is on the take.

None of that.

There, there was none of that.

Now that assessment was opened and closed in the same day so far as we can tell,

but the very fact that they engaged in it at all without a criminal pre.

Just highlights the problem.

And as our EVP, David Bowes remarked at one point in a briefing that I was

given or that I was giving, he said for the benefit of the audience, now, CWA

would never have learned about this.

If we hadn't done the FOYA, is that right?

And I said, that's exactly right.

So it just makes you wonder, you know, how many more groups

kind of fall into that category.

How many other individuals or organizations are out there that have

been subjected to this kind of thing that have no clue that it's happened?

First amendment protected civil society activity.

Every single one of us should be concerned about that.

That that's not what the bureau should be doing.

The bureau should be hunting for spies.

The bureau should be hunting for bank robbers.

people that have actually violated real criminal statutes.

And that's not to say that the bureau doesn't do that, but it's pretty clear

they're doing an awful lot of stuff that doesn't involve that, uh, that, that winds

up implicating the rights of Americans and that, that kind of thing has got to.

There's a really close link between freedom of speech and freedom to advocate.

And the ability to act with privacy and to not have that

privacy invaded without cause.

And that's really what Eric is trying to get at with these assessments and their

relationship to advocacy organizations.

From a legal perspective, privacy is more than just a secret.

It means the right to act without interference, not

just without observation.

Think of how differently you would feel if a random passer-by sees you going

to your car, as opposed to a stocker watching for you to go to your car.

The act of going to the car.

Isn't a secret.

But if the viewer is looking for you following you, that

observation is an intrusion.

Uh, violation.

The ability to act without being overseen is a basic component of privacy.

When the law talks about privacy.

It includes the right to independent decision-making without the

consideration of what it might look like to someone else.

The right to privacy was the basis for Roe V.

Wade, even though there was no question of whether Ms.

Rose abortion could be kept secret.

The question was whether anyone had a right to interfere in her decision.

It's not that these organizations are concerned that the government knows that

they're hosting these kinds of events or that they have connections with.

Those particular professors.

It's that it might use that information against you in some way in the future.

And that threat is enough to cause a privacy invasion.

That could limit first amendment activities.

What have you decided not to speak out because you don't

want to draw too much attention.

Those are the kinds of free speech implications that privacy has.

Another good one, uh, that illustrates, you know, how quickly they will

essentially lie about something or conceal something for a period of time,

involves an entity called the national security archive, which is at, uh,

George Washington university here in DC.

And the NAS sec archive has been around since the early 1980s.

It was actually established, um, by a former reporter, as well as one of the,

one of the lead DOJ attorneys, former DOJ attorneys dealing with, uh, dealing

with FOYA matters, a Guyman named she Quinland she, um, and in 2005, the NATS

sec archive put in a FOYA with the FBI saying, what documents do you have on us?

What records do you have on us?

And the bureau issued a, we have no records on your response

and the archive appealed.

And they never heard back from the office of information policy

or OIP at DOJ about that appeal.

So in 2019, uh, the national security archive was one of the many groups in

which I put a Foy into the FBI saying, you know, gimme what you've got.

And low and behold, uh, in 2021, they turn over, I guess, about 50, some odd pages of

material, uh, and redact quite a bit more.

And so I reached out to my friend, uh, Laura Harper, uh, their policy council

over at the national security archive.

And I said, Hey, did you all ever put in a Foy on yourselves?

Yeah.

They said they didn't have anything.

And I said, yeah, they lied to you.

. And so I, I shared all that with them.

Uh, and of course we turned that into an op-ed ultimately, uh,

to just kind of illustrate it.

But this, this included, this material included a cable from then FBI William

FBI director William sessions in September of 1989, basically telling the Washington

field office and other FBI elements to basically send anything back that they

had on the national security archive.

Um, Unprecedented, you know, this is the head of the FBI

saying, give me what you got.

Uh, and of course everything that the archive does is first amendment protected.

Right.

But what we've been able to glean from the documents, even though many of them

were very heavily redacted is that the bureau was absolutely obsessed with the

contacts that archive people were having with the Cuban government over, um,

an effort to put together, essentially some, uh, remembrance type events for the

Cuban missile crisis among other things.

And archive officials did travel to Cuba.

, they did talk to folks.

They did meet with, uh, Cuban officials, uh, at the Cuban mission, in Washington.

But nobody at the archive, obviously was ever engaged in any kind of

espionage on behalf of the Cuban government or anything like that.

But it's really clear when you look at the documents and the kinds of FBI documents

that they are, that some level of physical and or, electronic surveillance was

actually conducted, in those cases

let's say that you're a Brookings institution or a Carnegie endowment

for international peace or, whatever Atlantic council, for example, uh, if

you are engaging in events with foreign nationals, to commemorate some kind of

an event, don't be surprised, uh, you know, if the bureau has taken an interest

in that, uh, even though they shouldn't be, even though there's no legitimate

counter intelligence reason, to do that,

I just want to clarify, you said you made the request in 2019.

And got the records in 2021.

That seems like a really long wait to get those records

Yeah.

The bureau is infamous, , for the amount of time that it will, it will

take, if it can get away with it, , to respond to this stuff, you know, it,

it ranged generally from at least six months to sometimes two years depending.

, my general policy has been.

If I don't get some kind of, of answer or at least some kind of initial production

within the first, I don't know, six months or so that particular foil will

go into a potential litigation queue.

Uh, and then we will, we'll take it from there and, and see where it goes.

, the problem of course is, is not that the bureau doesn't have.

, the resources to do this.

There's no doubt in my mind, they do have the resources to do it.

They simply choose not to.

And I think that that applies to an awful lot of federal agencies and departments.

And that's because there's been no stick applied, essentially.

No, no congressional legislative stick applied, to get agencies and departments

to get their act together and comply.

And when you have, federal agencies and departments being allowed to create

essentially at a whole cloth, entire categories of dissemination restrictions,

like sensitive, but unclassified, , or controlled unclassified information

that does not exist in you, there's no statutory basis ultimately for

doing any of that kind of thing.

, and that's just another reason why FOYA at this stage is a little bit out of date.

, it, it really needs in my judgment needs a pretty major rewrite overall.

So that's the first big thing that Patrick found.

Assessments being made against a wide range of advocacy organizations

on all sides of the spectrum.

I asked him if he'd been able to put these documents into some kind of database

that's accessible to the public and he raised an issue I hadn't considered.

So we have not built anything quite like that yet.

Um, because so many of our FOYA continue to be outstanding essentially.

And in many cases we have received no response, uh, no responsive

records responses from the bureau.

We don't trust any of those, uh, obviously, and based on the national

security archive experience, what it tells me is that the bureau

has a specific period of time.

After the investigation has been closed before they will actually, you know,

let those particular documents out.

, we've gotten responses on a number of organizations.

I talked about the Mars previously, which I treat essentially as confirmation,

that they do have data, uh, most of the Glo Mar cases that we've actually

seen over the course of the time that the Glomar decision has been extinct.

Uh, almost invariably we find out that yes, there was a, there, they

were actively hiding something.

So I, I'm pretty confident that those blow Mars do actually represent a

defacto confirmation, essentially, that they have some level of documentation

on those particular groups.

There are other groups, uh, that we have reached out to when we have

received essentially confirmation, actually got an assessment on

the group or something like that.

Our policy is to reach out before we do any kind of publication on

that to find out if they want us to basically withhold publication.

And we're asked to withhold publication, we honor that, uh, request.

And the reason is really very simple.

A lot of folks have concerns about potential reputational

damage or the implications of it.

If it is made public, that they were the target of the FBI, even if the targeting

of the group was completely illegit.

And had absolutely no, no predicate, no criminal predicate at all.

So we're mindful of that.

Uh, we're sensitive to that.

And so we do have a number of groups for whom we have received data,

and we have not published on that.

This fear of potential repercussions for the disclosure of a mere

fact of assessment being done.

Is another way to underscore the importance that these assessments

have for restricting free speech.

For intimidating people out of speech.

But that's not the only big discovery that Patrick made.

The second one.

And probably the one more people will find troubling is that the fbi

routinely breaks its own internal rules for how to do investigations

And then tries to pretend they didn't

One of the most important lawsuits that we've had, um, that's been incredibly,

incredibly productive, has been, uh, a lawsuit that we filed last year,

looking for FBI inspection division audit reports , on the Bureau's compliance

or non-compliance with those domestic investigative, guidelines that I spoke

about earlier, that were developed by the ag and that are instituted

essentially by the FBI in a over 600 page document called the domestic

investigations and operations guide.

This is what Patrick mentioned earlier about the Ford administration attorney

general creating guidelines for the FBI.

That have become kind of a substitute statutory framework.

But they don't actually get approved by Congress and they're

very difficult to make stick because there's no real enforcement

mechanism included in the guidelines.

However, the FBI inspection division does conduct audits

to see how well or not well.

They are following these guidelines and that's what patrick was asking for

and had to sue to receive And so we managed to get so far six, of those

kinds of audits out into the public domain, largely declassified, largely

unredacted, not completely, , but in many cases, largely unredacted.

It paints a radically disturbing picture about the number of times that the FBI,

violates its own internal guidelines.

The Washington times ran a story, on the basis of the last four of

those audits that we got out along with a lot of other raw data.

And, by their count, it was over 1600 violations of their own regulations.

And that includes people, opening assessments or investigations

without authority, as well as the use of unauthorized investigative

techniques among other things.

it's really quite amazing how consistently year in and year out, they violate their

own rules and, and the most alarming thing, in this particular batch of

material that we've managed to get out.

On a, one of these audits was focused on a specific kind of assessment called

a sensitive investigative matter.

And what it found is, what that audit discovered is that in about 350, some

odd cases that they examine, they found nearly 800 violations and sensitive

investigative matters or Sims as are known, are specific activities that can be

assessments or preliminary investigations or full field investigations that are

looking at individuals or groups involved in the political process, religious

organizations, media entities, academics.

Things of that nature.

So when you're talking about that number of violations, and this only

looked at about an 18 month period, and that, that particular sample

size, of 353 itself was, relatively small and yet finding that number of

violations nearly 800 in that sample size was just absolutely astonishing.

These Sims, these sensitive investigative matters, these

investigations, assessments and the like that are targeting people

that are involved in civil society.

First amendment protected civil society activity.

Every single one of us should be concerned about that.

So in 353 sensitive investigative matters.

Over the last decade, they found 800 violations of these

self-created self-imposed rules.

That the bureau has for investigations.

But has there been any fallout from this?

Do they actually impose these rules on bureau employees?

We found no evidence so far that anybody was disciplined much less lost their

job for any of these violations over the course of this almost decade long period.

And the FBI always likes to say, well, we found the problem.

We conducted training.

Well, when you, when you say we found the problem in 2013, we conducted training

and the same problems come up in 2014.

And then you say again, we did more training and the

next year, the same problems.

Come up again.

You have a system that's broken.

You clearly have a system that is broken.

So there you have it.

After several years of waiting for records and in many cases

suing to receive records.

Patrick discovered that the FBI is conducting assessments

or investigations without any.

Basis to believe that the subject is.

Involved in a crime.

And in doing so they aren't even following their own internal rules, let alone the

public's perception of what would be fair and just investigative practices.

And we know this because of FOYA.

Where is a broken law.

And as Patrick mentioned, delay is just as bad as non-disclosure in many cases.

But it's the best we've got and we really need to use it.

So.

Just a reminder.

If there's something you want to know, Ask for it.

And if you need help, reach out.

I don't know everything about FOYA, but I can probably at least

point you at someone who does.

I hope you enjoyed this episode have a great week