FBI Misused Spy Database, FISA Court Says
wsj.com
wsj.com
In recent cases, all levels of the FBI were complicit. Removing funding may only take away resources from useful areas while guilty parties are free to continue their bad behavior at the risk of only a stern talking to by Congress every few years when they promise this will certainly be the last time this happens. Throw some agents in jail along and see if the behavior continues?
Imagine you or I caught lying to the FBI, lying to the courts, and then lying to Congress. What would our fate be? Certainly not continuing on with the status quo.
Since DOJ has no interest in keeping itself accountable, what can be done? Can individuals who were caught up in this file criminal or civil complaints with any hope of relief? For someone not caught up in this, how can they prevent tax dollars from funding ongoing criminal activity?
I went to jail for a crime I wasn't guilty of simply because some rogue police decided to commit a raft of felonies to try and gather evidence against me. When I put that to the judge he told me that "the police are allowed to commit crimes to gather evidence."
I tried going to the prosecutor with it and they will just laugh you out of the building. It's not a crime if you can't get the prosecutor to prosecute it. And the prosecutor's office almost never brings criminal cases to court on their own, they rely on the police for 99% of their work. If they went around prosecuting the police they wouldn't get any more cases and they would put themselves out of business.
People get off on murder charges because of this, like that lady that killed her infant but the cop searched her trunk without a warrant or probable cause. She obviously killed it, but the only evidence was inadmissible, so she walked.
Evidence gathered in violation of a constitutional law is often inadmissible.
But if you look at situations in which police gathered evidence in violation of a statute (e.g. committed a felony that wasn't additionally a constitutional violation), then I could count on one hand the number of times evidence has been excluded in courts across the USA in the last 100 years.
source: I play a lawyer on TV. (not really)
The prosecutor works for the government. No business involved. They will be just fine if there are no cases.
No crime, no need to pay for a prosecutors office (or a lot of cops).
A variant of ‘use it or lose it’, which is the standard in gov’t and large Corp budgeting.
https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=633
Another fun one is that if you join their conspiracy, they can charge you for crimes they committed as part of that conspiracy.
Here's a single page post format copy:
https://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/19810672629/12-i-w...
Even when the minimal executive action of firing those involved is taken (for example, firing Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Clinesmith) the media will attack the enforcers and give comfort to the perpetrators. It’s clown world.
"And in fact when I decided to just do it I said to myself, I said, “You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.”"
Trump told the world that he fired Comey for opening what has now been shown by the IG and SC Durham after a 4 year investigation to be properly predicated, if flawed. Firing Comey was an attempt by Trump to avoid accountability for what he and his campaign did, along with destruction of evidence, lying under oath, and 11 other counts of obstruction of justice by Trump identified by SC Robert Muller.It turns out Trump's campaign did meet with Russians and lied about it; Trump did had business in Russia he lied about; his campaign manager did meet with a Russian spy to discuss handing over dirt on his opponent; Russians did hack the Democrats and distribute the data; Trump did ask them publicly to hack his opponent in exchange for relaxed sanctions; and his campaign was knowingly sharing data with a Russian intelligence officer. So of course an investigation was opened into his campaign and their ties to Russia.
And if you want to read about how the investigation was properly predicated, here's the IG report: https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2019/o20012.pdf
The existence and thoroughness of this report begs the question as to why the Durham investigation was ever needed in the first place.
you may find such things as "The Russian govemment directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against U.S. election infrastructure' at the state and local level." and "The Committee found that the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election."
[1] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
[5] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
Those on the list 'signed up', so it can be expected they knew what they were in for. They also have more power in society then the rest of us and should be held accountable.
Plenty of wealthy people (and not wealthy) commit crimes for no other reason than greed - a lust for money, or power and no concern about hurting others to get it. There is no "structural reason" that drives them to commit crime.
OP lives in an idealist world where humans are intrinsically good and never made choices that hurt other people or society, if they do, it's because they were "forced into it".
Clearly that's not based on reality.
Because the agencies that enforce them... Don't enforce them.
The government ran an investigation into government corruption and found itself free of corruption.
FISA court investigated the FBI...
Police lie to everyone. It's legal and there are no real consequences for it due to all the immunity they enjoy. People should realize the FBI are not the version you see in Hollywood. They are just police with more power, less oversight, and their image and stature mean lies they tell are much more likely to be believed and that much more difficult to counter.
I'd argue that some people have incentives to ignore the systematic reasons behind crime. Slave labor in the US is partly dependent on prisoners. Crime keeps people fearful and distrustful of each other. Crime is used to justify increased control and monitoring of the public and the abuse of prisoners. Crime enables a huge underclass of Americans who pay taxes but aren't allowed to vote. Sadistic cowards keep politicians elected who are "tough" on criminals and they vote against things we know would actually reduce crime whenever those solutions aren't also needlessly cruel.
A lot of people think the other way around, where it's unfathomable that anyone would commit a crime of their own volition were it not for the weight of an unjust world upon them.
One way to do that is to make it clear that committing a crime is very likely going to result in punishment, which is what the US does.
In decades of considering State privacy abuses and their roots, I haven't come across an analysis that so succinctly encapsulates the whole of causes+outcomes as this one. It is one of the most Modern America things I have ever read.
The law equally applies to everyone, no matter the reason for it.
How did New York deal with crime in the late 90s? Not by ignoring it.
Do you think the problem is too much transparency? To use your example of the NYPD in the 90's (though I think you've probably got the wrong part of the decade if you're looking for the high water mark of crime), was it notably less corrupt than it is today, or was it just more opaque?
But how did the NYPD deal with crime in the 90's? Wasn't it by the kinds of privacy abuses called out in this report? By shaking down suspected criminals through stop and frisk?
Violent crime in NYC dropped precipitously with the “Broken Windows” style of law enforcement during Giuliani’s terms as mayor (1994-2002). The advertised theory was to enforce even small crimes like property owners leaving broken windows unrepaired. Hypothetically, the expectation that laws are being enforced makes people more likely to obey laws at all levels. (jokingly: or maybe people were so busy coming into compliance that they ran out of time for murder.)
There’s obviously debate, criticism, etc., regarding the cause but the theory has been applied to programming among other places with some success.
One coworker was mugged and beaten. Walked up to cops. They told him if he wasn’t gone in 30 seconds they’d take him in on a PI.
Crime doesn’t exist if it’s unreportable.
Actually, pretty much yes, or at least, that would have been a better strategy than some Giuliani BS.
Crime declined nation wide, and it had nothing to do with any local policies. My favorite theory is that leaded gasoline was causing crime spikes. But there are competing theories, and I think people have concluded that it isn't a single factor.
For this statement to hold, it requires the most absurd definition of "punitive" imaginable.
There are countries where talking negatively about the wrong people is grounds for execution.
There are countries where theft is punished by amputation of a limb.
There are countries where not flushing a public toilet that you used, is a punishable offense.
All of these countries are much more punitive, and almost all of them have much less crime than the United States.
The four countries with a higher per capita population are: El Salvador, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, and Cuba. (Omitting American Samoa, because that's a US territory).
None of those are major countries, so the statement "The US is the most punitive major country in the world" absolutely holds water.
If you want an idea of how crazy high incarceration rates are in the states, just compare the prison population per 100,000 inhabitants with its neighbors:
Canada - 85
Mexico - 174
USA - 505
On a side note I wonder how many people would rather lose a limb than spend a decade in US prison.China's prison population is lower, but they have "administrative detention" which isn't included.
How to lie with statistics.
This is the same for many other countries but not the case for the US. Also your first two examples applies to really small list of countries (Iran and S.A.) and their current governments are the disgrace of the world and are not really an example to take (like going too extreme and something the US shouldn't "I guess" be compared too).
Incarcerations isn't the only form of punishment.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Here is the list for 2021 from Wikipedia. There are only two "first-world" countries there.
At least 18 countries performed executions in 2021:[13][36][37]
Americas (1 country): United States (11)
Asia-Pacific (5 countries): Bangladesh (5), China (unknown), Japan (3), North Korea (unknown), Vietnam (unknown)
Europe (1 country): Belarus (1+)
Middle East and North Africa (8 countries): Egypt (83+), Iran (314+), Iraq (17+), Oman (unknown), Saudi Arabia (65), Syria (24+), UAE (1+), Yemen (14+)
Sub-Saharan Africa (3 countries): Botswana (3), Somalia (21+), South Sudan (9+)On the upper end, if you have no priors and your career and family will be blown up because you want to do a political favor for someone that results in destroying the public trust, it probably does matter.
Given how frequently this happens I wouldn’t be so sure. You also have to care about destroying the public trust and this is literally a thread about yet another instance of the FBI destroying public trust. Also, you don’t have to have a corrupt intent to take actions that destroy public trust.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/john-durhams-igor-da...
You can't change it, but you can learn about it.
Is the FBI a necessary evil or merely a force for corruption?
I haven’t seen a good argument they’re necessary — and they’ve been involved in illicit political corruption since their founding, less than a century ago.
So to see friends and coworkers punished for it makes them bitter. They double down in their resolve. Instead of changing behavior, they double down and promise themselves to be more careful to avoid punishment.
Additionally, at some point in this cycle, they decide that those in charge, the ones punishing them, are more akin to impostors who have infiltrated government and are twisting it into something it shouldn't be. They begin their own loosely-organized "resistance", and seek to undermine the very checks and balances that miraculously allowed a few FBI agents to be punished for transgressions.
In their own heads, you see, they're the heroes.
Reform is impossible, once the organization has grown large enough to develop its own anti-reform "immune system". Which, I suspect, is almost a 100 years old at this point.
> how can they prevent tax dollars from funding ongoing criminal activity?
Don't pay your taxes. If your landlord were using your rent money to murder undocumented immigrant children, would you ask "but how can I make sure he just buys his groceries with that rent money"?
Hell no. You just stop giving him the money. Or maybe you just keep handing it over and whining "there's nothing I can do". I dunno.
The data that is in these databases have a high probability to be abused. Blackmail and intimidation are easy to hide. What number of the people that had their location data exposed through this database were shot soon after? What number of people had their identity stolen? What number of people lost their jobs? What number of people had their families or friendships destroyed by secrets being spilled?
The dots are never connected beyond the admission of violations.
Cases being pursued by the DoJ: https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/capitol-breach-cases?combine...
Noteworthy that $2.6bln was allocated to US attorneys this year; not sure how much more was allocated to specifically support January 6th prosecutions, but the prosecution of every single one of them will hopefully serve as a deterrent.
If you think Jan 6 was anything more than a meandering of useful idiots by a conspiring state, you are the other useful idiot.
Several law enforcement and active military participants and collaborators—acting before, during, and after the highly visible events of Jan 6—have already been arrested and charged, most recently the MPD intelligence chief, but your description is a false characterization of what actually occurred.
> If you think Jan 6 was anything more than a meandering of useful idiots by a conspiring state, you are the other useful idiot.
If you genuinely believe this, you are just an idiot (maybe a useful one for the people who organized, executed, and then attempted to minimize the attack, but definitely an idiot.) Yes, most of the participants may have been radicalized sheep inspired and directed by a narrower group, but they clearly weren’t “meandering”.
Stop conflating protestors who happened to have unrelated government jobs with the suspicious and supportive actions of the capitol police who were supposed to be keeping congress safe and instead escorted crazy looking protestors around the capitol for photoshoots
Is this wrong? America was founded to be a federal republic composed of sovereign states sharing their power with a small central government with clearly delineated powers; now we have a massive central government that takes in two-thirds of all taxation[0] and spends 38.5% of GDP as of last count[1], and somehow decided that it had the authority to regulate a farmer growing feed for his own animals[2].
[0]: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-breakdown...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
Your small confederacy was what the Articles of Confederation had wrought and it lasted all of a decade. States rapidly enacted laws against their fellow states, it was a mess. We had religious laws, not a good scene.
Basically you should read A) the US Constitution B) historical accounts of the third continental congress
"We shall see that the national security state and the rule of law are mortal enemies. In the first place, by its nature and the mission which it has set for itself, the national security state apparatus needs arbitrary power. Such power has its own code, which is meant to govern or justify the behavior of the initiated—after the fact. It operates to protect the state apparatus from the citizenry." [0]
[0] https://archive.org/details/democracy-versus-the-national-se...
Marcus Goodman Raskin (April 30, 1934 – December 24, 2017) was an American progressive social critic, political activist, author, and philosopher. He was the co-founder, with Richard Barnet, of the progressive think tank the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He was also a professor of public policy at The George Washington University’s School of Public Policy and Public Administration....
Notably: In 1971, Raskin received from Daniel Ellsberg, documents that became known as the Pentagon Papers. Raskin put Ellsberg in touch with New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Raskin>
And father of Rep. Jamie Raskin, as noted at Archive.org.
Apparently in The Politics of National Security (1979), see the back-cover blurb.
Internet Archive appear to have garbled metadata for that book with another, unfortunately:
FBI/NSA interpret FAA 702 to acquire "one end foreign" communications, i.e. the communications of Americans with other parties abroad. There are millions of American citizens who reside abroad, and many thousands more at any given time are vacationing abroad. Those citizens' rights are being systematically trampled.
Further, Room 641A and then the Snowden revelations showed that actually FBI/NSA get a mirrored port or just split the beam directly on domestic Internet fiber runs. Submarine fibers are obviously all tapped, too (sorry, Hawaii). Supposedly they apply "minimization" filters on that full-take, but considering their incentives I doubt they try very hard.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by the legality of a database definitely containing fruits of Constitutional violations being "in dispute". Clearly FAA 702 is itself "in dispute" right now, with re-authorization not such a rubber stamp this time. And SCOTUS has punted on lawsuits against NSA surveillance with standing BS, so they've never actually ruled on the merits. Certainly many people, myself included, have long disputed the legality of FAA 702 and of retaining or processing communications acquired under its authority.
Anyway how can you say the legality isn't in dispute when the government has a secret interpretation of the law that they refuse to allow anyone to see? How can we dispute what we don't know about?
"I will continue to urge the DNI to inform the public about how the government and the FISA Court are interpreting the law. There is important, secret information about how the government has interpreted Section 702 that Congress and the American people need to see before the law is renewed." - Sen. Ron Wyden, May 19 2023.
That's not accurate. They can only request the data of non-Americans living outside the US. If you are a US citizen, they cannot request your data without a court order. If you are not a US citizen but living in the US, they need a court order as well. Also, it's Section 702 of FISA. The Federal Aviation Administration has nothing to do with it.
> Supposedly they apply "minimization" filters on that full-take, but considering their incentives I doubt they try very hard.
More inaccuracies here. It's not full-take. The documents Klein released clearly showed a Narus filtering device here, which Snowden's documents showed is used to collect the communications of targeted foreigners outside the US whose data passes through the US. In this era of https everywhere, it is exceedingly unlikely that this source is still useful.
> Anyway how can you say the legality isn't in dispute when the government has a secret interpretation of the law that they refuse to allow anyone to see?
Snowden leaked the interpretations. These interpretations (aside from phone metadata) have not been challenged.
For US citizens abroad, any filtering is obviously insufficient, as they couldn't generally know your foreign phone number or residential IP address belong to a US citizen. That doesn't even get into the government's claimed authorities under EO12333, or exactly what "communication facilities" they have obtained secret bulk collection FISA warrants for (likely VPNs, US Tor exits, etc.), or data received about US persons from collaborating foreign intelligence agencies.
I wasn't referring to the Federal Aviation Administration, and you'd know that if you were seriously engaged with this issue. It's not Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA), it's Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA).
It's also important to note the distinction between the seizure of communications, which happens at massive scale without individualized suspicion, and the search of those communications when they "request" it, as you put it. The Constitution prohibits both unreasonable searches and seizures.
Considering Sen. Wyden has long sat on the SSCI, I assume his warning yesterday was about a new, different secret interpretation than the few court documents that were made public by Snowden et al. a decade ago.
This is conspiracy theory nonsense. If it were happening, Snowden would have leaked documents saying so. Instead, his leaked documents said this is only happening in a handful of war zones where the US controls the telecommunications systems.
> The Constitution prohibits both unreasonable searches and seizures.
It's good that you understand this basic fact. Then why do you think what you claimed is happening, despite not having any evidence to support your claim?
No. This publicly goes back to Clapper telling congress that the NSA doesn't "collect" data on Americans. The lie was excused on the grounds that "collection" isn't them saving the data, but rather querying it later.
More conspiracy theory nonsense. The lie was that they don't collect any data on Americans, when they did collect phone metadata. The reason he made that mistake was that the previous question was about making dossiers of Americans, which they do not do, not having the content of any Americans' communications.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/why-the...
> Don't accuse people of being conspiracy theorists when you haven't checked your facts.
I will continue to call people conspiracy theorists when they say hundreds of conspirators in the US government are doing something obviously illegal without any evidence, especially when someone who leaked other programs could have leaked that evidence but did not.
Him, and the EFF, and I'm sure others.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/director-national-inte...
> JAMES CLAPPER: when someone says "collection" to me, that has a specific meaning, which may have a different meaning to him.
"Written justification for searches" is a recent reform? So until now, they didn't need any paper trail of their searches? Not that in house approval of your "justification" is really enough for this.
How can anyone believe the FBI gives a shit if it took them well over a decade to go "maybe we should write something down when we use this."
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archive.is. 86272 IN SOA carl.archive.is. admin.archive.is. 2033156158 1200 300 604800 3600
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;; SERVER: 1.1.1.1#53(1.1.1.1)
;; WHEN: Sat May 20 09:14:33 EDT 2023
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 136https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33937866
CloudFlare is in the right. This is for privacy. Just put the IPs on your hosts file, it's easy. https://dns.google/query?name=archive.is
23.137.249.79 archive.today
23.137.249.79 archive.is
23.137.249.79 archive.ph
While there try a hosts blocklist http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
It’s ok to run a school teacher in Bucharest, but if someone is applying to be an FBI agent - nope.
This isn’t the first time the FBI has “wrongly” run the names to prospective agents and clearance holders to through this db. They’ve promised not to do it again before.
But isn’t this the perfect use case for such a thing? When you apply for a security clearance, you waive certain privacy rights. That’s reasonable and part of the deal.
Perhaps the most egregious:
> 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 abuse being discussed here has nothing to do with applicants for a TS clearance. It has to do with US citizens who were exercising their constitutional rights within the US, and not interacting with any foreign entities. The 702 rules explicitly prohibit this, but the FBI did it anyway.
https://www.dni.gov/files/icotr/Section702-Basics-Infographi...
From the above linked document:
SECTION 702: PROTECTING U.S. PERSON INFORMATION
CAN THE IC USE SECTION 702 TO COLLECT U.S. PERSON COMMUNICATIONS?
• The government cannot use Section 702 to target U.S. persons or persons located in the U.S.
• However, as Congress understood when it passed the statute, it is possible that a foreign person who has been targeted under Section 702 may communicate with, or discuss information concerning, a U.S. person.
I held such a clearance for 40+ years and I also had some international encrypted tunnels that were separate from any government work. I knew that the international traffic would be routinely collected by NSA, and I used weak algorithms/passwords (vtund) just to make it easier for them.
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1340...
It would not surprise me or concern me to learn that I was one of the 400.
People with clearances consent to extreme levels of surveillance.
But when this database was created, rules were set in place that protected folks, even those with clearances, from being searched for unless there was a darn good reason. Routine background checks don’t count.
Of course, foreigners have no such rights.
So politically, you, me, and Bruce Schneier agree OK. But that’s not what the law says.
I just find it weird we are stripping foreigners of any and all protection, while Americans have so much protection even obvious use case are violations.
It feels Kafkaesque.
It also feels like there’s an element of “who watches the watchmen?” Not this database.
> The Biden administration also declined to declassify details about a new “sensitive technique” of surveillance performed under Section 702 that required the court to weigh its legality, keeping Americans in the dark about a method of spying even as it lobbies lawmakers to renew the expiring portions of the law.
Sometimes there are hints or past reporting. Eg before Snowden there had been other reporting around Telco complicity at switching stations.
Maybe something with satellite connectivity surveillance? (Lol, it would be rich if they said it was covered by FISA because it went from USA to "space" and back in to US) (Edit for typos)
That pretty much was German BNDs excuse a few years ago. "Law only restricts what we do on state territory, space isn't even foreign ground"
> Civil liberties advocates say the FBI uses Section 702 as a backdoor for warrantless searches to get around the courts.
I don’t think they argued this originally. Originally we argued that THE SEARCH HAPPENS BEFORE THE QUERY. That moving data into the database constitutes a search.
To oversimplify a bit, it’s similar to the government coming into your home every day, taking photos of everything, and inventorying every item. Creating a huge manifest of everything in your home, filing it away with every other manifest they’ve collected on your neighbors, and then claiming they haven’t searched your home because they will only look at the manifest if they think it’s relevant to a qualifying investigation.
Every entry in this database _should_ constitute a search.
> “Say I want to collect information on Vladimir Putin,” explained Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney, “and I see on his Gmail, it turns out he’s been talking to an American. So I’m collecting on Putin, but it might capture communications with a U.S. person, and so now in that database, I have every email he’s ever sent, and I can go in and query for that U.S. person.”
This isn’t exactly accurate either. Last I heard, it was based on “hops.” Not just 1 degree of separation of Vladimir Putin, but N degrees of separation from anyone considered to be a potential “national security threat.”
So if your landscaper is sending money back home to their family who is in contact with someone who is involved in a cartel, maybe your entire digital footprint (metadata? more?) is fair game for this database.
If you text the owner of your gym and their babysitter’s brother is suspected of being associated with a foreign group, maybe your entire digital life is fair game for this database.
The scope of this data dragnet is staggering.
> (Though the evidence suggests the FBI was searching for Black Lives Matter protesters as much as Jan. 6 suspects.) The federal court that reviewed how the FBI uses the database threatened to put major limitations on the agency’s ability to use it if the FBI did not change its procedures.
I don’t understand how these searches that were illegally conducted aren’t required to be handed over to the defense team for every trial this was used in, along with the records that were returned for their client. Everything downstream of these searches is tainted evidence, no?
Really? After COINTELPRO, the FBI was legislated into domestic-only knowledge, in an attempt to pen in their abuses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
This, well worse, actually, was only to be expected from the Patriot Act.
The quote was completely accurate. What you heard is inaccurate. The US isn't allowed to get data for people living in the US (or US citizens living anywhere) at all without a court order. They can collect Putin's data and that of his non-American associates. They can then search that data for Americans suspected to be involved in schemes against national security. They cannot search that data for Americans who aren't, which is what is being reported here.
Why they omit CIA from the equation?
Law only apply to the FBI? or we pretend laws exist to prevent agents from abusing it?
Either way, this is another evidence of the massive global spying capabilities of the US and how easily accessible they are for their agents
> Senior national security officials said Friday that all of the incidents described took place before the FBI had completed a series of internal reforms—including written justifications for searches, more oversight and requiring analysts to actively opt into searching the foreign intelligence database. Those steps, adopted within the past few years, are intended to reduce incidents of noncompliance
> “We’re not trying to hide from this stuff,” a senior FBI official said. “This type of noncompliance is unacceptable, and that’s why we put these reforms in place to stop that from happening.”
I'm old enough to remember when another celebrity political outsider got this exact treatment in 2016.
To the extent that a problem loosely matching your description exists, the solution mostly isn't in Presidential elections, and anyone selling that as the solution is either an idiot who doesn't understand that the US isn’t an executive dictatorship or a would-be tyrant trying to make it one.
No, if I was saying that I ... would have said that.
> Senior national security officials said Friday that all of the incidents described took place before the FBI had completed a series of internal reforms—including written justifications for searches, more oversight and requiring analysts to actively opt into searching the foreign intelligence database. Those steps, adopted within the past few years, are intended to reduce incidents of noncompliance.
> “We’re not trying to hide from this stuff,” a senior FBI official said. “This type of noncompliance is unacceptable, and that’s why we put these reforms in place to stop that from happening.”