Problems at Federal Agencies

 Many posts have discussed federal employment and bureaucracy.

Thomas Frank at Politico:

President Donald Trump has rejected disaster aid for Democratic-run states at the highest rate in the 47-year history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

He approved just 23 percent of disaster funding requests from states with a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators since returning to office 14 months ago. For states with a Republican governor and two Republican senators, it’s the opposite — Trump has approved 89 percent of their requests.

There has never been such a sharp partisan disparity in the approval of federal disaster funds since FEMA was created in 1979, according to a review of 2,500 natural disaster declarations by POLITICO’s E&E News.

The denials have blocked Democratic-led states from getting a total of $250 million in disaster aid that would have been approved by every previous president including Trump in his first term, E&E News found.

Trump rejected most of the requests even after FEMA had documented that the damage met its financial threshold to warrant receiving federal aid.

 Sarah Fitzpatrick writes at The Atlantic about FBI Director Kash Patel:

Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff. He is also known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room, in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends. Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

Some of Patel’s colleagues at the FBI worry that his personal behavior has become a threat to public safety. An FBI director is expected to be available and focused on his job—especially when the nation is at war with a state sponsor of terrorism. Current and former officials told me that they have long worried about what would happen in the event of a domestic terrorist attack while Patel is in office, and they said that their apprehension has increased significantly in the weeks since Trump launched his military campaign against Iran. “That’s what keeps me up at night,” one official said

America Is Vulnerable

Many posts have analyzed how foreign influence and intelligence operations.

R.M. Schneiderman and Derek Owen at The Bulwark:

American security experts fear that growing networks of foreign spies, combined with new technology, represent an unprecedented threat—one the FBI, the primary agency tasked with thwarting hostile foreign intelligence services, may struggle to address.

“Look at what the Ukrainians are doing with drones and AI against Russia,” says national-security analyst Paul Joyal. “I know our adversaries are watching.”

Yet as these dangers have mounted, the White House has proposed slashing the FBI’s budget by more than $500 million and has shifted the bureau’s priorities away from combating spies and other forms of foreign influence. Under Director Kash Patel, the FBI has moved people and power out of the bureau’s headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington and into the heartland. He reassigned nearly a quarter of all agents to a job that’s never been part of the FBI’s purview, immigration enforcement, according to data obtained from the bureau by Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat. Counterintelligence specialists with deep expertise in countries like China, Russia, and Iran are now regularly working immigration cases on a rotating basis, according to former agents who recently left the bureau. The FBI has also limited investigations of crimes like violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), allowing foreign spies greater room to maneuver.

The end result of these changes, former senior FBI officials maintain, is that America is extremely vulnerable—not just to an attack, but to an unprecedented level of foreign espionage.

“It’s a disaster,” says Robert Anderson, the head of FBI counterintelligence from 2012 to 2014. “I’m rooting for everybody because we’re all Americans, [but] Patel needs to wake up.”

Fewer But Less Qualified Agents

Devlin Barrett and Adam Goldman at NYT:

The Trump administration is preparing to lower the recruitment standards for F.B.I. agents, eliciting alarm from many agents who worry that the move will undermine the agency’s primary mission of conducting complex investigations and tracking threats to national security.

Under a plan pushed by the director, Kash Patel, and his deputy, Dan Bongino, the F.B.I. will start welcoming new classes of recruits who will receive less training and no longer be required to have a college degree, according to people familiar with the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe it.

The shift comes as the agency anticipates losing more than 5,000 employees by September, largely as a result of agents, analysts and others taking severance or early retirement packages offered by the Trump administration to try to reduce the budget.

Instead of spending about 18 weeks training at the academy in Quantico, Va., the group of agents, tentatively scheduled to start in October, will receive eight weeks, according to the people. And the agents will no longer need to fulfill a longstanding requisite for joining the bureau: a bachelor’s degree.

...

Current and former agents said they worried that the changes would transform the bureau from an investigative agency focused on national security into something more akin to a federal police force. One of Mr. Patel’s favorite sayings is “let good cops be cops,” which grates on many agents who privately point out that they are not, in fact, cops.

Violent Crime Is Down

  Many posts have discussed crime in the United States.

From the FBI:

The FBI released detailed data on over 14 million criminal offenses for 2024, reported to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program by participating law enforcement agencies. More than 16,000 state, county, city, university and college, and tribal agencies, covering a combined population of 95.6% United States population, submitted data to the UCR Program through the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and the Summary Reporting System.

The FBI’s crime statistics estimates, based on reported data, show a violent crime occurred, on average, every 25.9 seconds in 2024. The breakdown shows on average a murder occurred every 31.1 minutes and a rape occurred every 4.1 minutes. National violent crime decreased an estimated 4.5% in 2024 compared to 2023 estimates:

• Murder and non-negligent manslaughter recorded a 2024 estimated nationwide decrease of 14.9% compared to the previous year.
• In 2024, the estimated number of offenses in the revised rape category saw an estimated 5.2% decrease.
• Aggravated assault figures decreased an estimated 3.0% in 2024.
• Robbery showed an estimated decrease of 8.9% nationally.

In 2024, 16,419 agencies participated in the Hate Crime collection, population coverage of 95.1% of the U.S. population. Law enforcement agencies submitted incident reports involving 11,679 criminal incidents and 13,683 related offenses as being motivated by bias toward race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender, and gender identity.

To publish a national trend, the FBI’s UCR Program used a dataset of reported hate crime incidents and reported zero incidents submitted by participating agencies reporting six or more common months of hate crime data to the FBI’s UCR Program for both 2023 and 2024. According to this dataset, reported hate crime incidents decreased 1.5 percent from 11,041 in 2023 to 10,873 in 2024.

“Reported Crimes in the Nation” comprises five parts—“Crime in the United States, 2024,” “NIBRS, 2024,” “Hate Crime Statistics, 2024,” Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted 2024 assault tables, and “UCR Summary of Reported Crimes in the Nation, 2024.” The compilation’s name has been changed to best reflect the UCR Program’s products, which are based on data reported by participating law enforcement agencies to the FBI.

The violent crime estimate published as part of “Crime in the United States” comprises murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault offenses. For the first time, the 2013 through 2024 violent crime estimates are based on the rape offenses reported using the 2013 revised rape definition. The violent crime figures will still be based on the legacy rape definition for years 2005 to 2012. The revised rape definition (https://le.fbi.gov/cjis-division/cjis-link/ucr-program-changes-definition-of-rape) encompasses additional circumstances beyond the parameters of the legacy definition. In 2016, the FBI Director approved the recommendation to discontinue the reporting of rape data using the UCR legacy definition beginning in 2017. Since 2017, table one of the “Crime in the United States” was the only table using the legacy definition to publish the historic trend. This year’s change streamlines the publication of reported rape.

The complete analysis is located on the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer.

No Undercover FBI Employees in the 1/6 Mob

Many posts have discussed the insurrection of January 6, 2021. 

From the DOJ IG:

Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz announced today the release of a review examining the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) handling of its confidential human sources (CHS) and intelligence collection efforts in the lead up to the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Consistent with OIG practice, in spring 2022 the OIG paused aspects of our review to ensure that the OIG’s investigative work did not conflict with or compromise any ongoing DOJ criminal investigations or prosecutions. Having been informed by federal prosecutors last year that our review would no longer potentially interfere with pending criminal prosecutions, we resumed our work on this matter. In doing so, we were cognizant of the amount of time that had passed, as well as the number of non-DOJ OIG oversight reports that had been publicly released regarding the events of January 6. We determined that an area that had not yet been thoroughly reviewed by other entities was the FBI’s direction and handling of its CHSs in the lead-up to and on January 6, and whether the FBI exploited its CHSs and other available information to determine the nature of threats in advance of the electoral vote certification on January 6. Accordingly, we focused our review on that topic.

The findings in today’s report include:

• The FBI Took Significant and Appropriate Steps in Advance of January 6 to Prepare for its Supporting Role. Despite playing only a supporting role in preparing for and responding to the events of January 6, the FBI recognized the potential for violence and took significant and appropriate steps to prepare for this supporting role.
• The FBI Did Not Canvass Field Offices for Intelligence from CHSs Prior to January 6, which Could Have Helped the FBI and Law Enforcement with Their January 6 Preparations. The FBI could have taken an additional step to canvass its field offices in advance of January 6 to identify any intelligence, including CHS reporting, that might have assisted with the FBI and law enforcement partners’ preparations for January 6. FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate described the lack of a canvass prior to January 6 as a “basic step that was missed,” and told the OIG that he would have expected a formal canvassing of sources to have occurred.
• Confusion and Lack of Coordination Contributed to the FBI’s Inaccurate Report to Congress that It Had Canvassed Field Offices. After January 6, the FBI reported to Congress that it had directed its field offices prior to January 6 to canvass their CHSs for information concerning threats in connection with the January 6 Electoral Certification. However, as noted, we found that no canvassing of field offices for source information had occurred. We found that the FBI’s statements to Congress were not intentionally inaccurate, and that confusion and lack of coordinated communications contributed to the inaccurate reporting.
• No Undercover FBI Employees at Protests or at the Capitol on January 6. We found no evidence in the materials we reviewed or the testimony we received showing or suggesting that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on January 6.

The Term of the FBI DIrector

Andrew Kent, Susan Hennessey, Matthew Kahn

Why Did Congress Set a Ten-Year Term for the FBI Director?
Lawfare, Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Section 203 of the Crime Control Act of 1976 restricts the FBI director to a single ten-year term and prohibits the reappointment of an incumbent. Below is an examination of what the legislative history and political context reveal about Congress’ motives in passing that law. It is clear that Congress viewed the operation of the statute as both a ceiling and a floor: a limit on the president and a limit on the director. It’s also clear that Congress viewed political influence on specific FBI investigations as violative of important norms developed to prevent the recurrence of dangerous abuses.

Congress first considered a law to require Senate confirmation and term limits for an FBI director in the closing years of J. Edgar Hoover’s directorship. Hoover was the FBI’s first director and was appointed by the Attorney General and not the president. He served 48 years until his death in 1972. Congress approached the issue in the context of Hoover’s extraordinarily long tenure, during which he consolidated control of the FBI and carried out substantial abuses of power.

In one sense, limiting an FBI director’s tenure to a single ten-year term should be understood as a check on the director’s power. Congress’ was concerned with the rise of another unscrupulous and excessively powerful director, and term limits were one way to prevent that. There is simply less one can do in ten years than in forty-eight, be it amassing influence or violating civil liberties.

In another sense, the term limit acts as a check on presidential power. Congress passed the ten-year term limit in the shadow of the abuses of President Richard Nixon and White House aides. The Senate Judiciary Committee held hearing on FBI oversight and a bill to establish a ten-year term in March 1974, the same month a federal grand jury indicted the “Watergate Seven” and named Nixon an unindicted co-conspirator. Nixon’s acting FBI Director and nominee for the permanent post, L. Patrick Gray, had resigned in 1973 after it was revealed that he was giving the White House daily briefings on the FBI’s Watergate investigation and that he destroyed documents relevant to the inquiry.

Congress wanted to address the Scylla and Charybdis of Nixon and Hoover: the risk of political interference in FBI investigations, and use of the Bureau for political purposes, on the one hand, and on the other, the danger of an imperial FBI director whose long tenure–and the secrets and political chits accumulated during that tenure–allows him to act without accountability.

When recommending enactment of the ten-year term, the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote a comprehensive report of its rationale, including:

The purpose of this bill is to achieve two complementary objectives. The first is to insulate the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from undue pressure being exerted upon him from superiors in the Executive Branch. The second is to protect against an FBI Director becoming too independent and unresponsive.

Also from the report:

It is the great value of the FBI as a criminal investigative agency, as well as its dangerous potential for infringing individual rights and serving partisan or personal ambitions, that makes the office of FBI Director unique....The position is not an ordinary Cabinet appointmentvwhich is usually considered a politically oriented member of the President's "team."

 

Foreign Influence on US Politics

Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy.

 Catherine Kim at Politico:

So what’s behind this surge of foreign cash allegedly influencing U.S. politics? Are public officials simply getting more brazen in their interactions with foreign governments? According to Casey Michel, author of the upcoming book Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World, illegal foreign influence has been entrenched in our political system for decades — but it’s happening now more than ever.

Foreign lobbying of all sorts is a big business in the U.S., with countries and other entities spending over $5 trillion since 2016 to influence U.S. policy and burnish their own images. And despite bipartisan interest, attempts at reform have largely stalled out thus far.

Now, though, a confluence of factors including the Justice Department getting more aggressive on the issue, have led to this recent series of high-profile indictments. To better understand how foreign actors influence our politics and what their own goals are, Nightly spoke with Michel. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Are we seeing an uptick in foreign interference in our politics through lobbying? And if so, why is that the case?

We have seen an absolute explosion in recent years in terms of the scope and the scale of both foreign lobbying as well as foreign interference — without any kind of precedent in American history itself. And that’s for a few reasons: You had folks in Washington asleep at the wheel as it pertained to both the regulations and even the potential threat to these kinds of unchecked foreign lobbying. On the ground, there was a proliferation of Americans willing to provide foreign lobbying services beyond just traditional lobbying to authoritarian regimes, who were realizing just how wide open Washington was. It was really in the mid-2010s when things began to shift. And finally, folks started paying attention and realizing what the cost of ignoring these networks for so many years truly was.

From the FBI:

The counterintelligence and economic espionage efforts emanating from the government of China and the Chinese Communist Party are a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States.

Confronting this threat is the FBI’s top counterintelligence priority.

To be clear, the adversary is not the Chinese people or people of Chinese descent or heritage. The threat comes from the programs and policies pursued by an authoritarian government.

The Chinese government is employing tactics that seek to influence lawmakers and public opinion to achieve policies that are more favorable to China.

At the same time, the Chinese government is seeking to become the world’s greatest superpower through predatory lending and business practices, systematic theft of intellectual property, and brazen cyber intrusions.

China’s efforts target businesses, academic institutions, researchers, lawmakers, and the general public and will require a whole-of-society response. The government and the private sector must commit to working together to better understand and counter the threat.

The Terrorist Threat

 Graham Allison and Michael Morrell at Foreign Affairs:

Testifying in December to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, [FBI Director Christopher] Wray said, “When I sat here last year, I walked through how we were already in a heightened threat environment.” Yet after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, “we’ve seen the threat from foreign terrorists rise to a whole nother level,” he added. In speaking about those threats, Wray has repeatedly drawn attention to security gaps at the United States’ southern border, where thousands of people each week enter the country undetected.

Wray is not the only senior official issuing warnings. Since he became commander of United States Central Command (CENTCOM) in 2022, General Erik Kurilla has been pointing out the worrying capabilities of the terrorist groups his forces are fighting in the Middle East and South Asia. These include al Qaeda, the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), and especially Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), the ISIS affiliate that operates in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Christine Abizaid, the outgoing director of the National Counterterrorism Center, described “an elevated global threat environment” while speaking at a conference in Doha last month. And in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee just last week, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, speaking about the possibility of a terrorist attack on the United States, said that the “threat level . . . has gone up enormously.”

...

Observable trends add weight to these officials’ concerns. Most important is the growing number of both successful and foiled attacks. According to the Global Terrorism Index, deaths from terrorism increased by 22 percent from 2022 to 2023. This year has already seen the two large ISIS-K attacks in Iran and Russia. And were it not for the outstanding work of German intelligence and police, the list of successful acts of terrorism in the past few months would have been longer. German authorities arrested foreign nationals who were allegedly planning attacks on the Cologne Cathedral late last year and the Swedish parliament building in Stockholm in March.

Foiled plots inside the United States should be the ultimate wake-up call. In April 2022, the Justice Department charged an Iranian government official based in Tehran with attempting to hire a hit man to assassinate former U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton. The following month, the FBI reported that it had thwarted the plans of an Iraqi national living in Ohio to smuggle four people across the southern border to assassinate former President George W. Bush. Most recently, the FBI—as part of the Biden administration’s effort to convince Congress to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—shared declassified intelligence with Politico showing that the agency had stopped a plot to attack critical infrastructure in the United States last fall. According to the FBI, the organizer inside the United States was in regular contact with a foreign terrorist group, had identified specific targets, and had made sufficient preparations to put the plan into motion.

Crime in 2024 So Far

Many posts have discussed crime in the United States.

Corky Siemaszko and Tom Costello at NBC:

The latest FBI statistics point to a "historic" drop in crime in the first quarter of this year, Attorney General Merrick Garland says.

And this, after a year in which the murder rate fell at one the fastest rates ever recorded, a top criminologist added.

"This should be good news for everybody," criminologist Jeff Asher, who analyzed the FBI numbers, told NBC News. "But it's also early June and the trend of the nation's crime rate is always uncertain."

The rate of violent and property crimes dropped precipitously in the first three months of 2024 compared to the same period last year, according to quarterly statistics released Monday by the FBI known as the Uniform Crime Report.

The murder rate fell by 26.4%, reported rapes decreased by 25.7%, robberies fell by 17.8%, aggravated assault fell by 12.5%, and the overall violent crime rate went down by 15.2%, the statistics show.

Reported property crimes also decreased by 15.1%, according to the UCR report, which the FBI compiles using crime statistics supplied to the agency by law enforcement agencies across the U.S.

A "Deadly Force" Conspiracy Theory

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.

Andrew Egger and Jim Swift at The Bulwark:

“WOW!” Donald Trump truthed. “I just came out of the Biden Witch Hunt Trial in Manhattan, the ‘Icebox,’ and was shown Reports that Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY.”

Trump went further in a Tuesday fundraising email: “They were authorized to shoot me!”

“You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable,” the email blasted out to millions of the president’s fans went on. “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”

We hope you’re sitting down for this: It is not actually true that Biden tried to have Trump assassinated. (But would he have absolute immunity from prosecution if he did? The Supreme Court will get around to determining that, one of these days.)

This particular narrative was launched yesterday by January 6th conspiracy theorist (her words!) and friend of the show Julie Kelly, who while rummaging through filings in Trump’s classified documents case stumbled across some FBI policy statements on how the execution of its search warrant would proceed operationally. One of those documents was a “policy statement” on the “use of deadly force.”

Even a cursory read of this document makes it painfully obvious that it’s a bog-standard piece of paperwork—copied word for word from the DOJ’s policy book, the Justice Manual—limiting when armed agents are allowed to use force: “only when necessary, that is, when the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.” Most of the document is a series of “what ifs”: “Deadly force may not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject.” “Firearms may not be fired solely to disable moving vehicles.” “Warning shots are not permitted outside the prison context.” And so on.

New: FBI issues rare statement directly responding to this attack from Trump and his allies.

Says “standard protocol” was followed - “No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter.” https://t.co/OLQMHXojXI pic.twitter.com/jUDef7fyBY

— Alex Mallin (@alex_mallin) May 21, 2024

J6 Indictment

 Special Counsel Jack Smith Delivers Statement

Tuesday, August 1, 2023

 

Washington, DC Statement as Delivered

Good evening. Today, an indictment was unsealed charging Donald J. Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. The indictment was issued by a grand jury of citizens here in the District of Columbia and sets forth the crimes charged in detail. I encourage everyone to read it in full. 

The attack on our nation’s capital on January 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy. As described in the indictment, it was fueled by lies. Lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government, the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election. 

The men and women of law enforcement who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6 are heroes. They’re patriots, and they are the very best of us. They did not just defend a building or the people sheltering in it. They put their lives on the line to defend who we are as a country and as a people. They defended the very institutions and principles that define the United States. 

Since the attack on our Capitol, the Department of Justice has remained committed to ensuring accountability for those criminally responsible for what happened that day. This case is brought consistent with that commitment, and our investigation of other individuals continues. 

In this case, my office will seek a speedy trial so that our evidence can be tested in court and judged by a jury of citizens. In the meantime, I must emphasize that the indictment is only an allegation and that the defendant must be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. 

I would like to thank the members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who are working on this investigation with my office, as well as the many career prosecutors and law enforcement agents from around the country who have worked on previous January 6 investigations. These women and men are public servants at the very highest order, and it is a privilege to work alongside them. Thank you.

Domestic Terrorism on the Rise

GAO, "Domestic Terrorism: Further Actions Needed to Strengthen FBI and DHS Collaboration to Counter Threats."

According to U.S. law, domestic terrorism is generally defined as involving criminal acts dangerous to human life occurring in the U.S. that appear intended to coerce a civilian population or influence or affect the conduct of government. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) tracks cases (which it defines as investigations and disruptions) consistent with its investigative mission. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) tracks incidents which it defines attacks or plots, consistent with its definition of domestic terrorism. From fiscal years 2013 through 2021, the FBI's number of open domestic terrorism-related cases grew by 357 percent from 1,981 to 9,049, From calendar year 2010 to 2021, I&A tracked a total of 231 domestic terrorism incidents, with racially- or ethnically-motivated violent extremists committing the most violent incidents during the time period.

The FBI and DHS I&A collaborate via headquarters staff, fusion centers, and through serving on task forces, to identify and counter domestic terrorism threats. GAO found that they generally followed leading collaboration practices, but challenges remain. For example, FBI and DHS have agreements in place, but they have not assessed if these agreements fully reflect how their personnel should collaborate on their shared charge of preventing domestic terrorism. Due to the rapidly evolving threat landscape, having up-to-date, comprehensive formal agreements would enhance the two entities' collaboration. Further, FBI and DHS I&A have evaluated individual activities but have not consistently assessed the overall effectiveness of their collaborative efforts. Doing so can ensure both agencies are capitalizing on efforts that may lead to improved information to counter domestic terrorism threats.

Foreign Governments Did Not Tamper with Election Results

Joint Statement from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security Assessing the Impact of Foreign Interference During the 2020 U.S. Elections

Note: The joint report can be viewed here.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), released today key findings and recommendations from a joint report to the President issued last month on the impact of foreign governments and their agents on the security and integrity of the 2020 U.S. federal elections.

The Departments investigated multiple public claims that one or more foreign governments owned, directed or controlled election infrastructure used in the 2020 federal elections; implemented a scheme to manipulate election infrastructure; or tallied, changed or otherwise manipulated vote counts. The Departments found that those claims were not credible.

These conclusions are part of a classified report to the President prepared by DOJ and DHS pursuant to section 1(b) of Executive Order 13848, Imposing Certain Sanctions in the Event of Foreign Influence in a United States Election (the EO), issued on Sept. 12, 2018. Although the 1(b) report notes that Russian, Chinese, and Iranian government-affiliated actors materially impacted the security of certain networks during the 2020 federal elections, the Departments found no evidence that any foreign government-affiliated actor manipulated election results or otherwise compromised the integrity of the 2020 federal elections.

The 1(b) report relied on a classified assessment — prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), pursuant to section 1(a) of the EO, about any information indicating that a foreign government acted with the intent or purpose of interfering in the 2020 U.S. federal elections. Whereas the 1(a) report discusses efforts to influence public perceptions and opinion, the scope of the 1(b) report only includes efforts to compromise the security or integrity of election infrastructure or infrastructure pertaining to political organizations, candidates or campaigns used in the 2020 U.S. federal elections. The 1(b) report does not discuss efforts to sway voters or influence opinion.

During the 2020 election cycle, federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, non-governmental and private sector partners nationwide worked together in unprecedented ways to combat foreign interference efforts and support election officials, political organizations, campaigns and candidates in safeguarding their infrastructure. The Departments remain committed to continuously strengthening the nation’s cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, supply chain risk management, public-private partnerships and public messaging to enhance the resiliency of our democratic institutions.

Covert Chinese Influence

Many posts have discussed the efforts of China to influence American politics.

 Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian and Zach Dorfman at Axios:

A suspected Chinese intelligence operative developed extensive ties with local and national politicians, including a U.S. congressman, in what U.S. officials believe was a political intelligence operation run by China’s main civilian spy agency between 2011 and 2015, Axios found in a yearlong investigation.
...

The woman at the center of the operation, a Chinese national named Fang Fang or Christine Fang, targeted up-and-coming local politicians in the Bay Area and across the country who had the potential to make it big on the national stage.

• Through campaign fundraising, extensive networking, personal charisma, and romantic or sexual relationships with at least two Midwestern mayors, Fang was able to gain proximity to political power, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials and one former elected official.
• Even though U.S. officials do not believe Fang received or passed on classified information, the case "was a big deal, because there were some really, really sensitive people that were caught up" in the intelligence network, a current senior U.S. intelligence official said.
• Private but unclassified information about government officials — such as their habits, preferences, schedules, social networks, and even rumors about them — is a form of political intelligence. Collecting such information is a key part of what foreign intelligence agencies do.

...

What happened: Amid a widening counterintelligence probe, federal investigators became so alarmed by Fang's behavior and activities that around 2015 they alerted [Rep. Eric] Swalwell to their concerns — giving him what is known as a defensive briefing.

• Swalwell immediately cut off all ties to Fang, according to a current U.S. intelligence official, and he has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
• Fang left the country unexpectedly in mid-2015 amid the investigation. She did not respond to multiple attempts by Axios to reach her by email and Facebook.

Between the lines: The case demonstrates China’s strategy of cultivating relationships that may take years or even decades to bear fruit. The Chinese Communist Party knows that today’s mayors and city council members are tomorrow’s governors and members of Congress.

Hate Crimes

Michael Balsamo at AP:

Hate crimes in the U.S. rose to the highest level in more than a decade as federal officials also recorded the highest number of hate-motivated killings since the FBI began collecting that data in the early 1990s, according to an FBI report released Monday.

There were 51 hate crime murders in 2019, which includes 22 people who were killed in a shooting that targeted Mexicans at a Walmart in the border city of El Paso, Texas, the report said. The suspect in that August 2019 shooting, which left two dozen other people injured, was charged with both state and federal crimes in what authorities said was an attempt to scare Hispanics into leaving the United States.

From the FBI:

Today the FBI released Hate Crime Statistics, 2019, the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program’s latest compilation about bias-motivated incidents throughout the nation. The 2019 data, submitted by 15,588 law enforcement agencies, provide information about the offenses, victims, offenders, and locations of hate crimes.

Law enforcement agencies submitted incident reports involving 7,314 criminal incidents and 8,559 related offenses as being motivated by bias toward race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender, and gender identity. Please note the UCR Program does not estimate offenses for the jurisdictions of agencies that do not submit reports. Highlights of Hate Crime Statistics, 2019 follow. (Due to rounding, percentage breakdowns may not add to 100%.)

Victims of Hate Crime Incidents

• There were 7,103 single-bias incidents involving 8,552 victims. A percent distribution of victims by bias type shows that 57.6% of victims were targeted because of the offenders’ race/ethnicity/ancestry bias; 20.1% were targeted because of the offenders’ religious bias; 16.7% were victimized because of the offenders’ sexual-orientation bias; 2.7% were targeted because of the offenders’ gender identity bias; 2.0% were victimized because of the offenders’ disability bias; and 0.9% were victimized because of the offenders’ gender bias.
• There were 211 multiple-bias hate crime incidents, which involved 260 victims.

Offenses by Crime Category

• Of the 5,512 hate crime offenses classified as crimes against persons in 2019, 40% were for intimidation, 36.7% were for simple assault, and 21% were for aggravated assault. Fifty-one (51) murders; 30 rapes; and three offenses of human trafficking (commercial sex acts) were reported as hate crimes. The remaining 41 hate crime offenses were reported in the category of other.
• There were 2,811 hate crime offenses classified as crimes against property. The majority of these (76.6%) were acts of destruction/damage/vandalism. Robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, arson, and other offenses accounted for the remaining 23.4% of crimes against property.
• Two hundred thirty-six (236) additional offenses were classified as crimes against society. This crime category represents society’s prohibition against engaging in certain types of activity such as gambling, prostitution, and drug violations. These are typically victimless crimes in which property is not the object.

Curbing Presidential Power

 At NYT, Peter Baker reports on bipartisan proposals from Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, an assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush, and Robert F. Bauer, a White House counsel under President Barack Obama.  Their ideas include:

• Provide more authority and protection for future special counsels investigating presidents or other high-level officials and have them report their findings to Congress and the public rather than to the Justice Department.
• Prohibit presidents from pardoning themselves and amend the bribery statute to make it illegal to use the pardon power to bribe witnesses or obstruct justice.
• Bar presidents from managing or supervising private businesses or establishing blind trusts for their financial assets and require any business in which they have an interest to file public reports.
• Authorize inspectors general to investigate and report on reprisals or intimidation of journalists.
• Revise the authorization of force passed after Sept. 11, 2001, to prohibit humanitarian military intervention without additional votes by Congress and limit the use of nuclear weapons to self-defense in extreme circumstances.
• Ensure that the attorney general makes decisions on prosecutions involving the president or presidential campaigns, not the F.B.I. director, as happened during the Hillary Clinton email case.

Foreign Influence on Elections

Federalist 22:

One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption. An hereditary monarch, though often disposed to sacrifice his subjects to his ambition, has so great a personal interest in the government and in the external glory of the nation, that it is not easy for a foreign power to give him an equivalent for what he would sacrifice by treachery to the state. The world has accordingly been witness to few examples of this species of royal prostitution, though there have been abundant specimens of every other kind.

In republics, persons elevated from the mass of the community, by the suffrages of their fellow-citizens, to stations of great pre-eminence and power, may find compensations for betraying their trust, which, to any but minds animated and guided by superior virtue, may appear to exceed the proportion of interest they have in the common stock, and to overbalance the obligations of duty. Hence it is that history furnishes us with so many mortifying examples of the prevalency of foreign corruption in republican governments.

From the FBI:

Election Day 2020 is less than two months away, and the FBI is charged with protecting the rights of all Americans, including their right to vote.

From now until November 3, every American has a role to play in protecting the election from threats against the democratic process. Across the country, the FBI has initiated public awareness messaging about election security online at fbi.gov and across our social media platforms.

The goal of this social media campaign is to increase the public’s awareness about threats to the upcoming election and to inform Americans about what they can do to help the FBI ensure that the elections are safe and secure. These threats include crimes the FBI has been charged with investigating for decades, including campaign finance crimes; voter/ballot fraud; civil rights violations, cyber threats targeting the election process; and the potential for foreign influence on the democratic process, elected officials and institutions.
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The FBI is the primary investigative agency responsible for engaging with local and state election security counterparts to safeguard election integrity. The FBI is also the lead federal agency for identifying and combating malign foreign influence operations targeting our democratic institutions through the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF). The FITF brings together all FBI authorities and capabilities from multiple divisions to include Counterintelligence; Cyber; Criminal; and Counterterrorism assets to coordinate and work together to combat the threat.

The FITF is committed to providing accessible tools and resources to all levels of government through both in-person briefs and online tools, such as our Protected Voices campaign, found at fbi.gov/protectedvoices. Protected Voices is a public initiative which provides political campaigns, organizations, and other election security stakeholders with tools and resources to protect against malign foreign influence and cyber security threats.

In addition to protecting the November 2020 election, the FITF remains focused on persistent malign foreign influence efforts targeting our democratic institutions and processes outside of election events and works closely to address threats targeting the democratic process and American elections.

If you have information about allegations of election crime or voter fraud, please call your local FBI field office. The Washington Field Office can be reached at 202-278-2000.

Additional information on the FBI’s role in election security and access to educational resources about how to protect your voice and vote, can be found by following the FBI’s Washington Field Office at @FBIWFO.

 

Crime Is Down

From the FBI:

Both violent crime and property crime fell in 2018 from the previous year, according to the FBI’s annual crime statistics released today.

Violent crime declined 3.3 percent between 2017 and 2018. Property crime decreased 6.3 percent during the same time period, according to Crime in the United States, 2018, the annual crime statistics report produced by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program.

The crime data was voluntarily reported to the FBI by more than 16,000 law enforcement agencies across the country.

In 2018, there were about 1.2 million violent crimes, according to the report. Nearly every category of violent crime decreased between 2017 and 2018, with the exception of rape offenses, which increased 2.7 percent.

In the property crime category, there were nearly 7.2 million offenses reported in 2018. Burglaries, larceny-thefts, and motor vehicle thefts all declined in 2018 compared to 2017 data.

Full Report: Crime in the United States, 2018

Resources

• FBI Releases 2018 Crime Statistics
• UCR Publications
• FBI, This Week: 2018 Crime Statistics Released

Favorable Views of Federal Agencies

From Pew:

Despite historically low levels of public trust in the federal government, Americans across the political spectrum continue to overwhelmingly express favorable opinions of a number of individual federal agencies, including the Postal Service, the National Park Service, NASA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And majorities of both Republicans and Democrats now express favorable views of the FBI, reflecting a rebound in GOP perceptions after a decline in recent years.

Of the 16 agencies asked about in a national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted Sept. 5-16 among 2,004 U.S. adults, 14 are viewed more favorably than unfavorably by the public.

 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is the sole agency asked about in the survey viewed more negatively (54% unfavorable) than positively (42% favorable), while the public is divided in its view of the Department of Education (48% favorable, 48% unfavorable).

Russia v. FBI

Zach Dorfman, Jenna McLaughlin and Sean D. Naylor at Yahoo News:

On Dec. 29, 2016, the Obama administration announced that it was giving nearly three dozen Russian diplomats just 72 hours to leave the United States and was seizing two rural East Coast estates owned by the Russian government.
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Both compounds, and at least some of the expelled diplomats, played key roles in a brazen Russian counterintelligence operation that stretched from the Bay Area to the heart of the nation’s capital, according to former U.S. officials. The operation, which targeted FBI communications, hampered the bureau’s ability to track Russian spies on U.S. soil at a time of increasing tension with Moscow, forced the FBI and CIA to cease contact with some of their Russian assets, and prompted tighter security procedures at key U.S. national security facilities in the Washington area and elsewhere, according to former U.S. officials. It even raised concerns among some U.S. officials about a Russian mole within the U.S. intelligence community.