According to an unsealed filing in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the FBI isn’t doing itself any favors by resisting increasing demands, primarily from Republicans, to radically reform and even defund the agency.

Fox News reported on Friday that the filing indicates that the FBI improperly conducted warrantless searches on more than 278 000 American citizens through November 2021.

“U.S. citizens covered in that improper effort included people involved in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021; George Floyd protesters during the summer of 2020; and donors to a failed congressional candidate, the filing said,” according to the outlet.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorizes the government to conduct targeted surveillance on individuals located outside the United States who are not U.S. citizens.

The law’s primary purpose is to regulate the manner in which government agencies collect foreign intelligence. In instances where U.S. citizens become subjects of interest during these investigations, the FBI is responsible for interrogating them for prospective security purposes.

Fox News noted that this transfer of responsibility ensures that proper protocols are adhered to when managing inquiries involving U.S. citizens in the context of national security.

The FISC unsealing occurred on Friday, but the 127-page document was submitted in April 2022, according to the news source.

“As [FBI Director Christopher] Wray has made clear, the errors described in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s opinion are completely unacceptable,” a senior official at the FBI told Fox News on Friday. “As a result of the audits that revealed these instances of noncompliance, the FBI changed its querying procedures to make sure these errors do not happen again.”

“We are committed to continuing this work and providing greater transparency into the process to earn the trust of the American people and advance our mission of safeguarding both the nation’s security and privacy and civil liberties at the same time,” the senior FBI official added.

Friday’s filing detailed several improper searches, including a query for “over 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign.”

“The analyst who ran the query advised that the campaign was a target of foreign influence, but NSD [National Security Division] determined that only eight identifiers used in the query had sufficient ties to foreign influence activities to comply with the querying standard,” the filing stated.

After special counsel John Durham released his final report detailing the origins of the so-called “Russian collusion” investigation into Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, the FBI came under renewed scrutiny.

According to the report, the FBI initiated its counterintelligence investigation without any legitimate evidence, relying primarily on a “dossier” compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele and funded in large part by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Following the publication of the damning report, demands to defund or restructure the FBI have intensified.

More on this story via Conservative Brief:

“We don’t throw people in jail in Congress that’s probably for good reason. We have to de-fang and defund the authorities that have been weaponized against the people, we have to get the FBI out of Washington D.C.,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told Fox News’ Will Cain on Thursday. CONTINUE READING…