F.B.I. Closes Unit That Policed Compliance With Surveillance Rules

New York Times

20-05-2025

Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, has closed an internal watchdog office established in 2020 to uncover and reduce the risk of misuses of national security surveillance, according to officials familiar with the matter.
The elimination of the unit, the Office of Internal Auditing, comes as Congress debates whether to reauthorize a high-profile warrantless wiretapping law, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. That law, which was a chief focus of the office, nearly collapsed last year before lawmakers extended it until April 2026.
The move is significant because it could give skeptics of the program new ammunition to argue that Congress should sharply curtail the law or even let it expire given that a guardrail has been discarded. It also poses a crucial test for Mr. Patel, who rose in pro-Trump circles by attacking the F.B.I. over its abuses of the surveillance law but said during his confirmation hearing that he saw the program as a vital tool for gathering foreign intelligence and protecting national security.
The F.B.I. did not comment. But the closure was part of a larger reorganization, according to people familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. The functions of the office, along with another, the Office of Integrity and Compliance, which helps ensure that employees comply with laws, regulations and policies in general, have been absorbed by the Inspection Division.
The division is an internal affairs unit that examines agent shootings and allegations of misconduct.
Cindy Hall has abruptly retired as the leader of the internal auditing office. Efforts to reach her were unsuccessful, and the circumstances of her exit were not clear. A former official briefed on her departure was told that she had been forced out, while a person familiar with the matter said the bureau had characterized her departure to Congress as voluntary.
Before the reorganization, Ms. Hall had identified a group of people to expand the auditing office's work, but their on-boarding has been canceled amid a broader hiring freeze by the Trump administration, several of the people said. Her subordinates were transferred to the Inspection Division, Congress was told.
It remains unclear to what extent the Inspection Division is continuing the day-to-day operations that were a primary focus for Ms. Hall's team: training agents on how to properly search for information about Americans in the repository of communications swept up without a warrant under Section 702, and auditing past queries as well as regular applications for FISA warrants to check that they complied with procedures.
To be sure, there are arguments that the office may no longer be needed as a stand-alone entity.
For one, the number of F.B.I. searches for Americans' information in the Section 702 repository has fallen sharply, according to an annual transparency report released this month by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Last year, it said, the F.B.I. used only 5,518 query terms about Americans — like someone's email address or phone number. By contrast, it had used 57,094 such terms in 2023 and 119,383 in 2022.
For another, the Justice Department's national security division and its independent inspector general separately scrutinize the F.B.I.'s compliance with rules governing the use of FISA.
Still, Mr. Patel's elimination of the office inside the F.B.I. is striking given his own political history.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was enacted in 1978, requiring the F.B.I. to obtain warrants from a special court when wiretapping on American soil for investigations into people believed to be spies or foreign terrorists.
In 2008, Congress added an exception, Section 702. It enables the government to collect, without individual court orders and from U.S. companies like Google and AT&T, the messages of foreigners abroad — even when those intelligence targets are communicating with Americans.
Liberal-leaning civil libertarians have long been skeptical of both versions of FISA, citing privacy rights, while national security hawks have seen them as necessary. But the politics shifted as Republicans aligned themselves with Mr. Trump's hostility to the F.B.I. because of the investigation into the nature of ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia during Moscow's election interference operation.
In 2018, Mr. Patel, then a Republican congressional staff member on the House Intelligence Committee, made his name by attacking the FISA applications the F.B.I. submitted when requesting court permission to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser during the Russia investigation. The controversy helped Mr. Trump advance a narrative that the entire inquiry was a 'deep state' hoax.
Many of the claims Mr. Patel put forward in 2018 proved to be false or misleading. But in December 2019, an inspector general found a range of different — and real — problems in the F.B.I.'s FISA applications during the Russia investigation, as well as pervasive sloppiness by the F.B.I. in a follow-up audit of such applications in unrelated investigations.
The F.B.I.'s use of Section 702 information also drew increasingly harsh scrutiny. Audits found that analysts and agents serially violated limits on when they could search the repository of information for information about Americans.
The two issues merged politically. In 2020, William P. Barr, the attorney general, and Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director, created the Office of Internal Auditing to try to improve F.B.I. compliance, emphasizing it as a top priority by making a stand-alone entity devoted to that effort and led by a senior bureau official.
They made its leader hold the rank of assistant director, equivalent to the head of the Inspection Division. That person reported to the bureau's No. 3 official and sat in on the director's daily briefing.
The office's audits helped shed light on further problems. In that time, for example, it emerged that F.B.I. officials had improperly searched for information about members of Congress, participants in Black Lives Matters protests and Trump loyalists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
It also helped develop changes to try to ward off misuses of the law. In both the Trump and Biden administrations, the F.B.I. continued to tighten its procedures and systems, contributing to a drop both in the overall number of queries for Americans information and the number deemed to violate a rule.
Section 702 rules say agents may hunt for Americans' information only under narrow circumstances. Many of the bad queries came from agents or analysts running routine checks for information in all the F.B.I.'s databases at once, without thinking about the additional limits on the 702 repository. The Section 702 repository is no longer included by default in such searches, and using it now requires a supervisor's approval, among other safeguards.
During the Biden administration, Mr. Patel continued to attack the F.B.I. and its botching of surveillance. On a right-wing podcast last November, he criticized Congress for having just reauthorized Section 702, declaring, 'Chris Wray was caught last year illegally using 702 collection methods against Americans 274,000 times.'
He appeared to be making a garbled reference to a declassified 2023 opinion by the FISA court, which said there had been 278,000 bad queries of Section 702 information by F.B.I. analysts and agents over several years, including before the internal reforms. The court relied on findings by the Office of Internal Auditing.
During his confirmation hearing in late January, several lawmakers pressed Mr. Patel about his past statements. He said that he supported preserving Section 702 and that improvements in recent years 'go a long way,' but he also wanted to go further to restore public trust.
'702 is a critical tool, and I'm proud of the reforms that have been implemented and I'm proud to work with Congress moving forward to implement more reforms,' he said.