Patrick G. Eddington
Almost four years ago, and at Cato’s urging, Representatives Jamie Raskin (D‑MD) and Nancy Mace (R‑SC) asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate the FBI’s use of so-called “assessments”—an investigative authority that has no basis in statute and that allows the FBI to collect data, run confidential informants, and conduct physical surveillance against a person or group without any criminal predicate. A month after the Raskin-Mace request to GAO, the Cato Institute initiated a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking all closed FBI Assessments involving First Amendment-protected activities by individuals or groups. That court action is ongoing, but the GAO report is now public… though not by the GAO itself.
Investigative reporter Ryan Lovelace at the newly launched Racket News got his hands on the GAO report, which is designated “For Official Use Only”—an executive branch administrative control measure designation that, in the author’s view, has no constitutional basis and no business being employed by a congressional support agency charged with making its work public. The story is paywalled, but the report was made possible by American taxpayer dollars, so Cato is making the GAO report available here.
This graphic from the report tells the core story: the FBI’s criminal predicate-free targeting of over 1,000 individuals and groups from multiple sectors of society, including government employees, religious organizations, and news organizations.
The report contains details about the different Assessment types, the process FBI agents are supposed to follow to open one, etc. What the report does not contain are statistics on the number of Assessments that actually led not only to actual criminal investigations but also to convictions or plea deals by those originally targeted with an Assessment. In the case of “Sensitive Investigative Matter” or SIM Assessments—which directly implicate First Amendment-protected activities—the GAO report says this:
Among the the approximate 1,100 Type I/II assessments with SIM designation, the FBI converted 48 percent into investigations in contrast to 14 percent of all the approximate 124,000 Type I/II I/ll assessments into investigations.
In other words, the FBI was roughly 3.5 times more likely to convert a SIM Assessment to a Preliminary or Full investigation than with other non-SIM Assessments. That’s especially alarming since, under Preliminary or Full investigations, the agents running the case can employ wiretaps or other extremely intrusive and clandestine investigative techniques.
I’ll have more to say about this GAO report soon, but what should be obvious now is that the FBI’s misuse of Assessments represents a Bill of Rights-related crisis of far greater proportions than the equally objectionable Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702 electronic surveillance power, which is set to expire on April 20, 2026. Now would be an excellent time for Congress to initiate a Church Committee-style review of every single existing surveillance program being employed by executive branch elements.