Andy Biggs: “Over the last several years, we have received a seemingly endless stream of reports of abuses by the FBI and other parts…”

“Over the last several years, we have received a seemingly endless stream of reports of abuses by the FBI and other parts of our Federal police apparatus spying on Americans by abusing either section 702 or title I of FISA. I want to review some of those today before I get to the border. Let's talk about the report issued April 21, 2022, by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Washington, D.C. Here's what some of them are. Between late 2016 and early 2020, the FBI regularly queried unminimized FISA information using identifiers of individuals listed in local police homicide reports. This wasn't people accused. This included victims. They were using illicit querying, which in my world, when I used to practice, we would call an illegal search. They were going after victims, the next of kin of the victim, and witnesses. Guess what was found. Those queries were violating the querying standard because there was no reasonable basis to expect they would return foreign intelligence or evidence of a crime. That is just one. The next one, June 2020, used identifiers of 133 individuals arrested in connection with civil unrest and protests between May 30 and June 18, 2020. Guess what they found. No specific potential connections to terrorist-related activity, and there was not going to be a reasonable likelihood that they would retrieve evidence of a crime. The FBI still conducted that illegal query. Between June 11 and 15, 2020, another 156 queries were done.…”