US “Rogue” Agency Used Racial Profiling to Investigate Commerce Department Employees, Report Says

WASHINGTON – Officials from a little-known Commerce Department security unit carried out unauthorized surveillance and investigations of agency employees who targeted people of Chinese and Middle Eastern descent, investigators from the Department of Commerce said. Senate in a new report.

The report, informed by more than two dozen whistleblowers and released this week by Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Commerce Committee, found that the Threat Management and Investigation Department had operated for over d ‘a decade as “a thug, irresponsible police force,” opening thousands of unauthorized investigations into department employees, often for specious reasons.

He found that the office’s work – consumed by concerns about Chinese espionage in the United States – sometimes turned into racial profiling and that its executives used extreme tactics, such as sending masked agents to break and enter. in offices looking for incriminating evidence.

“Tackling threats to national security posed by China should be a priority for any agency, but that does not give the federal government permission to ignore the law,” Wicker said in a statement. “The abuse of power and racial targeting is unacceptable, especially in law enforcement. “

The unit, an internal security office within the Commerce Department, has become obsessed with eliminating foreign espionage, according to the report, resorting to searching employee email accounts for certain Chinese phrases and reporting “ethnic surnames” for background checks through secure intelligence databases. In some cases, his agents secretly searched the desks of employees wearing face masks and gloves, sometimes picking locks to enter.

Unit leaders often refused to close employee investigations even after officers were unable to find incriminating evidence, sometimes leaving researchers or other employees in administrative limbo. Nearly 2,000 files remained open at the end of last year, Senate investigators said.

In recent years, US law enforcement has become increasingly concerned that China is expanding its espionage efforts in the United States and using visiting Chinese academics for intelligence gathering. The Senate report explained how these fears fueled an aggressive and unauthorized counterintelligence effort within a department that houses scientific agencies made up of researchers from around the world. The result, he said, was a discriminatory effort to target and spy on people of Asian and Middle Eastern descent – many of whom are Chinese Americans, but some from Iran and the United States. Iraq – even without reasonable suspicion.

Under the Biden administration, department officials suspended unit investigations and began an internal review of the program in April, a spokeswoman said, adding that officials were reviewing Mr Wicker’s report and taking the allegations against the office “very seriously”.

The spokeswoman said officials expected their internal review to be completed “in the coming weeks, when the department will share its plans to address the issues that have been raised.”

Mr Wicker’s report was the culmination of a six-month Senate investigation in which investigators interviewed more than two dozen whistleblowers and combed through a mine of internal documents. The Washington Post reported on some of the initial findings of the investigation in May, while the investigation was still active.

Senate investigators painted a portrait of a unit that routinely engaged in unethical or dangerous activities that were beyond the scope of its mandate and for which its employees were not trained. The report said the bulk of these efforts have been driven over the course of multiple administrations by a single official: George Lee, longtime director of the unit, who has since been put on leave.

Mr. Lee could not be reached for comment on Friday.

Unit investigators monitored social media activity for comments critical of the census, then passed the names of commentators into classified databases, “though the intelligence community did not have clear permission to use these databases for this purpose, “according to the report.

A whistleblower who aided the investigation and was later interviewed by the New York Times said the focus on the investigation of dissenting comments on social media was particularly frustrating as the unit did not follow up threats against census workers, including whether commentators wrote on Facebook. that they would shoot a census taker if they came to their house, for example.

Much of the unit’s purpose was to research perceived threats within the Commerce Department, often targeting “employees of prominence in their professional fields,” the report said, with many of these investigations targeting business subjects. Chinese or Middle Eastern ancestry.

Investigators said the practice dates back “as early as 2014” to the Obama administration, and that the unit specifically targeted “departmental divisions with comparable proportions of Asian American employees.”

An internal document reviewed by The Times shows that unit employees were encouraged to search employee email accounts for terms written in Chinese characters as broad as “funds,” “government support,” and “project manager. Ostensibly to root out the participating employees. in a Chinese talent recruitment program. Any matching language found in an employee’s inbox would trigger an investigation, two former employees said in independent interviews.

The whistleblowers spoke to the committee and The Times on condition of anonymity to discuss the agencies’ internal issues.

In one case, according to a whistleblower, the unit carried out a secret search of an employee’s office after such an inbox search revealed that the worker had received a certificate from a Chinese research partner. designating the employee as an expert in his field.

“If Commerce takes the protection of US stocks seriously, it cannot come at the expense of US constitutional rights,” said Chris Cheung, a former Threat Management and Investigation Service investigator who reported the activity to his supervisors, in an interview. Mr. Cheung described the conduct of the unit as if “someone who was randomly given a gun and badge was not trained, then they functioned according to what they have seen in the movies ”.

A former senior Commerce Department official interviewed by Senate investigators described the targeting of Asian-American employees as a “fine line between scrutiny and xenophobia, and which the ITMS routinely crossed.”

Unit officials investigated Sherry Chen, award-winning National Weather Service hydrologist and naturalized U.S. citizen born in China, laying the groundwork for what has become a high-profile case in which Ms. Chen was accused of spying, arrested. and said she faced 25 years in prison and a $ 1 million fine. A week before her trial, prosecutors dropped all charges against Ms. Chen without explanation.

Ms. Chen told Senate investigators in an interview that officers from the unit “provided her with paper to write a statement on and asked her to write down the words they prepared after telling her that she did not need to consult a lawyer “.

Whistleblowers also said they attended a training session in Virginia where the unit director asked his employees to follow him in government-owned vehicles “at high speed.”