The surge, which the White House has said is meant to crack down on violent crime but has featured many arrests for minor offenses, could make it harder for the FBI to combat violent criminal gangs, foreign intelligence services and drug traffickers, said the current and former employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media.
As the Republican president publicly muses about expanding his crackdown into cities such as Chicago and Baltimore, the employees said they are urging leadership not to continue to expose more vehicles in this way.
“We can’t use these cars to go undercover, we can’t use them to surveil narcotraffickers and fentanyl suppliers or Russian or Chinese spies or use them to go after violent criminal gangs or terrorists,“ said a second current FBI employee.
“The claims in this story represents a basic misunderstanding of how FBI security protocol works — the Bureau takes multiple safeguards to protect agents in the field against threats so they can continue doing their great work protecting the American people,“ Ben Williamson, assistant director of the FBI public affairs office said in an email.
The White House referred questions to the FBI.
“They’re putting federal agents in a more highly visible situation where they’re driving their undercover cars and they’re engaging in highly visible public enforcement action or patrol actions,“ said John Cohen, a former Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism coordinator.
The current and former FBI employees said they spoke to Reuters because of the depth of their concerns and the potential harm to national security and safety of the American public.
Several of them urged an end to the practice of using undercover cars in the surge now before more are exposed.
“This is currently in D.C., which is the most saturated city with foreign nation spies, foreign actors so of course they’re going to be down there,“ Brunner said. “So those guys, you know, their vehicles, their license plates are getting recorded.”
“It is a major threat facing U.S. law enforcement,“ said Cohen, who now serves as executive director for the Center for Internet Security’s program for countering hybrid threats.
In 2018, a hacker working for the Sinaloa Cartel homed in on an FBI employee working at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, accessing their phone records and tapping into the city's network of cameras to help the cartel identify, track and kill FBI witnesses and sources.
Brunner, the retired agent, said that, at minimum, he believes the license plates of all the cars that were used in the surge need to be replaced. He and other current and former FBI employees said the bureau should consider using other cars if its agents are further deployed in future surges, perhaps renting them or borrowing them from other U.S. government agencies.
“But at the same time, the value that comes from the federal government in fighting violent crime is through their investigations, which very often are conducted in a way in which the identity and the resources and the vehicles of the investigators are kept, you know, secret.”
REUTERS
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