The Biden administration has put the brakes on a shady, abusive security unit inside the Commerce Department. Under the leadership of a career supervisor named George Lee, the Investigations and Threat Management Service (ITMS) had morphed into “something more akin to a counterintelligence operation that collected information on hundreds of people inside and outside the department,” according to The Washington Post.
That transformation started before Donald Trump’s time in the White House, but it was all too well-suited for the Trump era. The ITMS monitored social media, flagging critical comments about the census by random people in the U.S., like one by a retiree in Florida who dared write that the census might be manipulated “to benefit the Trump Party!” People who wrote such social media posts were searched on secure intelligence databases, because apparently it was suspicious to correctly observe that the Trump administration was trying to mess with the census at a time when the Trump administration was broadcasting that it was trying to mess with the census.
The ITMS also searched Commerce Department servers for specific Chinese words, leading to surveillance of Asian American employees because someone decided that using Chinese words was suspicious. The unit covertly searched workers’ belongings, in some cases obscuring the view of security cameras and using lock-picking tools.
Three different agents formally filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and according to a Trump political appointee in the Commerce Department, the ITMS “has been allowed to operate far outside the bounds of federal law enforcement norms and has created an environment of paranoia and retaliation at the Department.”
The Post’s investigation didn’t conclusively reveal when the most abusive behaviors started and Lee is a career staffer, not a political appointee. But it’s worth noting that those abuses were very much in line with other things we saw from the Trump administration, like trying to politicize the civil service to require loyalty to Trump—the kind of thing that stalking social media critics of census policy would fit right in with—or pressuring federal public health officials to follow Trump’s preferred messaging on the coronavirus pandemic, or using the Justice Department as the personal law firm for Trump and his inner circle, or social media monitoring by the U.S. Postal Service. Abusive behaviors tend to grow more abusive in a context that encourages them.
As of Oct. 23, the ITMS had 1,183 open cases, many of them taking place before 2018, because Lee refused to close cases that should have been closed. On May 13, the Biden administration ordered the suspension of all of the unit’s activities. On May 15, a Commerce Department spokeswoman said Lee was “not currently supervising the work or the employees of ITMS, and is not performing any investigatory duties.” That should be the prelude to a deep investigation—which can build on an inspector general’s investigation of the unit that found that it had no legal authority for much of its work—and a search through the federal government for other such unaccountable, unlawful, abusive units. It’s a cliché to say that sunlight is the best disinfectant, but sometimes it’s true.
That transformation started before Donald Trump’s time in the White House, but it was all too well-suited for the Trump era. The ITMS monitored social media, flagging critical comments about the census by random people in the U.S., like one by a retiree in Florida who dared write that the census might be manipulated “to benefit the Trump Party!” People who wrote such social media posts were searched on secure intelligence databases, because apparently it was suspicious to correctly observe that the Trump administration was trying to mess with the census at a time when the Trump administration was broadcasting that it was trying to mess with the census.
The ITMS also searched Commerce Department servers for specific Chinese words, leading to surveillance of Asian American employees because someone decided that using Chinese words was suspicious. The unit covertly searched workers’ belongings, in some cases obscuring the view of security cameras and using lock-picking tools.
Three different agents formally filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and according to a Trump political appointee in the Commerce Department, the ITMS “has been allowed to operate far outside the bounds of federal law enforcement norms and has created an environment of paranoia and retaliation at the Department.”
The Post’s investigation didn’t conclusively reveal when the most abusive behaviors started and Lee is a career staffer, not a political appointee. But it’s worth noting that those abuses were very much in line with other things we saw from the Trump administration, like trying to politicize the civil service to require loyalty to Trump—the kind of thing that stalking social media critics of census policy would fit right in with—or pressuring federal public health officials to follow Trump’s preferred messaging on the coronavirus pandemic, or using the Justice Department as the personal law firm for Trump and his inner circle, or social media monitoring by the U.S. Postal Service. Abusive behaviors tend to grow more abusive in a context that encourages them.
As of Oct. 23, the ITMS had 1,183 open cases, many of them taking place before 2018, because Lee refused to close cases that should have been closed. On May 13, the Biden administration ordered the suspension of all of the unit’s activities. On May 15, a Commerce Department spokeswoman said Lee was “not currently supervising the work or the employees of ITMS, and is not performing any investigatory duties.” That should be the prelude to a deep investigation—which can build on an inspector general’s investigation of the unit that found that it had no legal authority for much of its work—and a search through the federal government for other such unaccountable, unlawful, abusive units. It’s a cliché to say that sunlight is the best disinfectant, but sometimes it’s true.