| | | Commerce Dept. security unit to be shut down after overstepping legal limits in launching probes, officials say
The Commerce Department will eliminate a security unit that it found improperly launched criminal investigations and collected information on hundreds of its employees and average citizens, department officials said Friday.
A nearly five-month internal review by top Commerce lawyers concluded that the Investigations and Threat Management Service, the subject of a Washington Post examination in May, did not have “adequate legal authority” to pursue criminal probes, as it had been doing for 15 years.
Operating with little oversight, the obscure unit opened cases ranging from counterespionage to background searches on U.S. residents who wrote innocuous letters to the department’s top official, the review found.
Nearly every case languished for years without resolution, leaving individuals listed internally as still under scrutiny, the review found.
The findings were detailed in a report released Friday morning that recommended shuttering the 13-person unit, discontinuing its criminal and counterintelligence functions and folding its administrative and security duties into other offices within the department.
Commerce said in a statement that it had accepted the recommendations and would close ITMS within 90 days and implement other recommendations within 180 days.
“We are committed to maintaining our security, but also equally committed to protecting the privacy and civil liberties of our employees and the public,” said Commerce Secretary Gina M. Raimondo.
The report followed a string of investigations and media reports on ITMS’s activities.
A Congressional investigation led by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) of the Commerce Committee concluded in July that ITMS had evolved into a “rogue, unaccountable police force” that “opened frivolous investigations on a variety of employees without evidence suggesting wrongdoing.”
In May, the examination by The Post found that the unit had covertly searched employees’ offices at night, run broad key word searches on employee emails looking for signs of possible foreign influence and scoured Americans’ social media accounts for critical comments about the Census, which falls under Commerce.
In March, the department’s internal watchdog completed an investigation that found “evidence of potential misconduct and mismanagement within ITMS occurring over several years,” prompting the Commerce Department to suspend the unit’s criminal investigations, according to the report released Friday. The investigation by the department’s inspector general has not been released publicly but some of its findings were revealed in Friday’s report.
The internal review, conducted by the department’s Office of General Counsel, found ITMS lacked proper guidelines and training and had poor record-keeping and inadequate management. It did not find evidence, however, to substantiate allegations that ITMS opened or prolonged investigations into people based on their race or national origin.
Commerce officials would not say if any department employees face discipline as a result of the findings, citing privacy laws. But the statement said the department had “taken personnel actions in connection with findings of misconduct regarding ITMS.”
ITMS’s longtime director, George D. Lee, who led the unit from its inception in 2006 until last year, remained a Commerce employee as of Friday but was no longer working in ITMS, according to a Commerce official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel issues. Lee did not immediately respond to a message Friday seeking comment.
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