A security unit within the Department of Commerce targeted Chinese American staff in their eagerness to find signs of foreign influence, according to Senate investigators' report.
The Commerce Department's Investigations and Threat Management Service acted like a “a rogue, unaccountable police force.”
The office operated far beyond the bounds of federal law enforcement norms and has created an environment of paranoia and retaliation at the department,' John Costello, a former deputy assistant secretary of intelligence and security at Commerce under President Trump, told the Washington Post.
The report found that the work of the unit — consumed by concerns about rampant Chinese espionage in the United States — racially profiled some of their suspects, and that its members used questionable tactics, such as sending masked agents to break into offices, and blocking surveillance cameras to search for incriminating evidence.
More than a dozen whistleblowers have given closed-door statements, among them former investigators who allege that the office routinely overstepped its legal limits and has operated without meaningful oversight from within Commerce since the mid-2000s.
The unit, led by career officer George D. Lee, specifically “targeted departmental divisions with comparably high proportions of Asian American employees.”
A former senior Commerce Department official interviewed by Senate investigators described the targeting of Asian American employees as a “fine line between extra scrutiny and xenophobia, and one that I.T.M.S. regularly crossed.”
Attempts to get response from Lee from various media have been unsuccessful.
Under the controversial China Initiative that came out of the Trump administration and meant to uncover suspected spies for the Peoples Republic of China, the Senate report explained how those fears fueled an aggressive, unauthorized counterespionage effort inside the Commerce Department that houses scientific agencies staffed by researchers from around the world. The result, it said, was a discriminatory effort to target and spy on people of Asian and Middle Eastern descent — many of them Asian Americans, but some from Iran and Iraq — even in the absence of reasonable suspicion, reports the New York Times.
Under the controversial China Initiative that came out of the Trump administration and meant to uncover suspected spies for the Peoples Republic of China, the Senate report explained how those fears fueled an aggressive, unauthorized counterespionage effort inside the Commerce Department that houses scientific agencies staffed by researchers from around the world. The result, it said, was a discriminatory effort to target and spy on people of Asian and Middle Eastern descent — many of them Asian Americans, but some from Iran and Iraq — even in the absence of reasonable suspicion, reports the New York Times.
One of the high-profile cases that came out of the unit's investigations involved Sherry Chen and described in the Senate report.
Chen is an award-winning hydrologist at the National Weather Service and a naturalized American citizen born in China. She was accused of espionage, arrested and told she faced 25 years in prison and $1 million in fines. A week before she was scheduled to go on trial, prosecutors dropped all charges against Chen without explanation. With her career tarnished, she also was not allowed to return to her job.
The Biden administration stopped the unit's work in March. The complete Senate report will be issued later this year.
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