Careful Not to Cry Wolf: Does the FBI Tea Party Investigation Story Meet the Smell Test?

It sounds too crazy to be true, and hopefully it is. The Canadian Free Press is reporting that they were informed by an FBI whistleblower that the FBI launched an investigation into tea party organizers on or around March 23rd and may have attended and collected video tape of participants.

According to the whistleblower, who was suspiciously not named in the article, the infomation was collected for the Office of the Directorate of Intelligence in Washington D.C.

We caution our conservative and libertarian friends not to work overtime at the rumor mill or engage in conspiracy theory-mongering. In fact, we thought long and hard about whether we should post the link to this story. However, we think any claim that the new administration is using federal law enforcement to collect background on its political enemies should be given the smell test by people who understand the Bureau’s inner workings and should not merely be dismissed because it sounds incredible. If there is any credibility, we think the matter should be investigated by Congress.

The article reads in pertinent part:

“According to this unimpeachable source, a single-page confidential directive issued by the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC (FBIHQ) was sent to each of the 56 field offices located across the United States on or about March 23, 2009, instructing the Special Agents in Charge (SACs) of those offices to verify the date, time and location of each TEA Party within their region and supply that information to FBI headquarters in Washington. The source stated this correspondence termed the TEA parties “political demonstrations,” and added that the dissemination of the directive was very tightly controlled. “Not all agents were privy to this correspondence,” stated the source, who compared the dissemination to an older “Do Not File” classification.

In addition to obtaining or confirming the location and time of each “demonstration,” each field office was instructed to obtain or confirm the identity of the individual(s) involved in the actual planning and coordination of the event in each specific region, and include the local or regional Internet web site address, if any. The information collected by region was then reportedly sent to FBI Headquarters.

The source alleges that a second directive was issued on or about April 6, 2009 that reportedly instructed each SAC to coordinate and conduct, either at the field office level and/or with the appropriate resident agency, covert video surveillance and data collection of the participants of the TEA parties. Surveillance was to be performed from “discreet fixed or mobile positions” and was to be performed “independently and outside of the purview of local law enforcement.”

Although the level of detail collected from each operation is unclear, the information was reportedly submitted to Washington, where, “at the level of the National Security Branch (NSB), this information was to “include the office of the Directorate of Intelligence (DI), and integrated with a restricted access database, one that reportedly is accessible to only two agencies” [of the 14 agencies that comprise the U.S. intelligence community, according to the source.”