Commerce Unit Went ‘Rogue,’ Senate Report Says, Targeting Chinese Americans

An obscure federal office operated for more than a decade as an “unaccountable police force” inside the Commerce Department, using extreme and unauthorized tactics.

By Catie Edmondson
July 16, 2021, 6:11 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON — Officials in a little-known security unit within the Commerce Department conducted unauthorized surveillance and investigations into the agency’s employees that targeted people of Chinese and Middle Eastern descent, Senate investigators said in a new report.

The report, informed by more than two dozen whistle-blowers and released this week by Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Commerce Committee, concluded that the Investigations and Threat Management Service functioned for more than a decade as “a rogue, unaccountable police force,” opening thousands of unauthorized investigations into department employees, often for specious reasons.

It found that the work of the office — consumed by concerns about rampant Chinese espionage in the United States — sometimes veered into racial profiling, and that its leaders used extreme tactics, such as sending masked agents to break into offices to search for incriminating evidence.

“Combating national security threats posed by China should be a priority for any agency, but that does not give the federal government a license to disregard the law,” Mr. Wicker said in a statement. “Abuse of authority and race-based targeting is unacceptable, especially in law enforcement.”

The unit, an internal security office inside the Commerce Department, became fixated on rooting out foreign espionage, according to the report, resorting to searching employees’ email accounts for certain phrases in Chinese and flagging “ethnic surnames” for background checks through secure intelligence databases. In some cases, its agents would covertly search employees’ offices wearing face masks and gloves, sometimes picking locks to gain entry.

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