This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 11th, 2022. I'm Caleb Brown.

The FBI is well aware of large-scale misconduct within its agency now thanks to the work of Cato we are

beginning to get a picture of the precise scale of that misconduct.

Cato's Patrick Eddington has been doing a great deal of the legwork tracking

down the data of the FBI's own records on that illegal activity.

We spoke last week.

Last year, actually, no, actually September of 2020, It's amazing how time flies. We submitted a FOIA to the Federal Bureau of

Investigation looking for documents indicating how they had violated and

specifically how many times they had violated their own internal

guidelines. Those guidelines are known as the Domestic Operations and Investigation

Guide or Diog for short. And these have been around since the late 2008 and we wanted to try to get a sense just exactly how many times

FBI agents let's say spied on a political group or spied on a political candidate or spied on a church or you know any kind of domestic civil society organization or person essentially involved in the public policy process.

Not shockingly they refused and so we took them to court and

beginning in January of this year 2022 we began to get some initial productions

they told us it would be around 1,100 pages and in fact as of the date of this particular

taping that's exactly what we have in hand. We're not done yet, both trying to actually get information out of them because we don't believe

they've turned over everything. But we also expect our partner at the Washington Times to be utilizing some of the additional material

that we have provided to them to publish at least one or two more stories over the course of the

next few weeks.

But the bottom line here is a massive number of violations of

their own regulations shocking I know to our listeners, but they have been on a

scale that has shocked enough people that we now actually have an official

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