The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has a number of bureaucratic forms that must be filled out in the commission of any activities by its agents. These are typically mandatory, and are often presented at legal hearings as evidence of context.
An FD-209 form is used by FBI agents to record their contacts with unofficial criminal informants. [1]
An FD-292 form is used by FBI agents to notify the agency that they are getting married or divorced. [2]
An FD-302 form is used by FBI agents to "report or summarize the interviews that they conduct" [3] [4] and contains information from the notes taken during the interview by the non-primary agent.[ further explanation needed ]
It consists of information taken from the subject, rather than details about the subject themselves.
A forms list from an internal FBI Website lists the FD-302 as Form for Reporting Information That May Become Testimony.
The use of the FD-302 has been criticized as a form of institutionalized perjury due to FBI guidelines that prohibit recordings of interviews. Prominent defense lawyers and former FBI agents have stated that they believe that the method of interviewing by the FBI is designed to expose interviewees to potential perjury or false statement criminal charges when the interviewee is deposed in a grand jury and has to contradict the official record presented by the FBI. They have also stated that perjury by FBI agents allows the FBI to use the leverage of a potential criminal charge to turn an innocent witness into an informant. [5] [6] [7]
Standard "Advice of Rights" and waiver form.
An FD-472 form is used by FBI agents to acquire consent to place a wiretap as part of an investigation. [2]
An FD-473 form is used by FBI agents to acquire consent for a co-operative subject to wear a covert listening device. [2]
An FD-772 form is used by FBI agents to account for the purposes and events of any trips they have taken outside the country, whether business or pleasure. [2]
An FD-887 form is used by FBI recruiters in the hiring process of a Computer Science Special Agent Request for Access to Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI)
An FD-888 form is used by FBI agents to prepare for a Federal arrest or a warrant . [2]
An FD-920 form is used by FBI agents to initiate an investigation of suspected drug crimes. [2]
An FD-1023 (CHS Reporting Document) is the form FBI agents use to record raw, unverified reporting from confidential human sources. [8]
COINTELPRO was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations that the FBI perceived as subversive. Groups and individuals targeted by the FBI included feminist organizations, the Communist Party USA, anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists in the civil rights and Black power movements, environmentalist and animal rights organizations, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Chicano and Mexican-American groups like the Brown Berets and the United Farm Workers, and independence movements. Although the program primarily focused on organizations that were part of the broader New Left, they also targeted white supremacist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the National States' Rights Party.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. An agency of the United States Department of Justice, the FBI is a member of the U.S. Intelligence Community and reports to both the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. A leading American counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and criminal investigative organization, the FBI has jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crimes.
Perjury is the intentional act of swearing a false oath or falsifying an affirmation to tell the truth, whether spoken or in writing, concerning matters material to an official proceeding.
In law enforcement, a sting operation is a deceptive operation designed to catch a person attempting to commit a crime. A typical sting will have an undercover law enforcement officer, detective, or co-operative member of the public play a role as criminal partner or potential victim and go along with a suspect's actions to gather evidence of the suspect's wrongdoing. Mass media journalists occasionally resort to sting operations to record video and broadcast to expose criminal activity.
The Reid technique is a method of interrogation after investigation and behavior analysis. The system was developed in the United States by John E. Reid in the 1950s. Reid was a polygraph expert and former Chicago police officer. The technique is known for creating a high pressure environment for the interviewee, followed by sympathy and offers of understanding and help, but only if a confession is forthcoming. Since its spread in the 1970s, it has been widely utilized by police departments in the United States.
The Ruby Ridge standoff was the siege of a cabin occupied by the Weaver family in Boundary County, Idaho, in August 1992. On August 21, deputies of the United States Marshals Service (USMS) came to arrest Randy Weaver under a bench warrant for his failure to appear on federal firearms charges after he was given the wrong court date. The charges stemmed from Weaver's sale of a sawed-off shotgun to an undercover federal informant, who had induced him to modify the firearm below the legal barrel length.
Making false statements is the common name for the United States federal process crime laid out in Section 1001 of Title 18 of the United States Code, which generally prohibits knowingly and willfully making false or fraudulent statements, or concealing information, in "any matter within the jurisdiction" of the federal government of the United States, even by merely denying guilt when asked by a federal agent.
The FBI method of profiling is a system created by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) used to detect and classify the major personality and behavioral characteristics of an individual based upon analysis of the crime or crimes the person committed.
A presentence investigation report (PSIR) is a legal document that presents the findings of an investigation into the "legal and social background" of a person convicted of a crime before sentencing to determine if there are extenuating circumstances which should influence the severity or leniency of a criminal sentence. The PSIR is a "critical" document prepared by a probation officer via a system of point allocation, so that it may serve as a charging document and exhibit for proving criminal conduct. The PSIR system is widely implemented today.
In the United States, the Jencks Act requires the prosecutor to produce a verbatim statement or report made by a government witness or prospective government witness, but only after the witness has testified.
The Jackie Presser indictment scandal was a legal and political scandal which began on June 1, 1984. The scandal erupted after attorneys with the United States Department of Justice initiated a prosecution of Teamsters President Jackie Presser on various charges, including fraud and labor racketeering, only to cease prosecution once it was revealed that Presser had been a criminal informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) since the early 1970s. Department of Justice (DOJ) officials came under intense political pressure to resume prosecution, while Presser's attorneys claimed that Presser had permission from DOJ to engage in the alleged crimes in order to mislead organized crime figures. It was later revealed that FBI and DOJ officials may not have kept investigators in other federal agencies and Congress fully informed of Presser's role, and that FBI agents may have overstepped their authority in giving Presser permission to commit crimes. The scandal largely ended after Presser's death on July 9, 1988.
The Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) is the original name of a unit within the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Training Division at Quantico, Virginia, formed in response to the rise of sexual assault and homicide in the 1970s. The unit was usurped by the Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG) and renamed the Behavioral Research and Instruction Unit (BRIU) and currently is called the Behavioral Analysis Unit (5) (BAU-5) within the National Center for Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC). The BAU-5 currently works on developing research and then using the evidence-based results to provide training and improve consultation in the behavioral sciences—understanding who criminals are, how they think, why they do what they do—for the FBI and law enforcement communities.
Jencks v. United States, 353 U.S. 657 (1957), is a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the court held that the federal government must produce documents relied upon by government witnesses in federal criminal proceedings.
Robert Fuller is an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who has worked in counter-terrorism. He has questioned suspected terrorists, been a handler of informants in the U.S., and testified in both federal court and Guantanamo military commission trials.
Spygate is a disproven conspiracy theory peddled by 45th U.S. president Donald Trump and his political base on many occasions throughout his presidential term. It primarily centered around the idea that a spy was planted by the Obama administration to conduct espionage on Trump's 2016 presidential campaign for political purposes. On May 17, 2018, Trump tweeted: "Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama FBI 'SPIED ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WITH AN EMBEDDED INFORMANT.'" In that tweet, he quoted Andrew C. McCarthy, who had just appeared on Fox & Friends repeating assertions from his own May 12 article for National Review.
Charles Alan Philips was an American writer and journalist. He was best known for his investigative reporting in the Los Angeles Times on the culture, corruption, and crime in the music industry during the 1990s and 2000s, which garnered both awards and controversy. In 1999, Philips won a Pulitzer Prize, with Michael A. Hiltzik, for their co-authored series exposing corruption in the entertainment industry.
Frank Morris was an American businessman who died as a result of arson to his shoe shop in Ferriday, Louisiana, a city with a history of racial violence. There have been allegations of witness intimidation, evidence tampering, and involvement by local law enforcement. No charges have been brought despite three FBI investigations.
Crossfire Hurricane was the code name for the counterintelligence investigation undertaken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from July 31, 2016, to May 17, 2017, into links between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia and "whether individuals associated with [Trump's] presidential campaign were coordinating, wittingly or unwittingly, with the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election". Trump was not personally under investigation until May 2017, when his firing of FBI director James Comey raised suspicions of obstruction of justice, which triggered the Mueller investigation.
The murder of Edward Charles "Teddy" Deegan occurred on March 12, 1965. Deegan was shot and killed in an alley next to an office building in Chelsea, Massachusetts at approximately 9:30 p.m.. In 1967 police charged six men with Deegan's murder, and at trial, the prosecution's primary witness was Federal Bureau of Investigation criminal informant Joseph Barboza. On July 31, 1968, the court convicted Louis Greco, Henry Tameleo, Ronald Cassesso and Peter Limone of Deegan's murder, and sentenced them to the death penalty. Joseph Salvati and Roy French were sentenced to life imprisonment as accessories to Deegan's murder. In 1997 Salvati's sentence was commuted by Governor William Weld, and in January 2001, a judge overturned Peter Limone and Joe Salvati's convictions after uncovered FBI documents proved their innocence. In 2004, Judge Nancy Gertner ruled that federal lawsuits by the families of Louis Greco, Henry Tameleo, Peter Limone and Joseph Salvati had permission to be filed against the United States Government, and in 2007 a landmark decision ordered the United States Government to pay $101.7 million to the accused and their families for wrongful conviction. The use of FBI informants for the wrongful conviction of four innocent men is noteworthy because it unveiled the corrupt activities that occurred in the FBI during the 1960s.
United States v. Flynn was a criminal case in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia which was dismissed without any convictions in December 2020 following a presidential pardon. Michael Flynn, a retired lieutenant general in the United States Armed Forces, had accepted President-elect Donald Trump's offer for the position of National Security Advisor in 2016 and then briefly served as National Security Advisor. He pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Flynn's alleged false statements involve conversations he had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak when Flynn was incoming National Security Advisor to President-elect Trump, and Flynn agreed to cooperate with the Special Counsel investigation as part of a plea deal.