By Jana Winter
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Donald Trump's surge of federal law enforcement into Washington, D.C., is exposing the FBI's fleet of unmarked cars, potentially risking its ability to do its most sensitive national security and surveillance work, nine current and former employees of the bureau warned.
The surge, which the White House has said is meant to crack down on violent crime but has featured many arrests for minor offenses, could make it harder for the FBI to combat violent criminal
gangs, foreign intelligence services and drug traffickers, said the current and former employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media.
As part of the surge, FBI agents who normally conduct their investigative work out of the spotlight are now more involved in routine police work in Washington, appearing in high-profile areas dressed in tactical gear and emerging from unmarked cars, with the unintended effect of potentially identifying those vehicles to surveillance targets.
As the Republican president publicly muses about expanding his crackdown into cities such as Chicago and Baltimore, the employees said they are urging leadership not to continue to expose more vehicles in this way.
“Every time you see us getting out of covert cars wearing our FBI vests that car is burned,” said one of eight current FBI employees who spoke with Reuters on condition of anonymity.
“We can’t use these cars to go undercover, we can’t use them to surveil narcotraffickers and fentanyl suppliers or Russian or Chinese spies or use them to go after violent criminal gangs or terrorists,” said a second current FBI employee.
An FBI spokesman denied the current employees' assertions.
“The claims in this story represents a basic misunderstanding of how FBI security protocol works — the Bureau takes multiple safeguards to protect agents in the field against threats so they can continue doing their great work protecting the American people," Ben Williamson, assistant director of the FBI public affairs office said in an email.
"FBI leadership hasn’t received any of the concerns alleged here, and anyone who did have a good faith concern would approach leaders at headquarters or our Washington Field Office rather than laundering bizarre claims through the press.”
The White House referred questions to the FBI.
The use of as many as 1,000 FBI unmarked vehicles in Washington during highly public scenes comes amid an already heightened threat to law enforcement from cartels, gangs and hostile nations who actively seek to identify agents and their vehicles, the current and former FBI employees said.
“They're putting federal agents in a more highly visible situation where they're driving their undercover cars and they're engaging in highly visible public enforcement action or patrol actions,” said John Cohen, a former Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism coordinator.
"They may be unwittingly compromising the ability of those same personnel to go back and engage in sensitive investigations."
The current and former FBI employees said they spoke to Reuters because of the depth of their concerns and the potential harm to national security and safety of the American public.
'BAD FOR THE BUREAU'
Several of them urged an end to the practice of using undercover cars in the surge now before more are exposed.
“This is crazy, dangerous and bad for the bureau,” said former FBI agent Dan Brunner, who worked on cases involving the MS-13 street gang before retiring from the bureau in September 2023 after a two-decade career there.
“This is currently in D.C., which is the most saturated city with foreign nation spies, foreign actors so of course they're going to be down there,” Brunner said. “So those guys, you know, their vehicles, their license plates are getting recorded."
Reuters was not able to determine whether foreign actors were in fact tracking agents' vehicles and Brunner did not provide evidence that they were doing so. But Brunner, Cohen and the current and former FBI employees said investigative targets, such as members of drug gangs and foreign intelligence entities, are constantly working to try to identify law enforcement agents and FBI in particular and said there would be no reason to think that would have stopped during the surge.
“It is a major threat facing U.S. law enforcement,” said Cohen, who now serves as executive director for the Center for Internet Security’s program for countering hybrid threats.
Cohen and several of the current and former FBI employees who spoke to Reuters cited a recent report by the Justice Department's internal watchdog that detailed how this kind of information can be used against law enforcement.
In 2018, a hacker working for the Sinaloa Cartel homed in on an FBI employee working at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, accessing their phone records and tapping into the city’s network of cameras to help the cartel identify, track and kill FBI witnesses and sources.
“This isn’t a hypothetical issue, just look at what happened in Mexico City,” said a third current FBI employee.
Brunner, the retired agent, said that, at minimum, he believes the license plates of all the cars that were used in the surge need to be replaced. He and other current and former FBI employees said the bureau should consider using other cars if its agents are further deployed in future surges, perhaps renting them or borrowing them from other U.S. government agencies.
"There's an argument to be made that highly visible law enforcement presence in high-crime areas can serve as a deterrent for crime," said Cohen, the former DHS official.
"But at the same time, the value that comes from the federal government in fighting violent crime is through their investigations, which very often are conducted in a way in which the identity and the resources and the vehicles of the investigators are kept, you know, secret."
(Reporting by Jana Winter; editing by Scott Malone and Alistair Bell)
