Unit meant to protect US Commerce Dept staff was secretly monitoring them, report claims

A security unit for the US commerce department has been accused of spying on Asian-American employees and critics of the census as part of an undercover bid to root out “foreign influence”.

The Investigations and Threat Management Service (ITMS), whose job it is to protect employees, allegedly over-stepped legal limits by instead behaving like a counterintelligence agency and collecting information on hundreds of staff and private citizens, including searching their desks and reading their emails and social media, according to The Washington Post, who spoke to five ex-investigators.

The 17-person team under the Trump administration reportedly had a $5.38 million annual budget and opened an estimated 1,000 cases, though very few led to any criminal cases, it has been claimed.

The unit was also reportedly charged with investigating critics of the US census, which is run by the department of commerce, and which President Trump was accused of wanting to use to root out undocumented immigrants.

The accusation caused waves on social media with some people claiming the unit behaved like the east German “Stasi”.

Christopher Cheung, a former ITMS investigator, told the Post that his former unit targeted Asian-Americans in particular and searched for Chinese words, to root out “foreign influence”.

In a resignation letter to former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, he reportedly wrote that when investigations into Asian staff or guests were “inconclusive”, agents were still prevented from closing the case.

The news comes as the US continues to be hit by waves of anti Asian American hate crimes following the arrival of the pandemic, which reportedly began in China.

This week President Biden signed a Covid-19 hate crime bill into law, protecting Asian Americans.

The ITMS unit’s supervisor was named by the Post as George D. Lee, 48, who whistleblowers claimed would force new recruits to track him through a mountain assault course in Virginia.

Former supervisor Bruce Ridlen told the newspaper that ITMS’ actions looked as though “someone watched too many ‘Mission Impossible’ movies.”

A spokesman for the department told the Post that Mr Lee was not currently working in a supervisory capacity at the moment.

The Biden administration allegedly ordered the ITMS to halt all criminal investigations on March 10, pending an on-going review into the accusations.

A spokesman added: “The current Commerce Department leadership team takes this issue seriously. The Department expects that at the end of the review it can and will implement a comprehensive solution to the issues raised.”

The US Department of Commerce has been contacted by The Independent.