Trump Administration Quietly Expands Intelligence Access to Domestic Law Enforcement Files

The Trump administration is loosening long-standing restrictions on the sharing of law enforcement information with the CIA and other intelligence agencies. This move overrides controls in place for decades designed to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. The changes could grant intelligence agencies access to a database containing hundreds of millions of documents, including FBI case files, banking records, and criminal investigations of entities like labor unions, which touch on the activities of law-abiding Americans. Administration officials justify the expansion by stating it will provide more information from FBI, DEA, and other agency investigations to combat drug gangs and transnational criminal groups the administration has classified as terrorists. However, these significant steps have been taken with almost no public acknowledgement or notification to Congress. Internally, the process has been marked by a lack of transparency, with scant high-level discussion and little debate among government lawyers. One intelligence official criticized the move, stating, 'None of this has been thought through very carefully — which is shocking. There are a lot of privacy concerns out there, and nobody really wants to deal with them.' A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to answer specific questions about the expanded information sharing.