San Francisco police officers working on an FBI counterterrorism task force were routinely given low-level assignments that would invite violations of local San Francisco law and policy, according to an internal FBI legal analysis obtained by The Intercept.

The FBI’s San Francisco office has long assured the public that its relationship to the city’s police officers could be trusted, especially when it came to officers assigned to the bureau’s secretive counterterrorism teams. In January, for example, John F. Bennett, the special agent in charge of the office, wrote to Mayor London Breed to correct the “inaccurate information promulgated” by the media concerning its Joint Terrorism Task Force, or JTTF, which the San Francisco Police Department chose to remove its officers from more than two years ago.

The split was the extension of an inherent tension: Police officers on the teams operated under both the rules of the FBI and the rules of their department, and the rules of the department — created to protect the civil and First Amendment rights of San Franciscans and enforced under a local San Francisco ordinance — prohibit or strictly regulate much of the core activities FBI agents routinely engage in. Bennett downplayed the issue in his letter to the mayor, pointing to an agreement between the two agencies, which had held that police officers on the task force would follow local departmental rules when working with the FBI.

“SFPD officers assigned to the JTTF were expected to abide by their department’s General Orders while serving on the JTTF, and they did,” Bennett wrote.

It was a rosy picture, but it didn’t tell the whole story. An FBI white paper authored before Bennett sent his letter to the mayor, shows that the bureau’s San Francisco office considered the city’s laws and policies regarding civil rights and free speech to be a major problem. The document stated that the bulk of what police officers did on the San Francisco JTTF were inquiries that would typically be prohibited under SFPD rules and local law, calling into question nearly 120 operations that task force officers participated in over a three-year period.

The internal analysis described a legal catch-22 for San Francisco police officers: They were on one hand required to describe their work for the JTTF to SFPD supervisors and faced potential discipline or removal if they didn’t. At the same time, the work they did for the FBI involved classified matters — and sharing that information, even with a supervisor, exposed officers to federal criminal liability. The document presented several potential solutions to the conflicting rules. The only ones the FBI appeared to endorse were those that would water down or weaken the local civil rights and First Amendment protections SFPD officers are required uphold.

For advocates in San Francisco, who have spent decades working with the police department to hammer out a progressive and constitutionally sound framework for investigations conducted by SFPD officers, well before the police department began sending officers to the JTTF in 2002, the white paper provides confirmation of what many either knew or suspected: that law enforcement officials in San Francisco were saying one thing in public and another behind closed doors.

“The white paper shows that both the SFPD and the FBI have been misleading the community, civil rights organizations and elected officials on this issue from day one,” Javeria Jamil, a staff attorney at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, told The Intercept. “It confirms that SFPD was not following local law and policy when participating in the JTTF, despite their assertions to the contrary.”

Jeffrey Wang, a civil rights attorney at the San Francisco office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the paper “calls into question both the SFPD and the FBI’s credibility” and, in particular, indicates that Bennett’s letter to the mayor misrepresented facts that his own office was aware of. “They were painting this wonderful picture, everything is all good, however, this white paper comes out and here the FBI directly acknowledges significant conflicts between FBI rules and policies, about how these problems have been recurring, and also about how compliance is almost impossible.”

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