The OIG report was sharply critical of what it considered 'troubling" work by the Bureau. It concluded, for example, that FBI Director Robert Mueller "unintentionally provided inaccurate testimony to Congress" in 2006 about an anti-war rally in Pittsburgh four years earlier. On that occasion, the report recapped, a probationary agent was sent to do some "make work" on a "slow work day" to look for "international terrorism subjects" at an anti-war rally in Pittsburgh sponsored by The Thomas Merton Center, a group which says it seeks to promote "peace and social justice." On Capitol Hill, in 2006, Mueller told lawmakers that the surveillance of the Merton Center was "an outgrowth of an FBI investigation and that the agent was "attempting to identify an individual who happened to be, we believed, in attendance at the rally."

The OIG Report, however, "found no evidence that the FBI had any information at the time of the event that any terrorism suspect would be present at the event. Instead, FBI personnel subsequently created two inconsistent and erroneous explanations of the surveillance of the anti-war rally, stating inaccurately that the surveillance was a response to information that certain persons of interest in international terrorism matters would be present. In fact, the FBI had no basis at the time to expect any subject or other person of interest in a terrorism investigation would be present." Mueller, the report indicated, was unaware that the information provided to him by his subordinates was inaccurate.

Fine and his Justice Department colleagues also criticized the FBI for its surveillance of the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The OIG report "questioned whether the FBI had a sufficient factual basis to open several of the cases as full investigations rather than as preliminary inquires, and we concluded with respect to one individual that the facts contained in the FBI communication initiating the case did not support opening any investigation at all." One investigation into PETA's activities that was opened was then improperly allowed to remain open for six years, the OIG concluded, long after it should have remained so.

In a case of domestic surveillance of individuals associated with The Catholic Worker, a group which states it is committed to "nonviolence, voluntary poverty, prayer and hospitality for the homeless, the OIG report concluded that the FBI inappropriately characterized" certain "nonviolent civil disobedience" as terrorism-related. "The information the FBI collected in one case," the OIG report indicates, "had no relationship to any 'violent activities' much less to terrorism." Similiarly, in a case involving an investigation into the environmental activist group Greenpeace, the OIG also concluded that the FBI had inappropriately labeled planned protest activities (in Texas against Exxon and Kimberly-Clark) as an "act of terrorism" case. Subjects in that case were put on a federal "watchlist" despite what the OIG called "scant basis for the FBI to suspect" they were planning acts of terrorism.