Subject No. 2 concerns an FBI lie that everyone acknowledges to be deliberate. Agents in Las Vegas suspected an illegal gambling ring was being run out of a few fancy hotel rooms. But they didn't have enough evidence for a search warrant. The law forbade them from entering unless the inhabitants let them in voluntarily.

The agents hatched a scheme. They would shut off the room's Internet connection as if it had broken, pose as hotel employees coming to fix the problem, and thereby gain the "consent" of the inhabitants to come in and look around. This is an affront to the Fourth Amendment and the concept of consent. The lawyer for the defendants capably articulates why Americans should object to the FBI's logic by sketching the society that we'd have if it was used more often:

The next time you call for assistance because the Internet service in your home is not working, the "technician" who comes to your door may actually be an undercover government agent. He will have secretly disconnected the service, knowing that you will naturally call for help and—when he shows up at your door, impersonating a technician—let him in. He will walk through each room of your home, claiming to diagnose the problem. Actually, he will be videotaping everything and everyone inside. He will have no reason to suspect you have broken the law, much less probable cause to obtain a search warrant. But that makes no difference, because by letting him in, you will have "consented" to an intensive search of your home. The next time our telephone service goes out, the "repairman" who responds may actually be an FBI agent who cut the line himself. The next time your cable service goes fuzzy, your plumbing backs up, or your lights go dark, caveat emptor: the source of the problem may actually be the government agent lurking in his car down the street, waiting for you to call for help—thereby unknowingly "consenting" to him using a secret camera to record you and the most private spaces in your home. Even if you think that the next service outrage in your home is real, so that an actual technician has responded, don't be too sure. Your consent is just as valid when the undercover agent lies to your face to falsely reassure you—even when he misleads you by holding realistic sounding telephone calls with made-up colleagues about what is actually a nonexistent problem. So, every time any technician or service provider comes to your door, you will feel the palpable dread that by opening it you are "consenting" to the government secretly spying on you and your family—with no basis whatever. Or at least that is inevitably the government's astonishing position before this Court, because those are the appalling facts of this case.

Imagine if every government agency, from the FBI to the IRS to the local police force to the municipal code department, adopted this approach and the courts went along. Yet after The New York Times flagged this case in an editorial about problematic lies told by the FBI, Comey defended it as "acting responsibly and legally."