The Bureau;

In the escalating controversy over CBC News guidance directing journalists not to describe the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, as terrorism, FBI personnel assigned to American diplomatic posts in Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver were instructed to leave their workplaces and go home, according to a U.S. law-enforcement source with knowledge of interagency communications surrounding the incident.

When The Bureau presented the account to the FBI and asked detailed questions about its scope and operational consequences, the agency neither confirmed nor denied it.

“We will let the Director’s post speak for itself and have nothing additional to provide,” the FBI National Press Office responded.

[…]

On August 27, FBI Director Kash Patel issued an explicit public threat to Canadian agencies that did not repudiate CBC’s guidance:

“Any agency in Canada that doesn’t publicly reject this bastardization of history, and an insult to the souls lost during our largest terrorist attack in US history will no longer have friend in this FBI.”

The following day, Hoekstra reposted Patel’s warning and referenced the FBI’s direct intervention against significant terrorist and violent criminal organizations operating within Canada.

“Just this year, FBI has been instrumental in or directly responsible for multiple disruptions of significant terrorist and violent criminal organizations operating within Canada,” Hoekstra’s post said. “Failure to recognize and confront radical and terrorist ideologies significantly endangers our efforts to establish and harmonize a shared national and economic security partnership.”

Taken together, the two posts show that serious concerns were circulating at senior levels of U.S. law enforcement and diplomacy. The FBI maintains its Canadian legal-attaché headquarters at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, with suboffices at the American consulates in Toronto and Vancouver.

More: …adding to the crossborder tension is the Republican party’s decision to block the CBC from its convention