It’s Not an ‘FBI Problem’
“Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the ‘latent spark’… If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?” —John Adams (1775)
The Department of Justice — and more specifically its domestic law enforcement, intelligence, and security service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation — has been taking some well-earned criticism over the last six years for fabricating a politically motivated investigation, starting with a deceitful FISA warrant, to target Donald Trump.
But the politicization of the DoJ and FBI, tasking the bureau with investigations that fit high-profile political objectives, is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, it dates back to the FBI’s inception.
Today’s FBI is a massive bureaucracy, with a $10.7 billion budget, most of which is used to pay its 37,000 employees, including more than 13,000 special agents who form the tip of the FBI’s enforcement spear.
Founded in 1908 as the Bureau of Investigation, its initial mission was to enforce the Mann Act prohibition on interstate trafficking of prostitutes. The BOI mission significantly expanded by 1933, when it was linked to the Bureau of Prohibition and its focus was expanded to prosecuting notorious bootleggers and gangsters. That same year it would be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The fusion of politics and law enforcement originates with the FBI’s longest-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover. He commanded the organization for nearly half a century through eight presidential administrations — from its BOI days in 1924 until his death in 1972. The bureau took on its national security functions at the onset of World War II and its powers — which is to say, Hoover’s powers — greatly expanded through the end of his tenure.
Hoover is perhaps most remembered for keeping tabs and taps on John F. Kennedy and his administrative nemesis, JFK’s brother Robert, who was also our nation’s attorney general. In the mid-1960s, Hoover turned his focus to Martin Luther King and the communist connections of some civil rights leaders. But many of those investigations exceeded FBI authority and were clearly used to discredit King and others.
From 1945 until Hoover’s retirement, presidents and politicians dared not cross him because it was assumed that he maintained dossiers on their dalliances and other dastardly deeds. Today, the FBI’s 56 field offices report to the bureau’s DC headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue — in the J. Edgar Hoover building.
For two decades after Hoover’s era, the FBI became more specialized and more professional, developing designated units involved in high-profile criminal and terrorist investigations.
But the organization’s shine was badly tarnished by its excessive (to put it kindly) actions during the 1992 siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the 1993 siege at Waco, Texas, the latter being two months after the bureau failed to detect and thwart the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. The bureau’s mishandling of the 1996 Summer Olympics bombing, including the leaking of information leading to the public vilification of the wrong person, Richard Jewell, was another deep wound to its reputation.
The actual Centennial Park Olympic bomber was a sociopath named Eric Rudolph, identified in 1998 as the suspect in several bombings including those of two abortion clinics. For that reason, over the next two years, Rudolph became the subject of one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history involving massive federal manpower and resources. He was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list and had a $1 million bounty on his head.
Then-President Bill Clinton had the FBI focused on a high-profile criminal and political target at the same time al-Qa'ida terrorists were settling into U.S. suburbs and preparing to carry out their devastating 9/11 Islamist attack on our nation. Clinton had already declined numerous opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden before the attack.
In its findings, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report blamed both the FBI and CIA for failing to follow leads regarding the terrorist plotters, noting our country had “not been well served” by either agency. In fact, Stanford University Fellow Amy Zegart documented 23 investigative leads the FBI failed to follow, any one of which may have led to the disruption of the 9/11 attack. For the record, Eric Rudolph surrendered to local police in Murphy, North Carolina, 18 months after 9/11.
In the years after 9/11, the FBI’s leadership resisted the changes recommended by the 9/11 Commission and missed other investigative leads including those regarding mass assailants at schools.
There have been other notable failures.
In 2016, as former FBI Director James Comey and his corrupt FBI cadre were laying the groundwork to set up the Trump “investigation,” the bureau failed to follow up on a tip-off regarding Islamist Omar Saddiqui Mateen before he murdered 49 people in Orlando.
All that being said, there are three key points that beg a pardon.
First, in all the years since the FBI’s formation, despite some significant failures, special agents have made countless thousands of arrests thwarting terrorist plans and taking the most dangerous criminals off the streets — often due to truly brilliant investigative work and at great risk to the agents making those arrests.
Second, regarding failures to detect terrorist events, particularly the 1993 and 2001 WTC attacks, hindsight is 20/20. OK, actually hindsight is rarely 20/20, but in serious retrospect, it is much easier to look back and see what was missed than it is to detect something in real time. And too often there is a significant bias when reports emerge on past failures — a bias holding that clues and leads at the time should have made intervention more achievable than in fact it was.
And third, the FBI agents I have known and worked with over the past 35 years have been professional men and women of impeccable character, devoted to their oath “to support and defend” our Constitution. Every agent I know today fits that profile and is singularly devoted to the FBI motto: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.
The FBI’s stated mission is to “protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States,” and that is precisely what most FBI agents endeavor to do every day.
Unfortunately, as a result of “star chamber” corruption within the Department of Justice under Biden’s abjectly corrupt AG Merrick Garland, who are then tagging FBI managers on the seventh floor of the Hoover Building to do their bidding, morale among agents is at an all-time low.
Thus, I exercise caution when criticizing “the FBI” to make the distinction between the vast majority of special agents who make up the FBI and the corrupt elements within the FBI.
The problem is not the FBI, but certainly rot at the top of an organization results in rot at the bottom and in between.
The problem is a profoundly arrogant and lawless cadre of deep state bureaucrats within the Department of Justice and FBI, and a slice of dependable partisan minions below them, who have lost their moral compass and their willingness to abide by their oaths. Instead, they obediently and cleverly do the bidding of their Democrat Party masters, knowing full well how to keep their fingerprints off the crime scene.
At no time since 9/11 has the FBI’s reputation been so deeply soiled than it has been over the last six years.As I have thoroughly detailed, the corruption of the FBI and CIA under former directors James Comey and John Brennan, respectively, in collaboration with Hillary Clinton and using her layup for the “Russia collusion” conspiracy as “probable cause” to take down the presidency of Donald Trump — a political charade that was ultimately found baseless — was unprecedented in U.S. history.
And we now know as a matter of fact that the FBI ran interference for Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election by suppressing information from Hunter Biden’s laptop connecting his father to a ChiCom pay-to-play scheme.
And it appears now that the understudy of the demonstrably corrupt Barack Obama is resurrecting another DOJ/FBI deep state cabal to convict Trump for Hillary Clinton’s crimes.
The latest iteration is modeled after the last one created by Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and former FBI Counterintelligence Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok.
It is no coincidence that some FBI managers overseeing the Mar-a-Lago investigation also ran the Trump-Russia investigation. But the rank and file are following lawful orders issue by a federal judge, and regardless of the Clinton comparison, it is highly likely that Trump retained classified documents in violation of the law.
Will Biden’s DoJ cadre succeed with their Trump objective – to demoralize his supporters ahead of the midterm elections? Maybe, but it is certainly energizing Democrat voters.
Regarding the rot in the ranks of the bureau, some would ask, of the FBI’s 13,000 agents, how many have resigned in protest over constitutional offenses committed by senior administrators. I do not know the answer, but I do know that the vast majority of agents are focussed on their day-to-day law enforcement tasks, which are in keeping with their oaths and their obligations to the public.
I also know that painting all FBI agents with a broad brush because of the corruption of a few, is tantamount to the Left’s painting all cops as bad because of the corruption of a few, in order to prop up their “systemic racism” lie.
Moreover, there are some cracks in armor of Biden DoJ cabal.
A growing chorus of FBI whistleblowers is starting to shed light on political corruption at the highest levels of the bureau. It is likely no coincidence that FBI ASAC Timothy Thibault, a senior agent at the center of what can only be described as politically motivated investigations and non-investigations (such as the Russia collusion hoax and the Hunter Biden non-hoax), has decide to “retire,” much as some co-conspirators in Comey’s cadre also “retired.”
More whistleblowers and resignations will follow, especially if a Republican-led House majority opens investigations next January.
In the meantime, we should all take care to distinguish between “the FBI” as the corpus of thousands of good agents and the cadre of corrupt deep state bureaucrats within and atop the FBI.
To that end, the latest Rasmussen survey reports that a majority of likely voters agree that “there is a group of politicized thugs at the top of the FBI that are using the FBI as Joe Biden’s personal Gestapo.”
(Updated)
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776
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