Resistance.org Staff

Published June 17, 2021. Updated December 5, 2022

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As waves of protest have swept the United States against police violence and real or alleged abuses of the criminal justice system, America’s most powerful law enforcement agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), has also come under increasing scrutiny.

 

Consistent, fair, and apolitical enforcement of law is a necessary condition to uphold basic human rights.  The politicization of law enforcement to enforce the regime’s ideological agenda while suppressing dissent is a hallmark of authoritarian states, and constitutes a grave perversion of the rule of law.  Without fairness and integrity, law enforcement agencies lose legitimacy and public trust, while acting contrary to the very principles they are sworn to uphold. Free press has an ethical and civic duty to expose abuses by law enforcement agencies and raise them prominently in the public dialogue. Individuals of conscience and civic organizations have a similar duty to oppose abuses and to demand accountability in any nation where they have the liberty to do so.

 

Like most Americans, we respect and appreciate our nation’s law enforcement officers and had previously broadly given them the benefit of the doubt. We want to believe that those entrusted with enforcing our nation’s law do so fairly, impartially, and apolitically.  Yet accumulated evidence suggests that this is increasingly not the case.

 

During our review, we were astonished at how many complaints of FBI misconduct have been raised in the media, the credible evidence substantiating these concerns, and how little accountability there has been. Notably, many major stories received no coverage, or key details were withheld, in a large swathe of the American press sympathetic to law enforcement abuses when serving a favored political agenda. This development is troubling, as media complicity with news blackouts and whitewashing of law enforcement abuses impede accountability and is also a feature of authoritarian regimes.  Press reports also attest to coordinated collusion between FBI and sympathetic media outlets.

 

It may be unsurprising that politicization of justice and malfeasance have been alleged more frequently in national media against the FBI compared to local police. Police departments are accountable to their communities and most have standards of transparency.  The Federal Bureau of Investigations is largely unaccountable to communities and is more secretive and less transparent, which may predispose towards abuse of power. 

 

While many FBI agents may be ethical, a widespread pattern of institutional lying to Congress, the courts, and the American public, and the lack of prosecution or commensurate accountability for FBI officials who have perpetrated consequential abuses, have eroded the FBI’s legitimacy and public trust.

 

Idiocracy

The FBI’s investigation into the November 2017 shooting of congressional Republicans seems like a spoof from the 2006 film “Idiocracy” rather than a product of the United States’ best investigative minds.  The FBI classified the shooting by a deranged leftist, who shot and nearly killed Rep. Steve Scalise, narrowly missed murdering Rep. Trent Kelly, and others, as “suicide by cop.”[1]

 

Rep. Bradley Wenstrup noted that “neither he nor the other members of the GOP baseball team were ever contacted” by the FBI’s so-called investigators about the shooting. In claiming agnosticism regarding the shooter’s motives, the FBI ignored the statements of eyewitnesses, evidence from the scene, and the shooter’s social media posts.  Noting his “firsthand opinion that this was an attempt at assassination of many Republican members of Congress,” Rep. Wenstrup further noted that the FBI’s own agents he followed up with also “did not agree that this was suicide by cop.” Rep. Steve Scalise wrote “I was shot by a deranged Leftist who came to the baseball field with a list of Congressional Republicans to kill. This was NOT ‘suicide by cop.’ End of story.”[2]

 

Yet in June 2021, former acting FBI Director turned CNN commentator Andrew McCabe continued to claim that the FBI “still doesn’t know the motive” behind the shooting.[3] Representative Scalise responded:

 

“Unbelievable. Andrew McCabe says the FBI isn't sure why we were attacked playing baseball.

Seriously?

- The gunman came with a list of Republicans

- He verified we were Republicans before shooting

- He was in the Facebook group "Terminate the Republican Party”

A real mystery.”[4]

 

Liberal Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote:

 

"Remember that guy who posted Rachel Maddow clips all over his Facebook page saying GOP was full of traitors and endangering US with treason, then went to a softball field and shot Republicans after confirming who they were? Not really sure what he was up to, says Andrew McCabe."[5]

 

Tom Elliot wrote on Twitter:

 

“Disgraced former FBI agent Andy McCabe on the congressional baseball shooting: ‘The FBI still doesn’t exactly know what that shooter was up to. They never really uncovered the sort of detailed evidence that laid out a specific plot or an objective.’"[6]

 

Federalist editor Mollie Hemingway tweeted:

 

"Left wing political activist: tries to murder an entire softball team of Republican senators and congressmen. Top FBI brains: We may never know what happened."[7]

 

Actor James Wood opined: “Hmm. You mean the Bernie supporter who asked where the congressional Republicans were while holding a rifle in his hand? Yeah, this one is a puzzler all right."[8] Spectator contributor Stephen Miller wrote: “When someone like McCabe pulls this when there is a clear pattern and documentation of baseball field shooting motive, but it’s not politically comfortable for him, it makes me wonder about” other FBI conclusions.

 

Political Agenda, Not Justice

In other high-profile cases with far less evidence, the FBI has been accused of projecting its own politically-inspired motives.  At times, this conduct has involved gross duplicity. Fox host Tucker Carlson summarized a host of data:

 

“To a remarkable degree, federal law enforcement is now driven by political imperatives. Certain kinds of so-called hate crimes top the list of priorities. They'll draw the FBI faster than you could summon the local police to your house during a home invasion, even when, as is so often the case, they turn out to be hoaxes. Meanwhile, actual hate crimes -- brutal crimes in which Americans are gravely injured -- are ignored completely. They take place on our streets with shocking regularity. The media don't cover them. They often go unpunished entirely.”[9]

 

The Democracy Institute’s Patrick Basham stated that FBI’s early-morning raid of Rudy Giuliani’s apartment was part of a longstanding pattern of abuse of federal law enforcement for retaliation and intimidation against designated political enemies:

 

“From the outside, it appears crystal clear that this is a political retaliation against Giuliani and against Trump and the Trump inner circle...What has happened with the FBI clearly over the past several years—at a minimum—is that the FBI has been weaponized for political purposes...What the FBI is trying to do here is not I think so much get Rudy Giuliani, but get compromising information if it exists on Donald Trump and others in Trump’s inner circle, and most importantly, to scare off, to warn off anyone connected with Donald Trump.”[10]

 

Petr Svab interviewed experts on totalitarianism, noting increasing evidence of politically-motivated prosecutions, whereas ideological allies:

 

“To the degree that a totalitarian regime requires a police state, there’s no law in America targeting dissenters explicitly. But there are troubling signs of selective, politically motivated enforcement. Signs go back to the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups or the difference in treatment received by former Trump adviser Lt. Gen Michael Flynn and former FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe—both allegedly lying to investigators but only one getting prosecuted.”[11]

 

Andrew McCabe, James Clapper, Michael Hayden, Peter Strzok, and others who were never prosecuted, engaged in far more consequential and more rigorously attested misconduct compared to the fabricated allegations against General MIchael Flynn. Carlson noted that the FBI sent 15 agents to investigate a hoax involving Nascar driver Bubba Wallace, but not a single agent to investigate calls for murder based on race by perpetrators of BLM riots. New Zealand-based writer Lushington Brady noted that the FBI actively runs interference for favored groups.[12]

 

The political biases of authorities at the Federal Bureau of Investigations are no secret. Former FBI director James Comey stated that the Republican Party needs to be “burned down or changed,”[13] and the FBI has done more than its share of the burning.  In June 2020, dozens of former national security officials announced they would publicly campaign for Joe Biden. Promises of fair and apolitical enforcement of federal law have been increasingly illusory.

 

Selective Prosecution under False Pretexts

Authoritarian regimes engage in selective prosecution of political opponents. Unjust authoritarian tactics include charging political enemies with rarely-used provisions which are not enforced against others, disregarding standard prosecutorial guidelines to seek maximum sentences for political opponents, and withholding exculpatory evidence. In contrast, allies are treated leniently and often are not charged at all for far more serious offenses. Such tactics violate constitutional guarantees of equal protection under law and due process.  The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations has been documented to have engaged in all of these tactics on multiple occasions.

 

Novel Charges against Political Opponents

Charging political enemies with violation of rarely-used provisions which are not enforced against others is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.  The regime obviously is not concerned principally with the provisions of these laws. If they were, the laws would be enforced equitably.  They merely offer convenient pretexts for charging political enemies and constitute an abuse of prosecutorial discretion.

 

Logan Act

Notes from disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok document that in a meeting with Obama and FBI agents days before leaving office in 2017, then-Vice President Joe Biden suggested using the Logan Act as a pretext to investigate General Michael Flynn, who had disagreed with Obama on policy issues regarding the threat of Islamic terrorism.[14] Blitzer noted that “The Logan Act, which prohibits unauthorized people from negotiating with foreign countries, has never been successfully used to prosecute anyone since it became law in 1799.” These notes also exposed Biden’s public denials of knowledge regarding the Flynn prosecution as falsehoods.

 

Foreign Agents Registration Act

Noting that “the Biden administration will use the force of law to crush political dissent,” Carlson cited selective prosecution of political opponents with a little-known statute called the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA),  which had only one conviction in the fifty years prior to Trump’s election and for which violations remain “extremely common” in Washington, D.C.[15] Carlson noted that the US Attorney’s Manual at the Department of Justice states that individuals should be warned for violating FARA and not prosecuted. Yet, he continued, “FARA investigations became a tool the DOJ used against mouthy and inconvenient Republicans. There have been more FARA prosecutions in the past three years than we’ve seen over the past half-century. Process crimes, weaponized against political opponents.” 

 

Carlson noted that FARA also appears to have been the pretext for the raid on Rudy Giuliani’s New York City apartment. Giuliani stated that he was extremely careful not to violate FARA, having explicitly declined to represent foreign nationals before the U.S. government.

 

Federal Anti-Rioting Statute

The Washington Post noted that a section of a law used to charge one of the Capitol riot protesters who transported weapons brought to the riot was, according to emeritus dean and professor Steven Kanter of Lewis & Clark Law School and other experts, extremely uncommon.[16] The provision has been raised in objections by civil liberties and human rights groups.  This case differs from previously-noted invocations of the  Logan Act and FARA, as it represents adding additional charges to a deserved prosecution rather than drumming up politically-motivated pretexts for prosecution de novo.  Yet Antifa and BLM rioters who transported firearms across state lines for use in riots and violent insurrections were not charged under this section. Selective prosecution with rarely-invoked charges against unfavored groups and individuals to create “shock and awe,” rather than to serve justice, represents a breach of civil rights and an abuse of prosecutorial discretion.

 

Plotting against Political Enemies

Evidence reveals that Barack Obama and Joe Biden were involved in plotting against General Michael Flynn days before leaving office in 2017. Dan Bongino noted:

 

“There is text and email exchange out there that clearly says, ‘The White House is running this between the FBI agents who are talking about the case…[FBI agents wrote that] ‘POTUS, an acronym for president of the United States, wants to know everything we’re doing. The president was Barack Obama....He knew the whole time and he has managed to skate. That's why he is panicked and that's why his team is leaking this audio...Barack Obama, now we know, right before he leaves office personally brings up a phone call he had no business listening to between a private American citizen, Mike Flynn, and a Russian ambassador, a perfectly legal phone call from an incoming national security advisor to have made. And Obama personally knows about it and Comey seems to indicate at that meeting about a Logan Act violation and nobody cares. Do you understand there is no evidence at all Mike Flynn lied?”[17]

 

Rep. Doug Collins noted that “there was a pattern at the ‘highest levels of the Obama administration, including President [Obama] himself’ targeting members of the Trump administration.”[18]  FBI agents who reviewed the Flynn conversation found “no derogatory information” to suggest that a crime had occurred and recommended closing the case.[19] Justice Department officials advised the FBI that attempting to charge Flynn under the Logan Act was unrealistic and improper. Gregg Re wrote:

 

“Internal FBI documents that emerged in April showed that Peter Strzok -- the now-disgraced anti-Trump former head of FBI counterintelligence -- ordered the investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to remain open even after it was slated to be closed due to a lack of so-called ‘derogatory’ information. Strzok pursued an investigation based on the Logan Act, a law never used in a successful prosecution and that was intended to prevent individuals from falsely representing the U.S. government abroad in a pre-telephone era.”[20]

 

Representative Mark Meadows stated: “We know that they not only knew that there wasn't a case, but they continued to investigate and spy.” Notes demonstrate that the FBI plotted to interview Michael Flynn to “get him to lie” and “get him fired.”[21] Declassified transcripts show that the FBI “had no legal basis to interview Michael Flynn.” The agents presented a false pretense of a friendly interview and deceptively advised Flynn, contrary to standard procedure, that he did not need an attorney. The agents who interviewed Flynn also did not believe he was lying, noting that he was open and forthcoming and may simply have forgotten the specifics of the conversation. John Solomon wrote:

 

“In the end, the words that Michael Flynn uttered to Russia's ambassador that landed the former Trump national security in a three-year legal nightmare were simply this: ‘We need cool heads to prevail.’ That was the message Flynn delivered to Sergey Kislyak on Dec. 29, 2016, the day outgoing President Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for meddling in the U.S. election, according to newly declassified transcripts of the conversation. Yes, Flynn talked sanctions. But his message not to escalate a sanctions war was similar to what his future boss, Donald Trump, presented the next day and what many other experts recommended. And it was hardly words worthy of a crime or a counterintelligence threat, a fact that the career agents who worked the Flynn case concluded on their own before their bosses meddled in the matter.”

 

Powell stated:

 

"These [FBI] agents specifically schemed and planned with each other how to not tip [Flynn] off, that he was even the person being investigated. So they kept him relaxed and unguarded deliberately as part of their effort to set him up and frame him. According to recently released testimony, President Obama revealed during an Oval Office meeting weeks before the interview that he knew about Flynn's phone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, apparently surprising then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates...The whole thing was orchestrated and set up within the FBI, [former Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper, [Former CIA Director John] Brennan, and in the Oval Office meeting that day with President Obama.”[22]

 

Exculpatory evidence was withheld.[23]  Former House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy responded to Obama’s “amazing statement” professing concern for the “rule of law” after exculpatory evidence led the Justice Department to file to drop charges against Michael Flynn:

 

“Where is [Obama’s] respect for the rule of law for the crime that Michael Flynn was the victim of?” Remember, he was unmasked by somebody in Obama’s administration and then it was leaked... that is a 10-year felony, to disseminate classified information. Michael Flynn was a victim of that crime. President Obama himself pardoned people for making false statements to the government. He picked [Justice Department Inspector General] Michael Horowitz, that was an Obama pick. Michael Horowitz found fault after fault after fault with the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] program and [former FBI Director] Jim Comey and [former FBI Deputy Director] Andy McCabe, so I am delighted to hear President Obama’s newfound interest and respect for the rule of law. I just wish he would apply it equally to Republicans and Democrats. The FBI used a dossier that was bought and paid for by your political party without vetting a single factual allegation in that dossier. You put it in front of a federal judge, where is your concern for respect for the rule of law as it relates to Carter Page and what happened to him?”[24]

 

These and other tactics are those of authoritarian states, and not what one would expect of federal law enforcement in a Western democracy with a duty for fairness, impartiality, and aloofness from political considerations.

 

Yet the perpetrators of FBI abuses have been rewarded. FBI agent Joe Pietka, who lied to “the FISA Court and later interviewed Flynn [with agent Peter Strzok] – was promoted and moved to the SF area AFTER the FBI learned of serious problems in his FISA application.”[25] Senior FBI official Jennifer Boone, who was "’at Headquarters overseeing’" the Carter Page investigation, received a promotion to head the bureau's Baltimore field office” in 2019.  While Rep. Mark Meadows expected criminal indictments of senior FBI officials due to the overwhelming pattern of misconduct, only one official has subsequently been charged.

 

An FBI official on the Mueller team stated that the Flynn prosecution had a “get Trump” attitude even though evidence of collusion was simply “not there.”[26] Further disclosures have revealed that “Trump was personally targeted by [an] FBI probe during [the] Obama administration.”[27] Yet crimes committed by the Obama Administration have been ignored by federal investigators[28] as well as documented crimes by first son Hunter Biden.

 

Spying on Political Opponents

In 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned following his impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress regarding his involvement and cover-up of the Watergate Scandal.  Watergate involved a pattern of spying and sabotage on Democratic Party headquarters to gain political advantage. While Nixon’s role remains prominent in public memory, less well known is the extent to which the scandal “led deeply into the upper reaches of the Justice Department, FBI, [and] CIA.”

 

In recent years, revelations that are arguably at least as serious as the Watergate scandal have uncovered a pattern of politically-motivated spying by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, albeit with the roles reversed and the spying being perpetrated principally against Republicans.  Such conduct is illegal and unethical, and violates constitutional separation of powers. Carlson noted:

 

“James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, lied to Congress when he said the NSA wasn’t spying on millions of Americans. The NSA was, in violation of our constitutional rights. James Brennan, the former CIA director, lied when he said the CIA wasn’t spying on the US senate. Can you imagine an Intel agency spying on the legislative branch? That was happening, he lied about it. Another case of perjury. Here’s the interesting thing: Neither Clapper nor Brennan was prosecuted. In fact, both got better jobs. Why did they get off? They’re on the right side. Roger Stone [who was prosecuted], by contrast, advised Donald Trump.”[29]

 

A report from Obama-appointed Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found a pattern of "abuses and deficiencies in the FBI's FISA process" for electronic eavesdropping.[30] Chief FISC Judge James E. Boasberg concluded that the court is "concerned about the apparent widespread violations” of privacy rules in conducting surveillance. These reports are troubling, as most victims are unaware of their surveillance, the process offers no opportunity for redress, and past abuses have done serious damage.

 

Reports have shown “'indisputable evidence' FBI 'planted' an agent to 'spy' on Trump.”[31] During the first Trump impeachment, the FBI illegally monitored privileged attorney-client iCloud communications of the President of the United States.[32] In seizing the electronic devices of Giuliani, the FBI positioned itself to access further privileged communications. The phone of an attorney and former Justice Department official associated with Giuliani was also seized.[33] Giuliani stated that Biden DOJ officials should "be investigated for blatantly violating my constitutional rights:"

 

“If that doesn't result in their being sanctioned, the case being dismissed, and it stopping, this is no longer -- we might as well be in, you know, East Berlin before the Wall fell. This is tactics only known in a dictatorship where you see a lawyer's records right in the middle of his representation of his client. You should be prosecuted and disbarred for that.”[34]

 

A Pathology of Lies

Civil libertarian attorney Harvey Silverglate writes that many federal prosecutors do not care about guilt or innocence, but work to “win at all costs.” He cited Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police, who bragged: “Show me the man, and I will find you the crime.”[35] He noted that the United States seems to have “picked up where the Soviets left off” in turning “federal criminal law into a conviction machine, sweeping up the innocent along with the guilty.”  He wrote: “The very expansiveness of federal law turns nearly everyone into lawbreakers. Like the poor Soviet citizen who, on average, broke about three laws a day, a typical American will unwittingly break federal law several times daily. Many go to prison for things that historically never have been seen as criminal.”  In his book Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, Silverglate writes:

 

“Prosecutors are able to structure plea bargains in ways that make it nearly impossible for normal, rational, self-interest calculating people to risk going to trial. The pressure on innocent defendants to plead guilty and “cooperate” by testifying against others in exchange for a reduced sentence is enormous—so enormous that such cooperating witnesses often fail to tell the truth, saying, instead, what prosecutors want to hear.”

 

Silverglate continus to note that “In 1998 Bill Moushey wrote a devastating ten-part series for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ‘Win at all Costs.’ Moushey described the caldron of lies that FBI investigators, prosecutors, and other federal officials regularly tell. Even when it was clear they had no case, prosecutors often soldiered on just to inflict financial punishment on people they targeted.”

 

The Federal Bureau of Investigations repeatedly lied to the FISA court and to Congress about the so-called Russia dossier, funded by Democratic opposition research to attack then-candidate Donald Trump, without a single verified allegation.[36]  From the inception, the FBI was aware that the claims were partisan fabrication and not credible intelligence. Gregg Jarrett noted:

 

“The FBI knew all of this but continued to insist that Steele was reliable and the dossier was credible, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. The bureau scrupulously guarded their secret knowing full well that disclosure would ruin the public’s trust in the FBI.”[37]

 

He further observed that if the FBI had been forthcoming, "it would not have led to a special counsel who of course in the end found no collusion conspiracy. It would have dramatically changed the course of Donald Trump's presidency if Comey and the FBI had been honest."[38]

 

Yet this is precisely the point. The concern of such officials has not been with serving impartial justice, but with prosecuting a political agenda.  To the extent that unfavored figures can be smeared, discredited, and obstructed, the FBI has been all too happy to engage in such conduct. None of the perpetrators of FBI misconduct have seriously been held accountable. Jarrett further noted that “disgraced fired FBI officials Comey, McCabe and Strzok profit from a pathology of lies” with lucrative media jobs and book deals.[39] The extent to which they have been rewarded and even lionized by the left virtually guarantees that similar misconduct will continue. Jarrett wrote:

 

“It is outrageous that Comey, McCabe, and Strzok are allowed to profit from corrupt acts...As a top counterintelligence agent at the FBI, [FBI agent Peter] Strzok carried on an extramarital affair with FBI lawyer Lisa Page, all the while exchanging profane text messages excoriating Trump... At the same time, Strzok traded fawning missives of adoration for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton...Befitting his texts, Strzok was instrumental in clearing Clinton of criminal charges in her email scandal by sanitizing Comey’s findings so that she escaped indictment. He then signed the documents launching the witch hunt against Trump without a shred of credible evidence...Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz informed Congress that Strzok’s texts ‘clearly showed a biased state of mind. that was “antithetical to the core values of the FBI...’

“All too many of [Deputy FBI Director Andrew] McCabe’s actions were motivated by a hatred of Trump, not by facts. If the facts were not what he wanted, he twisted them to fit, or manufactured outright lies to make his case...McCabe pressured Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel to go after Trump. McCabe’s decisions were driven by political bias and personal animus — not by sustainable facts or plausible evidence...McCabe was eventually fired for dishonesty when the inspector general determined that he had ‘made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor — including under oath — on multiple occasions.’ This was a polite way of saying that McCabe was canned for leaking and lying. Naturally, this made McCabe a perfect fit for CNN, which hired him as a paid commentator…Comey is a classic poseur; he feigns moralist principles but embraces unscrupulous tactics. He is a shameless fraud.”[40]

 

Even FBI officials appear to be aware of their own fraud.  After a disinformation campaign by former intelligence officials who ironically claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign, the agents who raided Giuliani’s apartment refused to take the Hunter Biden laptop - even though they were ostensibly required by the warrant to take it.(PL6)  If there were any credible basis for the claim that the laptop contained Russian disinformation, Giuliani pointed out, the FBI should be eager to review its contents. Refusal to take the Hunter Biden laptop even when repeatedly offered reflects the Bureau’s awareness of the bogus nature of these claims. Carson observed regarding misconduct by the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies: 

 

“In the face of mountains of evidence, we've done nothing about it. There has been no meaningful reform of the CIA or the FBI or any of the other terrifyingly powerful agencies that operate independently from our democracy and on the side of the Democratic Party. We know all of this, but we still pretend they're legitimate.”[41]

 

Media Collusion

Liberal journalist Matt Taibbi wrote that notwithstanding involvement in “systemic abuses that included civilian massacres and an assassination squadan assassination squad” and two of the three lying to Congress,

 

“[Former CIA Director John] Brennan, [former National Security Advisor James] Clapper, and [former CIA and NSA Director Michael] Hayden have been rehabilitated and are all paid contributors to either MSNBC or CNN, part of a wave of intelligence officers who’ve flooded the airwaves and op-ed pages in recent years, including the FBI’s Asha Rangappa, Clint Watts, Josh Campbell, former counterintelligence chief Frank Figliuzzi and former deputy director Andrew McCabe, the CIA’s John Sipher, Phil Mudd, Ned Price, and many others.”[42]

 

Carlson noted a pattern of collusion between the FBI and leftist media and political establishment. The disgraced anti-conservative Lincoln Project received advanced notice from FBI leaks of the raid on Rudy Guiliani’s home.[43] Representative Jim Jordan quizzed FBI director Wray regarding why leaks seem to always benefit Democrats after the unauthorized leaking of reams of confidential tax documents to another leftist advocacy group.[44]

 

In 2021, journalist Glenn Greenwald cited evidence that “the FBI and CIA have more power over the US corporate media than ever. It used to be clandestine but now they put their operatives right in the newsrooms. It's Operation Mockingbird, but not hidden.”[45]

 

Complicity in Crimes

Recent court filings have presented evidence that numerous “unindicted co-conspirators,” apparently FBI agents or informants, infiltrated groups engaged in the January 6 Capitol riots, but appear to have participated in plotting and in illegal conduct.[46] Carlson noted:

 

“Trevor Aaronson's book ‘The Terror Factory’ analyzed every terrorism prosecution from 2001 to 2013. Aaronson found that at least 50 defendants were on trial because of behavior that the FBI had not only encouraged, but enabled. FBI agents were essentially the plotters in these crimes. They made the crimes, crimes.  In 2012, a writer for The Nation called Petra Bartosiewicz found that FBI informants had quote, ‘Crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior, which is allowed and good, to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself.’ And we checked. We looked carefully, and that’s not an exaggeration. One of those plots was an Islamic terrorist attack in 2015 in Garland Texas. It turns out the FBI played an active role in that shooting.”[47]

 

Co-conspirators should be held fully accountable, federal law enforcement agents or not.  As believers in a nation of laws where “no one is above the law,” we call for full public transparency and pressing of charges against federal law enforcement agents who incite, encourage, plot, and participate in criminal activity. The U.S. government should not be permitted to charge some defendants while releasing without charge cronies who participated in plotting and incitement of violent criminal activity.

 

Update - December 2022

Additional reports cite allegations of ongoing wrongdoing by the FBI which have worsened during the Biden administration.

 

In November 2022, House Republicans released an 1,000 page report detailing politicization of the FBI and Department of Justice, noting that the “FBI has weaponized the federal government against its political opponents” as well as unfavored free speech, citing a “systemic culture of unaccountability” and that problems “undermine the FBI’s fundamental law-enforcement mission.[48] 

 

Senator Chuck Grassley revealed that “whistleblowers’ reports reveal double standard in pursuit of politically charged investigations by senior FBI, DOJ officials.”[49] The FBI has allegedly been purging conservative employees and retaliating against whistleblowers; FBI director of human resources Jennifer Moore has been alleged to have engaged in unlawful retaliation.[50] An FBI whistleblower noted that the current FBI whistleblower program is “broken” in failing to protect qualified persons.[51] An earlier purge was reported over the January 6 investigation.[52]

 

Yale historian Beverly Gage documents that “the FBI wasn't supposed to be political—but it has been since the beginning.”[53] A former agent reported that FBI politicization markedly worsened under Mueller and Comey.[54] 

 

The Free Beacon reported in 2017 that “the FBI has become one of the more liberal [leftist] political agencies of government, and some critics say appears increasingly to operate outside normal constitutional controls.”[55] In February 2018, former US attorney Joseph diGenova documented misconduct and irregularities of the FBI in colluding “to exonorate Hilary Clinton of federal crimes” and to frame her opponent[56] with an investigation subsequently acknowledged by deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein to lack proper predication.

 

Witnesses and commentators have expressed grave concern. A former intelligence official told the Free Beacon that “people are finally tumbling to the realization that this [FBI] has become a proto-KGB. We're in a constitutional crisis.” Gregg Jarrett opined that the “greatest peril to democracy today is not a foreign force but a malignant force of unelected officials here at home.”[57]

 

The FBI has been accused of manipulating data to serve its political agenda, including creating a ““false and misleading” narrative by “miscategorizing cases related to Jan 6 to bolster claims of domestic extremism crisis,”[58] as well as by burying data to obscure the soaring US murder rate[59] arising from leftist pro-crime policies.  PBS cited whistleblower testimony that 665 workers left the FBI over two decades to escape discipline for misconduct.[60]