From what we have seen publicly, the FBI’s descent into the realm of political chicanery began with the Presidential primaries in 2016 and has gotten progressively worse ever since. Director James Comey’s very public exoneration of Hillary Clinton in July 2016 was the first clear sign of something amiss. Mrs. Clinton was in clear violation of section F in 18 US Code 793 (the Espionage Act) for negligent handling of classified material when she was Secretary of State. After presenting damming evidence against her, including that Top Secret emails existed on an unprotected server in her home, Mr. Comey inexplicably proclaimed he could not bring a case against her.
Then, with the emergence of Donald Trump as a powerful conservative political force, the Bureau transformed into something akin to a gangster political attack squad.
The FBI became consumed with destroying Donald Trump. And it didn’t stop there. Any associates of Trump were also targeted if their own destruction could somehow contribute to Trump’s downfall.
As we now know (but didn’t at the time), the FBI fabricated the story about Trump conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 Presidential election. They then used this fiction as evidence to repeatedly apply for (and receive) surveillance warrants against Trump’s associates.
So tall was the tale they spun, it managed to form the basis of a formal Justice Department investigation costing millions of taxpayer dollars and involving an army of leftist lawyers bent on the same goal as the FBI. As false narratives usually turn out, it was a swing and a miss legally even with all that firepower.
The FBI’s gangster tactics became ever more aggressive with raids carried out on the homes of dozens of Trump associates. The Bureau put on over-the-top public spectacles when arresting Trump advisors Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Peter Navarro. Heavily armed small armies of FBI agents were sent in Gestapo-type fashion to apprehend septuagenarian “criminals” accused of process1 crimes. In the case of Dr. Peter Navarro, a 72-year-old college professor, he was in a busy airport when an armed FBI team came with force, placed him in handcuffs and leg irons (according to Navarro), and paraded him out in full view of the crowd. This was completely unnecessary. It wasn’t like Dr. Navarro was going to suddenly turn into Rambo, disarm all the much younger and stronger FBI agents, and then sprint to the exit. It was purely an act of bullying by an undisciplined and brutish FBI.
Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, the FBI made an unannounced raid on the home of former President Trump. They even rummaged through the former First Lady’s underwear in their “search” for more evidence to be used against Trump. Ironically, the stated purpose of this raid was to find documents supporting a claim that Trump was storing classified material at his home. Ironic because this is the same exact crime for which James Comey publicly exonerated Hillary Clinton without ever executing any raid at all of her home.
To top it all off, documents showing the extent of the FBI’s intimate relationship with Twitter have now surfaced. While in theory there could be a legitimate national security reason for such a relationship, that has clearly proven not to be the case. As is evidenced by the recent release of a trove of messages between the Bureau and Twitter, the FBI’s objective in this marriage was to censor speech that did not align with its own political ideology.
Public trust in the Bureau has plummeted. Each week seems to bring another revelation sinking them even further into the political abyss. And we haven’t even mentioned their role just prior to the 2020 election in suppressing information on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. Evidence on that laptop potentially implicating Joe Biden in a pay-for-play scheme was explained away as Russian disinformation. Apparently, there is no bottom to the FBI’s well of Russian surprises.
How can this be fixed?
Ordinarily, large businesses that start to fail by focusing on something other than their main product or service will replace their leadership to get back on track. From 2017 – 2019, the entire leadership level of the FBI was either fired, forced to resign, retired, or departed on their own. It has not made any difference. In fact, one could argue the behavior of the Bureau has gotten even worse since then.
The problem at the FBI goes far beyond the leadership level. Rogue behavior, aggressive tactics, and an obvious political bias now define the Bureau. A nearly identical problem existed within Twitter. To rid Twitter of its destructive progressive culture and get the company back to focusing on its original core service, Elon Musk selectively purged about half the entire Twitter workforce. This same thing needs to happen within the FBI.
We believe it is critically important that the start of any such purge should be in the human resources department. Unless the bias is removed there first, the replacement hires for all those who are let go would likely have the same biases as those they are replacing. The people making up the workforce would change, but the culture problem would remain.
It is also vital that in a highly technical organization like the FBI, all new hires are chosen based only on the merits of their skill and ability to perform the job, and not their ability to enable the Bureau to achieve a political end or demographic goal.
Unfortunately, as long as Joe Biden remains chief of the executive branch of government, where the FBI organizationally resides, this necessary correction will not happen. The reason is that Biden and the Democrats are beneficiaries of all the FBI’s malfeasance. It will take a Republican President to fix this problem. And not just any Republican. A change of this magnitude to the Bureau can’t be undertaken lightly or haphazardly. Not everyone at the FBI is a bad egg. And we’re certain that a portion of the workforce perform their jobs very well and provide a vital service to the country. As much as some conservatives would like to see the FBI completely dissolved, that would be both impractical and just plain stupid.
As of this moment, the two Republicans topping the polls for the 2024 Presidential nomination are Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. There is no question that Trump has both the fearlessness and the motivation to purge and rebuild the FBI. But we question his ability to do so strategically and not “throw out the baby with the bathwater”, so to speak. On the other hand, while we believe DeSantis would take a more intellectual and measured approach to rebuilding the FBI, we question how urgently he would take on the task. It would be his first time on the national political stage, and he might be fearful of doing too much too soon.
We’ve seen how aggressively the FBI attacked Donald Trump both as a leading candidate and as President. We have no doubt they would do the same thing to Ron DeSantis or any other conservative candidate who manages to gain the loyalty of half the voting public. Thus, reigning in the FBI must be the first order of business for the next Republican Chief Executive.
1 A process crime is an offense against the judicial process (failure to appear, contempt of court, etc.). After being subpoenaed to testify before the January 6th committee, Dr. Navarro refused to appear claiming he was protected by executive privilege since he had served as an advisor to the President. The Democrat Congress voted to hold him in contempt, and the Justice Department ordered his arrest.