Certain parts of the FBI, especially in its top ranks, are cesspools of politicization and abusive treatment of citizens. A House Republican report highlights some of the problems, and a National Review essay proposes one significant corrective.
The Republican staff of the House Judiciary Committee released a 1,000-page report on Friday on the “politicization of the FBI and Justice Department.” While sometimes overwrought and sometimes overbroad in its claims, the report supports well its fundamental assertion that “the Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the stewardship of Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, is broken. The problem lies not with the majority of front-line agents who serve our country, but with the FBI’s politicized bureaucracy.”
Garland and Wray have repeatedly stonewalled legitimate attempts at congressional oversight, sometimes (by this observer’s reckoning) almost criminally. In a Nov. 2 letter to Garland, ranking committee Republican Jim Jordan of Ohio listed an astonishing 32 outstanding requests for information (stemming from eight different inquiry letters from committee Republicans) that Garland or his agents have yet to fulfill. Likewise, Wray has failed to fulfill 38 informational demands from eight other letters.
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Even accounting for a tendency for the minority party in Congress to make some demands for information seemingly more crafted for political “gotcha” theatre than for legitimate oversight, the recalcitrance of Garland and Wray on obviously substantive demands is an affront to the public. Instead of the transparency due in a government based on the citizenry’s consent, this behavior looks like the sort of cover-up common to authoritarian rule.
For example, in light of a concerted Justice Department effort to target anti-abortion protesters, which has included dangerous use of heavily armed SWAT team raids of homes with children readying for school, Republicans have asked for department communications referring to this aggressive campaign. Garland has not complied. Committee Republicans asked Wray for guidance documents and training manuals for FBI personnel regarding the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act against U.S. citizens. Wray stonewalls. They asked why the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Symbols Guide on Militia Violent Extremism included only symbols of right-wing groups, but not “left-wing violent extremist” groups. No answer.
In general, citing numerous whistleblower reports, committee Republicans produce copious evidence of “political bias [against conservatives or Republicans] by the FBI’s senior leadership,” of a “systemic culture of unaccountability,” and of “rampant corruption, manipulation, and abuse.” The most familiar complaints are about the targeting of parents who dare speak up at school board meetings, the major transgressions involved in the part of the “Russia probe” that targeted former President Donald Trump (rather than just Russian election interference more generally, which was significant), and the outlandish cover-up of concerns about the laptop and international business dealings of presidential son Hunter Biden.
More broadly, Republicans repeatedly say “the FBI is abusing its foreign surveillance authorities.” Space doesn’t allow a full recounting of their evidence, but this complaint lies at the heart of a National Review essay by Andy McCarthy titled, appropriately, “How to Fix the FBI.” McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor who earned convictions for the 1993 (not the 9/11/2001) bombers of the World Trade Center, posits that the FBI should not be doing foreign counterintelligence work at all.
“Foreign counterintelligence and domestic law enforcement are not just different; they are in many ways at cross-purposes,” McCarthy writes. He explains that most domestic law enforcement is a response to crimes already committed, with abundant (and necessary) rights to due process of law. Intelligence, though, can involve proactive interference with nefarious activity, often involving surveillance of the sort that bumps up against ordinary constitutional protections for domestic dissent and political organizing.
The FBI, McCarthy writes, “is not an effective intelligence agency, and its prioritization of secrecy over due process has eroded its competence and trustworthiness as a law-enforcement agency.” (Italics added.)
Moreover, as the FBI brushes against and inevitably erodes some of those due process protections in the name of counterintelligence, its already overabundant sense of being a law unto itself — think of the rampant abuses committed by the FBI under longtime Director J. Edgar Hoover — grows into a force dangerous to a free citizenry.
Hence, McCarthy’s proposal.
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“Lawmakers should be prepared to confine the bureau to its law-enforcement mission, which is vital,” McCarthy writes. “The domestic-security mission should be handled by a pure intelligence agency with no law-enforcement powers, in a manner similar to Britain’s MI5. That intelligence agency should be subjected to extensive congressional and Justice Department oversight, with highly restricted liaison to law enforcement, limited to significant national-security threats.”
The FBI is an immensely valuable agency with thousands of good workers. Its centralized top ranks, though, have become corrupted by too much power with too little accountability. House Republicans are right to limit its abuses, and McCarthy makes sense in proposing to reduce its mission.
