By Samuel Mangold Lenett – The Federalist
The FBI is broken. No serious person who isn’t operating in bad faith would contest this fact. But it also, at least historically, serves an important purpose: solving high-level national crimes that local and state agencies lack the resources or personnel to solve.
That said, following the release of the Durham report and the publication of the “Twitter Files,” it is undeniable that left-wing partisan actors have thoroughly weaponized the nation’s largest intelligence agency against their ideological adversaries. The FBI must not be allowed to continue abusing the public, and in the event that holistically eliminating the institution is not an option, it must be majorly reformed to end its reign of terror.
A soon-to-be-published report written by the former Acting Secretary of Transportation Steven Bradbury for the Heritage Foundation titled “How to Fix the FBI” addresses this head-on.
Exploring various steps Congress could take to rein in this part of America’s rogue intelligence apparatus, Bradbury’s report details specific reforms that could mitigate the federal bureaucracy’s rabid partisan bias through nothing short of a complete structural overhaul of the agency.
Emphasizing how the FBI squandered Americans’ goodwill through systemic abuse, the report states:
Once America’s premier domestic law enforcement agency, dedicated to protecting the American way of life from organized crime and terrorist conspiracies, the FBI has now become an adversary of freedom in the eyes of many Americans, misappropriated for partisan political purposes, abusing its national security powers for the suppression of free expression and religious dissent and for the harassment of law-abiding citizens.…
“The Bureau has expanded the scope and use of its own intelligence-gathering powers in dangerous ways, directing them increasingly at political movements that threaten the Washington establishment and at the exercise of constitutionally protected rights by ordinary Americans,” Bradbury writes.
In recent years, the FBI and the agency it’s housed within, the Department of Justice, notably disenfranchised concerned parents by branding them as terrorists for opposing public school boards’ ideological misconduct, flagged online Covid-19 skepticism, and burned piles of cash investigating and tracking down Jan. 6 protesters instead of prioritizing actual security and safety risks like the flourishing human trafficking and synthetic fentanyl industries.
And referring to the ongoing debate over whether to recertify Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), Bradbury raises the point that the FBI abused this process to gather intelligence on Americans who were obviously not engaged in foreign espionage.
He writes, “FBI has improperly queried the database more than 278,000 times, including to gather information about U.S. persons who were crime victims, suspected January 6 rioters, people arrested at Black Lives Matter protests, and even 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate.”
The Federalist – July 8, 2023
I have not read this article. There is zero need for a “complete overhaul,” and to implement it would pour blood into the water. The grave damage that has been done was by politically and ideologically compromised senior leaders. Evern more exceptionally grave damage was done, by very deadly consequences by the Pike, Rockefeller and Church Committees. This is why counterintelligence in America was sabotaged and obstructed legally to this very day. The damage is everywhere you look, as culture wars, a TTP of underground warfare is raging.
I have worked very closely with myriad FBI Agents, and I assure you they are just like me and countless others. Deeply dedicated, productive and since 9/11 alone overworked all day, every day, and the sacrifices to personal lives this leaves to your imagination. Yet every day, 9 hours or 2 hours sleep, wham back at it.
The exceptional danger is during a complete overhaul, we will be more risk averse, reactive posture that has existed since those three commissions were allowed to destroy what American national security agencies remains. John Gentry has written extensively on (left) political obstructions and interreference in this profession. He is a retired CIA Officer. Michele Van Cleave, Terry Turchie, Mark Raskin are others you should get to know. That call for overhaul might be the death knell.
My pesonal opinion – clean out the 7th Floor…. to quote the article….’it is undeniable that left-wing partisan actors have thoroughly weaponized the nation’s largest intelligence agency against their ideological adversaries.’