The Sad Decline of the FBI: You Read It Here First [Updated]

The FBI scandals continue to unravel. Scott has chronicled the saga of the missing Strzok/Page text messages, now apparently on the road to recovery. The FBI has continued to stonewall Congressional investigations, to the point where Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley says the FBI is playing “a bureaucratic game of hide the ball.”

And House Republicans have prepared a four-page memo that apparently summarizes the FBI’s malfeasance in connection with the fake Trump dossier. Some who have read it say it may lead to criminal prosecutions within the Department of Justice. DOJ is demanding a look at the memo, but so far House Republicans won’t turn it over. Why? Because they know what Justice bureaucrats will do with it. They will leak it to their friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post so they can preemptively attack the memo before the public gets to see it.

These scandals have been going on for quite a while, but people are finally beginning to notice. Howie Carr says it is time to abolish the FBI. Is that going too far? Maybe, but the Bureau has been coasting on its reputation for a long, long time. At a minimum, I would say that those who can be fired within the Bureau’s leadership, should be. Starting with Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

Rasmussen finds that a remarkable number of voters support appointment of another special counsel to investigate the FBI:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 49% of Likely U.S. Voters believe a special prosecutor should be named to investigate whether senior FBI officials handled the investigation of Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump in a legal and unbiased fashion. Thirty-one percent (31%) disagree, but a sizable 19% are not sure.

To say that the FBI has lost the confidence of the American people is an understatement. But it isn’t just the FBI; Barack Obama corrupted the Department of Justice from the top down. Those who were paying attention have known this for a long time. We started writing about the DOJ scandals early in Obama’s administration. I haven’t done a thorough search, and this may not be the first such instance, but on September 7, 2010, a year and a half into Obama’s first term, I wrote:

One of the real scandals these days is the way in which Barack Obama and Eric Holder have politicized the Department of Justice. The Democrats criticized the Bush administration for politicizing DOJ, but that was sheer fabrication. It didn’t happen. Immediately upon taking office, however, Obama and Holder embarked on a program of partisan law enforcement the likes of which this country may never have seen before.

A few months later, on January 28, 2011, I wrote:

The corruption of the Department of Justice under Barack Obama and Eric Holder is one of the saddest of many sad stories that have emerged from the Obama administration. Under Obama, the Department has been politicized to a degree this country has never experienced; certainly not in its modern history.

In the years that have gone by since then, Obama’s corruption of the Department of Justice, including but not limited to the FBI, has been a recurrent theme on this site. If “mainstream” reporters had joined us in blowing the whistle on DOJ’s rather obvious corruption under the Obama/Holder/Lynch regime, would we ever have gotten to the point where Loretta Lynch was meeting with Bill Clinton, apparently to assure him that Hillary was safe from prosecution, regardless of the evidence, while senior FBI officials huddled to discuss how they could prevent the outsider, Donald Trump, from assuming the presidency?

Perhaps not.

UPDATE: At the Hill, Sharyl Attkisson weighs in: “As walls close in on FBI, the bureau lashes out at its antagonists.”

Democrats and many in the media are taking the side of the intelligence community, calling the Republican efforts partisan. House Democrats are said to be writing a counter-memo.

“We need to produce our own memo that lays out the actual facts and shows how the majority memo distorts the work of the FBI and the Department of Justice,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, the lead Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Which is consistent, obviously, with the fact that what we are dealing with here is the unprecedented politicization of the Department of Justice by Barack Obama and his minions.

Meantime, the Department of Justice has officially warned the House Intelligence Committee not to release its memo. It’s like the possible defendant in a criminal trial threatening prosecutors for having the audacity to reveal alleged evidence to the judge and jury.

More evidence of how far gone in Democratic Party partisanship the Department of Justice is. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a conservative Attorney General? Someone like Jeff Sessions?

This is the first time I can recall open government groups and many reporters joining in the argument to keep the information secret. They are strangely uncurious about alleged improprieties with implications of the worst kind: Stasi-like tactics used against Americans.

Actually, I don’t think it is surprising at all. “Jim Treacher” diagnosed this journalistic disease long ago:

Michael Ramirez gets the last word. Click to enlarge:

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses