It’s been a horrendous week for the FBI.
With its credibility already at rock bottom, each day brought a fresh scandal, and yet from the bureau’s unctuous public statements, there is no remorse.
Nothing to see here. Please move along. Which of course the complicit media is more than happy to do.
Here are the top scandals of the week:
1) The Durham report. Here is the official record, for the history books, that the FBI’s “Russia collusion” investigation was cooked up by Hillary Clinton to denigrate Donald Trump by tying him to Russia “as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server” — and that, despite knowing it was bogus, the FBI went ahead and launched the ill-fated Crossfire Hurricane investigation, while dropping four probes into the Clinton Foundation.
In fact, there was more evidence that the Clinton campaign had colluded with Russia to produce the farcical “Steele dossier,” on which Crossfire Hurricane relied, than ever there was of Trump collusion.
‘Surprise and dismay’
Special counsel John Durham fingers the men on the seventh floor of Washington, DC’s J. Edgar Hoover Building, Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who perverted the power of the FBI in order to interfere with the 2016 election on behalf of Clinton.
FBI leaders were “fired up,” as one agent described it, about whatever tenuous piece of information derogatory to Trump floated across their desks during the election campaign, any rumor, no matter how implausible.
They encouraged their underlings to do whatever it took to stop Trump winning, including obtaining secret surveillance warrants on his campaign members under false pretenses.
They duped them by hiding crucial exculpatory information, including intelligence of what Durham calls “the Clinton plan” to frame Trump as a Kremlin asset.
In one sad section of his report, Durham describes the “surprise and dismay” of FBI employees who had been “actively involved in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation” after he showed them declassified portions of that intelligence.
One supervisory special agent “became visibly upset and emotional, left the interview room with his counsel, and subsequently returned to state emphatically that he had never been apprised of the Clinton Plan intelligence.”
That was the moment the agent realized he was played for a chump by FBI leadership, as was the entire bureau, whose reputation will never recover.
When Durham questioned Hillary Clinton about the intelligence, she shamelessly dismissed it as a “rabbit hole” and said it “looked like Russian disinformation to me; they’re very good at it, you know.”
Her campaign operatives John Podesta, Jake Sullivan and Jennifer Palmieri denied to Durham that they knew of any plan to tie Trump to Russia and all separately described the idea as “ridiculous.”
But they knew the campaign had funded the bogus Steele report and that its main line of attack was to frame Trump as a national security threat because of imaginary ties to Russia that they had planted with the FBI and media.
They were unsuccessful. Trump won, to the chagrin of the FBI manipulators.
From then on, it was a cover-up to hide their abuses from the incoming administration, and that is indeed what the Mueller probe turned out to be, stacked as it was with Crossfire Hurricane plotters, all the time crippling Trump’s presidency and poisoning any attempt to normalize relations with Russia, with who knows what geopolitical ramifications.
The ringleaders of this crime against the American people, including Comey, McCabe, rabid Trump-hater Peter Strzok, then deputy assistant director of counterintelligence, declined to be interviewed by Durham, and he inexplicably declined to use his power to compel their testimony.
In their arrogance, they show no remorse but continue to prosper as paid liars on CNN and MSNBC or, in Comey’s case, doing the rounds as an “author” to earn multimillion-dollar advances and lie some more.
2) On Thursday, three wrongfully suspended FBI employees testified to the House weaponization subcommittee about the shocking abuses they observed, and the vicious retaliation they suffered from the bureau after they made protected whistleblower complaints.
Having suspended them without pay, refused to release records that would allow them to seek other employment and leaked personal information about the men to the media, the FBI stripped their security clearances before they went to Washington.
Garret O’Boyle fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as an infantryman in the Army’s 101st Airborne, before becoming a police officer and then a decorated FBI special agent.
Marcus Allen also won medals fighting in Iraq and Kuwait before becoming an exemplary employee at the FBI.
Steve Friend was a distinguished police officer and FBI special agent.
Together they testified about the frightening weaponization of the world’s most powerful law enforcement agency, which seems more akin to a criminal enterprise run amok, currently in service to partisan political interests, but really just out of control.
The three men accused the FBI of targeting Catholics, pro-life groups and parents attending school board meetings; of cooking the books on domestic terrorism; of unconstitutionally using SWAT teams to intimidate nonviolent January 6 suspects; of investigating Americans for nothing more than taking a bus to Washington to hear their president speak; of coercing Bank of America to turn over credit card transactions of anyone who came to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, whether they went to the Capitol or not.
And so on.
We would know little about the FBI’s victimization of blameless Americans if it were not for these brave men.
For their integrity, they have been savagely punished by the FBI, smeared by the media and traduced by Democrats such as the insufferable Stacey Plaskett and Dan Goldman as grifters and MAGA sympathizers.
O’Boyle, a father of four, described how the FBI treated him when he started to speak out against the abuses.
They allowed him “to accept orders to a new position halfway across the country. They allowed us to sell my family’s home. They ordered me to report to the new unit when our youngest daughter was only 2 weeks old. Then, on my first day on the new assignment, they suspended me; rendering my family homeless and refused to release our household goods, including our clothes, for weeks,” he said.
Public sees the truth
3) On Friday, a FISA court order revealed that the FBI has been misusing a surveillance tool almost 300,000 times in 2020-2021, including doing 23,000 searches on Jan. 6 suspects and 20,000 searches on a congressional candidate’s donors.
The FBI also refused to comply with a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee to hand over a document alleging that Joe Biden accepted bribes to change US policy while he was VP.
In the light of just one week of FBI shame, the latest Harvard Harris Poll showing deep public mistrust in the FBI comes as no surprise. Not only do 69% of voters believe the FBI violated its own standards in the Russia collusion probe, 70% are concerned that the bureau will interfere in future elections.
The FBI is out of control and everyone knows it.
