The current FBI needs to be torn down – and perhaps not even rebuilt.

Their actual motto is Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity, but the list of crimes that the FBI has committed continues to steadily add up to make a mockery of that. This is just one of the more recent examples:

On Tuesday, the court struck down the FBI and Department of Justice in what looks to be a precedent-setting case called Snitko v. United States, dealing a significant blow to the government’s expansive search and seizure practices known as “inventory searches.”  The case started out with a 2021 raid on a company called US Private Vaults, a California company offering secure safe deposit boxes with minimal personal identification requirements… The FBI claimed it was just an “inventory search” that would allow box contents to be inventoried and returned to their owners. This requires following a specific set of rules that the FBI didn’t bother to use.

They broke open some 700 boxes. But as the author, former Army infantryman and IG investigator, points out, even though they lost the case – to such a degree that after two years fighting not to have their records destroyed, agreed to hand them over to the plaintiffs just to avoid this judicial decision – there were no consequences:

No one was prosecuted. No one was fired. No one cared. “Deprivation of Right Under Color of Law” is a felony. There is a division of the Justice Department that prosecutes these cases. The DOJ IG didn’t open a case to see how widespread this problem is, probably because they already know. 

And little people got screwed:

Joseph Ruiz, an unemployed chef went to court to retrieve some $57,000 seized by the FBI, whereby the judge ordered the agency to tell Ruiz why they were trying to confiscate the money. According to court papers, an FBI agent claimed the money was from drug trafficking…or so they apparently assumed. According to the FBI, Ruiz’s income was insufficient to justify him having that much money

The thing is that a lot of this is not new. Under the leadership of the cross-dressing J Edgar Hoover, the FBI was a law unto itself for decades, with Hoover carefully informing new political arrivals in D.C., including even Presidents, that his agency would keep their secrets safe – as long as his precious agency and his leadership of it was left alone. And during this time one of the most popular TV shows was The FBI, which was carefully watched by the agency and thus showed it in the best possible light.

After Hoover died things seemed to improve through the 1970’s-1990’s. Scandals largely vanished and the agency gained a good reputation with other police and agencies for its investigative efforts, including Cold War counter-intelligence and work against the Mafia, which Hoover had ignored because he was terrified some agents might be compromised by them. In the end that happened anyway in the 1990’s, at least in Boston, as documented by journalist Howie Carr:

Boston’s also long been setting the pace for payoffs. Whitey Bulger’s partner, Stevie Flemmi, said their mob had six local FBI agents on the payroll. Six! But hey, during one of the rare internal investigations of fed corruption back in 2017, the inspector general reported that in D.C., they’d discovered 50 agents were taking “gratuities” — also known as bribes — from assorted bad actors.

Corruption which continues into the modern day. But there was none worse than the 1992 Ruby Ridge killings:

In 1992, the FBI ran an entrapment scheme on rural Idaho resident Randy Weaver, branded a “white separatist.” A gunfight claimed the life of a U.S. marshal and Weaver’s son Sammy, only 14 years old. The FBI then deployed massive military force, helicopters, armored vehicles and such, against a single family. Army-trained FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot Randy’s wife Vicki through the head as she held her infant child. The FBI claims “Weaver’s wife was accidentally shot and killed by an FBI sniper,” but a Fox News documentary dug up another side to the story. The FBI thought Vicki Weaver was the family leader. Snipers are carefully trained to “acquire” their targets. The chances that the killing of Vicki Weaver was an accident range between slim and none.

But in recent years it has gotten worse, worse even than during Hoover’s time, and the declining trust of politicians, especially Republicans, and the public in the FBI shows it. The rot seems to have started in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. When pressed by President Bush as to why the FBI (and TBF other agencies) had failed to stop the plot when they were actually tracking some of the terrorists:

In May 2001, according to “The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States,” FBI counterterrorism boss Dale Watson had only two people looking at threats from Osama bin Laden and his organization. FBI assessments of the potential use of flight training by terrorists and warnings of “radical Middle Easterners attending flight school,” were never passed along to the Federal Aviation Administration. 

The FBI and its new Director, Robert Mueller, (only in the job a few days) felt humiliated and vowed to improve their watch on Islamic terrorism in the USA. It hasn’t worked out too well:

  • In 2009 the FBI failed to prevent US Major Nidal Hasan from carrying out his mass-shooting despite monitoring his communications. They did not “assess Hasan to be involved in terrorist activities.”
  • In 2013, the FBI failed to stop the brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from bombing the Boston Marathon, despite Russian intelligence warning them in 2011.
  • In 2015, the FBI failed to prevent terrorists Syeed Farook and Tashfeen Malik from murdering 14 innocents in San Bernardino.
  • In 2016, the FBI failed to prevent Omar Mateen from murdering 49 and wounding many others in Orlando, Florida.

And the incredible story associated with all this failure to protect US citizens from Islamic Jihadists in the last twenty years is that the broke the law even as they failed:

Ever since the War on Terror started, the FBI has targeted Muslim communities with informants, who receive $100,000 or more for their work and may be engaged in illegal activities that go unaddressed. Trevor Aaronson analyzed thousands of FBI cases and found that, “Of these defendants caught up in FBI terrorism sting operations, an FBI informant was the person who led one of every three terrorist plots, and the FBI also provided all of the necessary weapons, money, and transportation.” The most infamous example is when an FBI agent told a soon-to-be shooter to “Tear up Texas,” right before that person shot up a crowded hall. Even the San Bernadino shooter had contact with people “on the FBI’s radar.”

Given that, you won’t be surprised by this:

A 2019 internal audit of the FBI detected hundreds of violations related to “sensitive investigative matters,” which are investigations into elected officials, candidates, or political organizations. A review of 353 sensitive cases uncovered 747 violations. “A majority of the cases studied, 191, involved domestic public officials,”

Even in the world of good old-fashioned counter-intelligence the FBI have screwed up, [2021] Trial reveals federal agents falsely accused a UT professor born in China of spying. And for just ordinary domestic crimes they’ve been asleep at the switch while they focused on other things like Trump and Russian collusion:

[S]ome of America’s toughest female athletes recounted to a Senate committee their painful tales of how the FBI ignored evidence that team doctor Larry Nassar was a sexual predator…According to an analysis by the New York Times, at least 40 women and girls, including some of the youngest victims, were assaulted by Nassar between July 2015, the first contact with the FBI, and September 2016. Had the Star not published its exposé of Nassar that month, which finally prompted some action by the FBI, who knows how long his depraved predation would have continued?

“If they’re not going to protect me, I want to know, who are they trying to protect?” McKayla Maroney, a two-time Olympic medalist and one of Nassar’s most frequent victims, asked the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 15.

That’s a good question and the answer is that the FBI is now so politicised that it simply focuses on cases most likely to put it in a bad light.