Given the FBI’s role in the Russia-collusion hoax, and its other interventions in political life, little wonder it’s lost the trust of many Americans. Durham shows in stark detail how the FBI teamed up with Clinton and the Democrats to try to undermine Trump. The FBI’s house needs clearing out, in terms of both personnel and practices. Congress needs to take action and put these jumped-up bureaucrats back in their rightful place. – The FBI is a danger to democracy

Although the USA has agencies like the CIA and the NSA to spy on foreign enemies and try and deal with them the FBI has the counter-intelligence role within the USA.

One of the problems is that it hasn’t been very good at its job:

  • 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 as I pointed out in Part I, many of the Islamic Jihadist plots the FBI supposedly foiled had the FBI at their core:

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.

After the 1995 Murrah Building Bombing, much play was made about “Right Wing Militias” and other “anti-government extremists”, particularly by President Bill Clinton as a political effort to set his GOP foes back on their heels in the 1996 election.

But the FBI was just as concerned about all this, as it had been for several years with things like the Ruby Ridge siege (which was actually one of the motivations of the 1995 bombers). As a result, they saw nothing of the rise of Islamic Jihadist terrorism and thus the 9/11 attacks.

History is repeating:

Soon after the Gaza war began, Wray appeared before the House Committee on Homeland Security and said that homegrown violent extremists, or HVEs, posed the single greatest immediate foreign terrorist threat to the United States.

“HVEs are people located and radicalized to violence primarily in the United States, who are not receiving individualized direction from [foreign terrorist organizations] but are inspired by FTOs, including the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (“ISIS”) and al-Qa’ida and their affiliates, to commit violence.”

Perhaps the FBI should have not been spending so much time on the following crap.

The Russian Collusion nonsense, which included the following:

  • An FBI informant trying to entrap a Trump aide with boasts of his “Russian contacts”: it didn’t work, the aide rejecting the informant and his claims.
  • Ignoring the links between Steele (who supposedly wrote the infamous “dossier”) and the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, known for his ties to President Vladimir Putin, sanctioned by the US government years earlier, and with clear evidence that he’d fed Steele fake information.
  • One of the key FBI agents, Charles McGonigal, led 150 counter-intelligence agents in New York and was heavily involved in the Russia Collusion investigation before he retired in 2018. In 2023 he was arrested for violating US sanctions by trying to get Deripaska off the sanctions list in 2019, and for which he’d been well paid via shell companies.
  • The FBI lied to the FISA court to get spying warrants against the Trump campaign, using as their “source” a Washington Post article whose source turned out to be Christopher Steele, who was feeding the same bullshit to the FBI. They also did it with a Yahoo story. In both cases the FBI claimed the MSM stories “confirmed” Steele’s “tips,” when it was actually Steele “confirming” himself. FBI veterans of the FISA process said they have never known the bureau to cite media stories as evidence to corroborate leads or support probable cause to obtain such all-invasive warrants from the spy court.
  • By 2023 it was known that the FBI had hidden the full extent of these serial frauds on the FISA wiretapping court by redacting details of its deceptions in FOIA documents, which meant they’d learned nothing despite being caught re-handed.

As Ace of Spades put it in his inimitable style:

It is simply not even remotely plausible that the FBI agents rigging the election and conning the court into granting them a FISA “didn’t know they couldn’t use the same source as the original tipster and also use him to confirm his own tip.” They knew that. They knew they were breaking the rules — and the law.

But they did it anyway.
…
But that’s how the game works. When a crime has been committed and you don’t want to prosecute the criminals because they’re your palz and fellow Democrats, you say “the system” was the Real Criminal, and you give that system oh such a good spanking! You make sure that system is good and chastised and promises to never do wrong again!

That link also includes the story about the Israeli hackers

In very related news: The FBI investigated who it was in government who had paid an Israeli hacking company — a company on the list of the government’s blacklist, a company government agents were forbidden to do business with — for a tool used to spy on American citizens.

The FBI did find the criminal behind this — Surprise! It was the FBI!

Whoops!

Whoopsie!

Historian Victor Davis Hanson had some fun with this way back in 2019 with an article, Should the FBI Run the Country?, in which he laid out a thought experiment where the Bush Administration launches an investigation into Barack Obama in 2008 because of his ties to people like pro-Gaddafi extremist Louis Farrakhan, pro-Palestinian extremist Rashid Khalidi, and Bill Ayers of Weather Underground infamy – all aided by a John McCain’s effort to concoct “evidence” about Obama’s foreign contacts with Iran, fed to an FBI that is wary of Obama in the wake of 9/11. Read it to see how well it tracks with what was actually done to Trump by Hillary Clinton and the FBI.

Then there’s the FBI raid on Trump’s Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, where FBI Director Wray was asked in Congress about internal dissent at senior levels of the FBI over the action – with Wray refusing to even call it a “raid” and obfuscating every question:

But House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (D-NY) put him on the hot seat about why he hasn’t complied with 50 requests from the House Judiciary Committee (which she also serves on) for all manner of information and documents related to FBI operations. Some of those requests have been pending for some time.

Stefanik let him have it, emphasizing that he is required to be accountable to Congress “and by extension the American people” and complying with the Committee’s oversight requests was just the “bare minimum” that they were required to do. 

Accountable? AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA….

That same article describes the GOP House efforts to also find out what happened with the FBI meddling in 2020 with Twitter, Facebook and other Social Media companies to (See The Twitter Files Index for the details) to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. I’ll cover that in more detail in another post since the upshot is that the case is now before the Supreme Court as a test of government interference with the 1st Amendment, but you can read more details of what the FBI did in this article which starts with the same question arising out of their terrorism investigations, From What, Exactly, Is the FBI Protecting Us?

Social media monopolies like Facebook and Twitter worked hand-in-glove with the FBI, as well as other government agencies, to suppress accounts and censor stories they jointly deemed misinformation, disinformation, or otherwise harmful to the country during the 2020 election. 

And they’re still at it:

The FBI spends “every day, all day long” interrogating people over their Facebook posts. At least, that’s what agents told Stillwater, Oklahoma, resident Rolla Abdeljawad when they showed up at her house to ask her about her social media activity.  Three FBI agents came to Abdeljawad’s house and said that they had been given “screenshots” of her posts by Facebook. Her lawyer Hassan Shibly posted a video of the incident online on Wednesday.

So FBI agents are so screwed up that they actually admit this now?

Incidentally, as long ago as early 2022 the FBI claimed that it had “lost” Hunter Biden’s laptop:

Vorndran told Congress he didn’t know where the laptop is, nor does he even know who SHOULD know the whereabouts of the laptop. Weird, considering he IS the assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division.
…
Gaetz laughingly continued, “Have you assessed whether or not the first family is compromised as a result of the Hunter Biden laptop?” Vorndran played dumb-dumb and again claimed he knew nothing.

You should also understand that the FBI office “investigating” Hunter Biden’s laptop is the same office that “screwed up” the Russia Collusion story:

Besides his scathing summary of the FBI’s use of Danchenko as a CHS, Durham also revealed several new aspects of the initial botched investigation of Danchenko that was headed out of the FBI’s Baltimore field office. While Durham had revealed during Danchenko’s trial that the FBI had mistakenly closed out its investigation against Danchenko, wrongly believing he had left the country, Monday’s report showed how bush league that mistake was: All it took was for the special counsel’s office to review the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Person Encounter List for Igor Danchenko to determine he had not departed the U.S. on a one-way ticket to London, as the Baltimore field office believed.

Seriously? This is basic stuff!

By 2023 all of this, plus the Durham report that showed the FBI had no reason to start the Crossfire Hurricane operation (their official name for the investigation of the Russia-Trump Collusion claims), finally led to the well regarded Spike reporter, Sean Collins to put it bluntly, The FBI is a danger to democracy:

In response to Durham, the bureau claimed that it has already ‘implemented dozens of corrective actions’ that would have prevented the ‘missteps’ that occurred in 2016. By describing its actions as ‘missteps’, the FBI shows that it is not taking Durham’s account of its corruption seriously.

Indeed, the FBI seems to think that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with its actions and behaviour. Hence it has actually become even more involved in the political process since 2016.