The once-revered FBI has fallen on hard times. One might pinpoint the decline beginning as far back as former Director J. Edgar Hoover’s partisan machinations during the McCarthyism years. Yet in the last several years, the bureau’s reputational hits have piled higher and higher. Every American with access to a television or the internet has heard about federal law enforcement’s participation in election-interference in the 2016 election of President Donald Trump. Not content to have pressed its thumb on the scale of that election and throughout President Trump’s tenure, the FBI also set its sights on journalists, members of Congress, and even soccer moms unhappy with the direction of their kids’ schools— all while turning a blind eye to brazen lawbreaking by political favorites. Some would say the agency is operating with no meaningful oversight or constraint, is increasingly erratic, and is willing to ignore the guardrails that once kept it above politics.
Last Monday’s raid on former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach County, Florida—ostensibly on behalf of the nation’s top librarians at the National Archives hunting for Presidential papers—marked a new nadir for an agency either woefully out of touch or willfully obtuse as to its own image, much less as to its proper role as a neutral observer and noncombatant in political tussles.
The Biden Justice Department appears to be drunk on power, given the audacious move to raid the former President’s home, foregoing the less drastic measure of a subpoena. This has even drawn the criticism of disgraced former Democrat New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who demanded that the DOJ explain the reasoning behind its raid or it, “will be viewed as a political tactic.” The DOJ appears to have responded by sending friendly talking heads and media flacks into damage control mode, without substantively addressing its extraordinary and unprecedented move, at least until Attorney General Merrick Garland’s two-minute nervous and scripted appearance Thursday afternoon attempting to justify the raid, which he admitted he authorized, while he criticized the former President for being outraged at the violation of his private home.
The trajectory is familiar; the first two years of Trump’s presidency were overshadowed by the fake Russia collusion conspiracy whose seeds were sown well before the 2016 election by the Clinton campaign working hand in hand with White House operatives and senior FBI brass. The spectacle of a sanctimonious James Comey, anointing himself as the savior of the Republic, distracted from the new administration’s efforts to govern. The resulting Mueller investigation further hobbled the administration’s agenda, with subpoenas of members of his 2016 campaign and presidential administration. The whole charade ended with a whimper, with no evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russians to elect him in 2016. But the damage had been done – with the full and enthusiastic participation of FBI leaders who lied to the FISA court to obtain surveillance on Carter Page and others, and doubtless many other transgressions that will remain hidden behind the blue wall.
And what about those sacred government documents? Hillary Clinton, as Obama’s Secretary of State, used a private email server located in her bathroom in Chappaqua for official communications, including 2,100 emails deemed classified. Many of these emails were ultimately hacked and released to the public. Clinton was deemed to have violated 18 U.S. Code § 1924, regarding the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents and materials, yet despite other federal officers facing prison time for far less, Clinton got off with nothing more than public mockery.
This open double standard continued full speed into Hunter Biden’s questionable dealings with China, Ukraine, etc. From 2013 to 2020, the president’s son served as a member on the board of the Chinese-based private equity fund BHR Partners, where two of the China-based asset managers were the Bank of China and Harvest Fund Management, a Chinese asset management company that harvests funds for financial services. Hunter secured a $1.5 billion deal to form BHR in December 2013, when he joined his then-Vice President father and Secretary of State John Kerry on a diplomatic trip to China to discuss sensitive negotiations with the Chinese government over their expansionist activities in the South China Sea.
Hunter’s overseas dealings also saw him and a friend join the board of the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings, from 2014 to 2019, earning compensation of up to $50,000 per month. He joined amid numerous corruption probes in Ukraine related to the dealings of the company, as well as Vice President Biden’s public boasts about pushing for the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor who was investigating Burisma. Like Clinton, Hunter skated free, with no FBI investigation for corrupt foreign dealings while his father was running for President.
During the Biden administration, the FBI and DOJ have ramped up their brazen partisan approach, going after those they deem a threat to their order, carrying out a parallel investigation to the January 6 committee in Congress, targeting investigative journalists, and going after PTA moms and dads who attend school board meetings to voice criticism of woke ideology taking the place of learning
In November 2021, the FBI raided the homes and offices of current and former Project Veritas investigative journalists, including its founder, James O’Keefe. From a source, Veritas obtained the personal diary of Ashley Biden, President Biden’s daughter, which Veritas decided not to publish because it could not verify its authenticity. Despite this, the FBI recklessly conducted raids on American journalists engaging in indisputably protected First Amendment activity, clearly at the behest of lawyers for the president’s daughter, who had openly threatened to call the feds when Project Veritas called asking for comment from Ashley Biden. This conduct was egregious and beyond the pale of proper federal law enforcement activity that civil rights and free press organizations, including the ACLU and the Committee to Protect Journalists—neither of which are friendly to Project Veritas—raised the alarm.
The ACLU commented, “Unless the government had good reason to believe that Project Veritas employees were directly involved in the criminal theft of the diary, it should not have subjected them to invasive searches and seizures.” The Committee to Protect Journalists agreed, saying that lacking “a clear link between members of Project Veritas and alleged of criminal activity” the FBI raids and seizure of evidence were a “dangerous precedent that could allow law enforcement to search and confiscate reporters’ unpublished source material in vague attempts to identify whistleblowers.”
While the FBI and the DOJ gleefully arrested hundreds of participants on January 6 and left many to languish in detention as political prisoners accused of minor offenses, the leaders of Black Lives Matter riots that tore apart the country for the better part of 2020, remain at large, marked safe by today’s FBI.
Amid the outrage at school boards across the country last year and parents attending school board meetings demanding answers to the Critical Race Theory and sexualization of children in schools through woke curricula, the DOJ under the direction of Garland targeted parents who attended these meetings with a threat tag created by the FBI’s counterterrorism division. These “extremists” were helpfully placed on the regime enemies list at the behest of the National School Boards Association, who asked the Biden administration to utilize tools including the overreaching PATRIOT Act to deal with this supposed existential threat to national security. The same FBI that won’t lift a finger to stem massive and deadly fentanyl drug trafficking into the U.S. through a porous southern border, targets parents and other peaceful Americans that exercise their First Amendment rights to criticize the government and their natural rights to protect their children from harm.
Amid the leftist backlash from the Supreme Court leak of the Dobbs decision, the FBI apparently missed the radical abortion extremists busy firebombing and attacking numerous pregnancy centers, churches, and pro-life organization’s offices. They have allowed the doxxing of the Supreme Court justices without providing protection, including an alleged assassination attempt of Justice Kavanaugh as well as a group of radical abortion extremists that sought to intimidate him and his family as they ate at a D.C. restaurant. They still haven’t managed to find the leaker within a very small group of suspects working at the Supreme Court. The same FBI that can track a trespassing grandmother through her cell phone location and her Facebook posts, also can’t seem to find the person caught on video placing pipe bombs at the RNC and the DNC last January.
The United States is a large and prosperous nation with federal laws and federal problems. It needs a federal law agency to enforce at least some of those laws, but the FBI’s top brass have completely abdicated their agency’s role as a reliable and impartial American federal investigation and enforcement arm. These leaders, through successive Democrat and Republican administrations, have allowed themselves to become partisan tools of the Democratic Party in their attempts to suppress opposition and consolidate power. We’ve reached the point where the FBI itself needs to be investigated for its one-sided and often unconstitutional investigative practices; it may be broken beyond repair based on the persistent pattern of hyper-partisanship and rogue behavior we have seen from the one-hallowed agency. Congressional Republicans call for hearings and “oversight.” What’s needed is radical reform, reshaping, and a re-commitment to faithfully execute the laws of the United States, while never being used as hatchet-men pursuing a political agenda.
Harmeet Dhillon is a nationally recognized lawyer, trusted boardroom advisor, and passionate advocate for individual, corporate and institutional clients across numerous industries and walks of life. Her focus is in commercial litigation, employment law, First Amendment rights, and election law matters.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Daily Wire.