The Estimable Jim Jordan has produced a 1050 page document that details a variety of issues with the DOJ and FBI.
(It’s actually a 50 page report plus about 1000 pages of an email chain that’s 2/3rds signatures and headers between his staff and various people in the Executive Branch.)
I got to the summary on page 2 and wanted to start offering some reasons to be dubious, before continuing further.
Firstly, it should be noted that the FBI is possibly the most Republican organization in the Federal government. The director/acting director has been a Republican since it’s founding, about a hundred years ago, continuously except for one two month gap in the 90s. They recruit exclusively from police officers. Police are more likely to be Republican with, it seems, about 84% of them pro-Trump in 2016. And we saw, during the Trump investigations, that all of the FBI agents who were targeted by him - McCabe, Strzok, Page, Baker, etc. - were Republicans.
Allegation: The FBI is artificially inflating statistics about domestic violent extremism in the nation. Whistleblowers have described how FBI leadership is pressuring line agents to reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism even if the matter does not meet the criteria.
Skepticism: I know that the military has been looking for extremists in their own force and trying to root them out. I wouldn’t be surprised if the FBI has been doing the same, post-January 4th. And, in that case, I would expect said extremists to try to complain to sympathetic extremists in government that the leadership was working against extremists in an unfair and evil ways. To find this accusation plausible, we would need to have some sense of how these whistleblowers were examined for credibility. Were they checked for extremist sympathies?
Allegation: The FBI is abusing its counterterrorism authorities to investigate parents who spoke at school board meetings. Whistleblowers disclosed how, shortly after the National School Boards Association urged President Biden to use the Patriot Act against American parents, the FBI Counterterrorism Division set up a special “threat tag” to track school board-related cases.
Skepticism: Mostly the same as the first but, additionally, this sounds like a very roundabout way of saying that someone reported terrorist threats against schools from parents and the FBI investigated them as terrorist threats. That doesn’t seem unreasonable. If you don’t want to get treated like a terrorist, don’t threaten to go shoot up a school.
Allegation: The FBI has abused its foreign intelligence authorities to spy on American citizens, including people associated with the campaign of President Trump in 2016.
Skepticism: Those FBI powers were up for extension during the Trump presidency and such personages as Devin Nunes and Donald Trump passed it. If the man who was spied on feels like the powers are pretty okay then they’re probably pretty okay.
Allegation: The FBI is clearing the Bureau of employees who dissent from its woke, leftist
agenda.
Skepticism: Same as first (plus the reminder that the FBI is a deeply Republican organization).
