Senate Republicans are poised to help pass a massive spending bill that includes billions of dollars more for the FBI.
This is despite a recent whistleblower disclosure, reported exclusively by The Washington Times, that bureau management in Washington pressured its agents around the country to hide the number of hours they spent on the Jan. 6 investigation and inflate time spent on other cases.
According to the anonymous whistleblower, the scheme’s purpose was to boost the FBI’s budget requests to Congress and the year-end spending bill shows the bureau is getting over and above what it received in fiscal year 2022.
The spending package appropriated $11.33 billion for the FBI to investigate “extremist violence and domestic terrorism.” That’s $569.6 million above the levels appropriated for the 2022 fiscal year and $524 million more than President Biden requested in his budget.
Additionally, the U.S. attorneys’ offices received $2.63 billion, which is an increase of $212.1 million above fiscal year 2022 to further support prosecutions related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and domestic terrorism cases.
Rep. Dan Bishop, North Carolina Republican, called these provisions among the most “egregious” in the $1.7 trillion 4,000-page spending bill.
The FBI is also getting a new, $375 million headquarters with lawmakers from Virginia and Maryland competing for their state to be the bureau’s new home.
The bill appropriated the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives $1.75 billion toward increased responses to gun violence, $215.9 million more than the agency received in fiscal year 2022.
The bill prescribed that Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the top Republican on the Appropriation Committee who is retiring at the end of the year, will have an FBI training center in his state renamed after him. He already has several other federal buildings named after him.
The whistleblower disclosure submitted to Congress said that a senior official in the FBI’s counterterrorism unit at the Washington headquarters urged the bureau’s field offices to stop agents from recording hours when they are working on investigations related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The supervisors in the field offices were told the agents should instead say they were working on other violations, such as international terrorism, and other investigations, when recording hours in the FBI’s time and attendance system, known as WebTA.
Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who will chair the Oversight Committee in the next Congress, called for the FBI’s funding to be blocked until the agency explains how it used its relationship with Twitter’s previous management to allegedly violate First Amendment rights of Americans and meddle in elections.
“In the beginning, I thought that there were probably two or three rogue employees who were orchestrating this cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story, but now we know the FBI had a division of at least 80 agents,” Mr. Comer said on Fox Business.
“We also know that the FBI paid Twitter over $3 million for their time, all the time they took over the past couple of years in telling them who to suppress, who to ban. You know, it’s just things that the government has no role in.”
Senate Minority Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, however, is adamant about passing the spending legislation saying in his floor remarks Wednesday morning, “There is no question the bipartisan funding bill is imperfect.”
“If Senate Republicans controlled this chamber, we would have handled the appropriations process differently from top to bottom. But given the reality of where we stand today, Senators have two options this week: We will either give our Armed Forces the resources and certainty that they need, or we will deny it to them,” Mr. McConnell said.
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.
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