Republican lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee have released a 1,000-page report detailing a “rampant culture of unaccountability, manipulation, and abuse at the highest level” of the FBI.
The GOP lawmakers say the report builds on several whistleblower disclosures that describe the FBI’s Washington hierarchy as “rotted at its core” with a “systemic culture of unaccountability.”
The report also accuses the bureau of “weaponizing” the federal government against its political opponents and aims to show how FBI leadership is biased against conservatives, particularly senior officials pressuring agents to reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism.
“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,” the report states.
The report, which was put together with the help of a parade of at least 14 whistleblowers from inside the FBI, puts a bullseye on the bureau and the Justice Department for intense investigations if, as expected, Republicans take control of Congress in the midterm elections on Tuesday.
The report is likely an outline of oversight investigations that the GOP plan to launch next year.
It also reveals whistleblower disclosures about how the FBI is “misrepresenting” the extent of domestic violent extremism across the country by categorizing Jan. 6-related investigations as organic cases that come from local field offices, as opposed to one single incident.
“In both ways, the FBI is fueling the Biden administration’s narrative that domestic violent extremism is the biggest threat to our nation,” the committee Republicans wrote.
The report also revealed that:
• The FBI downplayed and reduced the spread of the serious allegations of wrongdoing leveled against President Biden’s son Hunter.
• The FBI abused its foreign surveillance authorities.
• The Justice Department and FBI conducted an unprecedented raid on the home of a former president.
• The FBI followed a Republican lawmaker on a family vacation to seize his cell phone.
• The Justice Department and the FBI have allowed attacks on pro-life facilities and churches to continue while pushing a pro-choice agenda.
• The FBI conducted an “intelligence” assessment of a conservative charity under the guise of investigating unrelated alleged crimes.
• The FBI purged employees who refused to align themselves with the leadership’s political ideology.
• The FBI has helped Big Tech to censor Americans’ political speech.
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the stewardship of Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, is broken,” tweeted Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the committee’s top Republican.
In a statement to The Washington Times, the FBI said that agency has been transparent with Congress, providing testimony and responding to letters from lawmakers on numerous occasions “to provide an accurate accounting of how we do our work.”
“The men and women of the FBI devote themselves to protecting the American people from terrorism, violent crime, cyber threats and other dangers. Put quite simply: we follow the facts without regard for politics. While outside opinions and criticism often come with the job, we will continue to follow the facts wherever they lead, do things by the book, and speak through our work,” it said.
The FBI has been under intense scrutiny since its pursuit of Trump-Russia collusion during the 2016 campaign and during President Trump’s time in office. Since then, suspicions of political influence at the FBI and DOJ only increased, especially after the raid in August of Trump’s home at the private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
Justice Department officials have accused Mr. Trump of stashing classified documents at his home.
The report also detailed how the Justice Department and FBI used counterterrorism resources to target parents protesting local school boards, what the committee members characterized as an abuse of counterterrorism authority.
Whistleblowers disclosed to the lawmakers how, just after the National School Boards Association urged President Biden to use the Patriot Act against parents, the FBI Counterterrorism Division established a special “threat tag” to track school board-related cases.
“Whistleblowers provided evidence of how the FBI opened investigations into one mom for allegedly telling a local school board ‘we are coming for you’ and a dad simply because he ‘rails against the government and ‘has a lot of guns,’” the report stated.
As a result of the FBI’s “political meddling,” the report said, the FBI’s criminal investigations are “dragging” and resources are being “pulled away” from real law enforcement.
One whistleblower described how he was told that child sexual abuse material investigations were “no longer an FBI priority” so that the agent could work a Washington-directed politically charged case instead.
FBI agent Kyle Seraphin, who was suspended from the agency earlier in the year and is one of the whistleblowers to Congress, highlighted a problem noted in the report: The Office of Inspector General writes up reports about the bureau that are never followed up on.
“There are the FBI audits. This is Inspection Division. … The FBI internally audits itself, and then it does nothing about it. So there was an audit of 353 cases that found 747 compliance errors of our own policy internally,” Mr. Seraphin said. “That’s a lot of errors.”
Lawmakers call the report the first “comprehensive accounting” of the bureau’s problems to date. They say it focuses primarily on the FBI abuses through the reports of whistleblowers, but also examines relevant actions of the Justice Department.
The Washington Times has reached out to the FBI for comment.
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.
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