OPINION:
“Fool me once, shame on you,” the adage goes. “Fool me twice, shame on me.”
There is plenty of disgrace to go around for schemes meant to deceive — once, twice and further occasions — on the part of the FBI. Americans may feel humiliated for getting repeatedly played. Still, it is the agency itself that is overdue for remorse — for applying wildly disparate standards in investigating Trump collusion and Biden bribery. Until the nation’s so-called top law enforcement organization can prove its ethics are true, there is little reason to regard its words and deeds with anything but suspicion.
The FBI’s roughshod treatment of Republican Donald Trump before, during and after his presidency has given new meaning to “the seven-year itch.” The maddening national affliction, stretching from 2016 to the present, has gotten under the skin of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, prompting his dogged pursuit of a long-overdue remedy.
Accordingly, Mr. Jordan has challenged Attorney General Merrick Garland in a June 1 letter to unbosom whether toxic influences from the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation of alleged Trump-Russia collusion have seeped into special counsel Jack Smith’s ongoing inquiry into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Last month, special counsel John Durham released his final report on the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, concluding the operation was a product of the FBI’s politicized bureaucracy. The repurposing of any material gathered during that debunked operation — rooted in agency collusion with Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign — should be off-limits, Mr. Jordan asserts.
“It is clear that Congress must consider legislative reforms to the FBI, and the Committee has been engaged in robust oversight to inform those legislative proposals,” the Ohio Republican said. “In the interim, however, due to the FBI’s documented political bias, the Justice Department must ensure any ongoing investigations are not poisoned by this same politicization.”
Obviously.
Among other things, the chairman asked Mr. Garland to reveal whether FBI employees involved in previous, unwarranted Trump investigations are working on Mr. Smith’s inquiry. That they shouldn’t be is equally evident.
Even as Mr. Jordan seeks transparency from the FBI’s boss at the Justice Department, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer has pressed FBI Director Christopher Wray to produce material purportedly embarrassing to President Biden that an FBI whistleblower claims the agency has buried. The document, an FD-1023 form, contains allegations made by an FBI informant in June 2020 that Mr. Biden engaged in a bribery scheme as vice president to manipulate U.S. foreign policy in exchange for $5 million to be paid to his family’s businesses.
To be fair, Americans can draw no conclusion about the president’s guilt or innocence from an unverified allegation. They cannot help but be appalled, however, at the absence of fairness in the FBI’s apparent strategy to keep whistleblower accusations against Mr. Biden hidden from the public on the heels of shattering robust legal restraints to spy on Mr. Trump and fueling a furtive campaign to sabotage his presidency.
Until FBI leadership is purged of its malign political machinations, the agency whose ethics are drenched in deception deserves little but suspicion.
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