As damning as John Durham’s report on the FBI’s abominable handling of alleged Russian collusion by Donald Trump in 2016 is, it is not an emotional document. But on Thursday three FBI informants showed us the human faces of this deplorable corruption.
Corruption that on Friday we learned from a bombshell Washington Post report includes wrongfully using the Section 702 database to surveil Americans an astounding 278,000 times, including January 6th suspects and conservative political donors.
FBI agents Garret O’Boyle, Marcus Allen and Steve Friend, all of whom say they were stripped of security clearance and pay for bringing concerns about FBI abuses to their superiors, painted a scary picture as they testified before the House subcommittee on the weaponization of government.
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Before getting to the shameless punishment meted out by the FBI to these men for simply expressing concerns, let's look at those concerns, because they should shake us to the core.
Friend says that he was punished by superiors after he objected to participating in a SWAT team arrest of a January 6th suspect who was actively cooperating with law enforcement. Apparently at the FBI, to even suggest that the agency not escalate an otherwise peaceful situation is forbidden.
Allen claims he was sidelined after sharing open-source materials that questioned the FBI’s handling of the January 6th investigation. God, forbid we have agents communicating among themselves their criticisms of top brass. No, the message is clear, shut up and stay in line.
O’Boyle has described what could fairly be called, if accurate, a conspiracy to pad the number of white-supremacist-driven domestic terrorism cases in the agency, both to ensure more funds in that area and to drive a pernicious political narrative.
This is the FBI that targeted parents for having the nerve to show up at school board meetings. This is the FBI that treats the prolife movement like it’s Al Qaeda. This is the FBI that wants to infiltrate Catholic Churches to spy on the faithful in prayer.
According to committee chair Rep. Jim Jordan, R-OH, there are dozens more whistleblowers who have been interviewed, and in its own scathing report, the committee outlines what we already suspected, an FBI that is partisan and out of control.
One would imagine that the Democrats on the committee might take the slightest interest in these alleged FBI abuses, but not on your life, instead they berated the witnesses and claimed that the entire hearing was just a charade meant to help Donald Trump.
In one utterly bizarre moment, California Democrat Rep. Linda Sanchez, referred to a tweet, supportive of the Jan 6th riots, from an account with ‘Marcus Allen" in its handle. Even after the witness testified it was not his account, the deranged congresswoman proceeded to read it anyway and ask Allen if he agreed with it.
Is this the new standard? If you share a name with someone on Twitter, even one of the most common names in the country, you must answer for the content of that person’s tweets? This is the kind of fascistic nonsense one expects from a Soviet trial in the 1950s not from a sitting member of Congress.
The FBI claims that punishments these men received were for normal and routine violations of protocol. Really? O’Boyle was mid-move when he was reprimanded and not allowed to access his children's clothing. All three have been deeply financially harmed.
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Is it just a coincidence that these three men, and the other dozens were severely criticizing the FBI, is it just a coincidence that the confirmation bias and other misdeeds in the agency mirror with frightening detail the findings of the Durham report? Is it just a coincidence that a database was used to wrongfully spy on conservative Americans?
All of this should scare the hell out of every American citizen – the bias at the FBI, the targeting of everyday people exercising their rights and the retribution towards any in the agency who dare to question it. And maybe most importantly that Democrats have covered their eyes and dammed their ears to these abuses.
Perhaps the most important result of Republicans winning the House in last year’s midterms is the ability to hold just these kinds of investigations and hearings, to let us see in flesh and blood the human beings harmed by this corruption.
But it is not enough to expose this deep-state depravity, there must be consequences, there must be action. Frankly, there must be wholesale changes in personnel and policy at the top level.
Democrats have shown that not only are they incapable of fixing this existential crisis, they won’t even acknowledge it exists. Next year, as Americans go to the polls the FBI is on the ballot, and anyone who wants a free country rather than a police state should think carefully about that before they cast a ballot.
