Prefer to listen rather than read? Check out the podcast version.
I do not care for the FBI at all.
I do not care for the agency that murdered Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King Jr. I am not a fan of the people who mutilated leftist organizations via COINTELPRO and still conducts massive and fourth-amendment-violating government surveillance by way of the PATRIOT act. You will never, ever catch me singing the praises of an institution that spied on me and my friends in Portland during the 2020 BLM protests.
So when conservatives talk about FBI overreach? When they say the institution is corrupt and oppressive and needs to be abolished? I agree with all those words.
Unfortunately, conservatives have no desire to eliminate the police state. They simply want to control it.
I wrote a whole article about this for Talking Points Memo that explains how conservatives can Back the Blue while clamoring for FBI agent blood, which you can read here. An excerpt:
Trump and his allies do not categorize the FBI, ICE, and the police force as different agencies of American law enforcement. They view them as either for Trump (ICE and the police) or against him (the FBI). The seeming contradiction of supporting only some of these agencies disappears when you view these efforts for what they are: consolidation of power and the elimination of opposing forces in 2024.
I am extremely pleased with how the TPM piece came out, but it didn’t have room for more than a sentence or two detailing conservative’s various and sometimes convoluted grievances against the FBI and DOJ. Most of them are bullshit. However — and this is important — some of them are not.
Let’s get into it:
Operation Crossfire Hurricane
This is the FBI investigation that eventually turned into Russiagate and the Mueller Report. It began in the summer of 2016 just days after the FBI closed their investigation into Hillary’s infamous emails.
Speaking of emails, remember how Comey announced publicly they were going to reopen the emails case like a week before the election? Yeah, they didn’t say shit about the Trump investigation. Not a single word.
Anyway, MAGA should probably be thankful for the assist but are instead apparently going to die mad about it. In 2019, then-Attorney General William Barr assigned high-profile lawyer John Durham to conduct a counter-investigation into the alleged political motivations behind Crossfire Hurricane. For over three years conservative pundits have promised that the Special Counsel was on the brink of revealing a deep Clinton-connected conspiracy that would vindicate Trump and humiliate his enemies. Instead, the investigation largely fizzled in May when a federal jury, after just six hours of deliberation, acquitted central target Michael Sussmann of lying to the FBI.
Analysis
The Trump campaign had contact with Russia. Russia definitely interfered with the 2016 election. Of course the FBI had to investigate. That’s their entire job description. They did not have to keep quiet about the investigation while trumpeting Clinton’s email scandal from the rooftops. You’d think the Trump campaign would be grateful, but they’re constitutionally incapable of it.
0 points for MAGA.
Hunter’s Laptop from Heck
Speaking of indiscretion, the Bidens really cannot stop misplacing their things. Ashley Biden left her diary in a Florida home, where it was either stolen or acquired by someone who sold it to Project Veritas and generated an ongoing surveillance overreach scandal all its own that could all have been easily avoided if Ashley Biden held onto her things a bit better.
It runs in the family. Ashley’s brother, Hunter Biden, dropped a laptop off at a repair shop and then never picked it up. The hard drive contains evidence of garden-variety nepotism and tabloid-ready pictures of Hunter and paid female companions enjoying hard drugs in various states of undress.
The story was supposed to be Trump’s October Surprise. But things didn’t work out that way.
Weeks before the 2020 election, the New York Post reported that the now-infamous laptop’s hard drive contained evidence of influence-peddling to Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm. The FBI, still raw from the James Comey 2016 debacle, refused to comment. Media outlets reported that the FBI was investigating the laptop story as possible Russian disinformation. Based on these reports, social media giants Facebook and Twitter took steps to suppress the story, going so far as to lock the Trump campaign’s Twitter account for spreading misinformation.
Just one problem: the story turned out to be true. In March of 2022, the New York Times and Washington Post managed to verify the hard drive contents. While most journalists agree that the New York Post jumped the gun in reporting an unverified story, the news understandably incensed conservatives already sore about the election loss. Worse, it emerged that the FBI was actively investigating Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings at the same time it declined to comment and sat back while social media companies buried the story.
Analysis
This is a bad one, folks. The laptop itself is, as far as I can tell, a big wet fart — nepotism is hardly new in the White House — but the FBI’s role in quashing the story and social media’s subsequent slap-happy banning spree are genuinely concerning. The FBI overstepped here.
1 point for MAGA
January 6th
What an awkward day for conservatives. Real mask-off moment. And so they have asked ever since: how could sweet, kindhearted and peaceful MAGA patriots attack and severely injure police, break into the Capitol building, and search for a vice president or congressperson to hang? Did the Devil make them do it?
Worse, they claim: it was the FBI.
Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz have directly alleged that Ray Epps, a man involved in the storming of the Capitol, was an FBI agent provocateur, and both Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton have referenced the theory. Epps denies any connection to the FBI, but we know that at least one FBI informant was in the crowd.
We also know at this point that the FBI catastrophically failed to gather or act on intelligence that indicated the day would, as Trump promised, be “wild.” To liberals, this looks like FBI collusion with the insurrectionists. Conservatives, on the other hand, see it as evidence that the agency purposefully allowed the event to happen in order to make their movement look bad.
Conservatives also fume over the FBI’s role in prosecuting those who participated in the Capitol building breach. FBI agents are the ones breaking down doors, detaining participants, and charging them in court–something the conservative movement sees as partisan.
Analysis:
Anger at the FBI for kicking down doors and arresting people is very dumb. People did crimes. Then they got arrested for crimes. The FBI did the arresting. This is all pretty normal stuff.
I have a LOT of questions about the FBI’s action and inaction surrounding January 6th. All the top Proud Boys — a group that actively planned violence in the leadup to that day — were in contact with the FBI. Every extremism expert I know thought January 6th was going to be a shitshow. How the hell is it possible they did not know?
I’d like answers on that. Meanwhile, though? It doesn’t matter as much as conservatives would like it to. Just as Russian propaganda efforts surrounding the 2016 election do not absolve America for falling for it, revelations of FBI action (or inaction) would not absolve conservatives from having an incredibly violent day in early January 2021.
Own your shit.
.25 points for MAGA
“Domestic Terrorists”
In the wake of January 6th, conservatives are especially sensitive about being labeled “domestic terrorists”--and according to them, the FBI is willing to deploy that label with a broad brush. The summer of 2021 saw the rise of disruptive and sometimes terrifying tactics deployed at school board meetings by citizens furious about masking and vaccine requirements, critical race theory, and material they saw as pornographic. In a disastrous PR move, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) wrote a letter to the Biden administration suggesting these disruptions be considered “a form of domestic terrorism” and asking for federal law enforcement to step in.
At no point did attorney General Merrick Garland (or anyone connected with the FBI) call parents domestic terrorists. He did, however, take action. He issued a memo to the FBI and federal prosecutors that asked them to look into “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers and staff." Based on this guidance, the FBI began to work with concerned school boards across the country.
A public records request by Parents Defending Education yielded email correspondence within the NSBA in the wake of the disastrous memo. These emails clearly state that the NSBA was in contact with the Biden administration about the school board situation weeks before they sent the memo, which was partially in response to questions from the administration.
The incident fueled paranoia and provided Republicans with a vivid talking point against the Biden Administration and the FBI alike. “These are not domestic [terrorists],” Julie Pickren, a Republican nominee for the Texas State Board of Education, asserted during the “We Are All Domestic Terrorists” panel at CPAC Dallas. “These are parents who just want an excellent education for their children.”
Analysis
Mistakes were made. But let’s look at the emails a little more closely.
The NSBA made a bad mistake inserting the phrase “domestic terrorists” into their memo. If it was some kind of malicious plan on their end, you’d expect them to gloat. That is, um, not what happened. Here’s a typical excerpt:
While I believe the intent was good, unfortunately, instead of helping our members and working to decrease the tensions and hostility that many of us are facing, we seem to have fanned those flames of hostility and division. Rather than helping our cause and calming the waters, this letter has re-awakened hostilities that were just beginning to finally calm down as the things many of us put in place were having a positive effect on student safety, learning, and attendance.
Also, let’s not pretend the memo and response were to parents showing up at school board meetings and loudly exercising their first amendment rights:
"A month or so ago we had an individual film himself with a parent and that parent's student on their way to a school site with a pair of zip handcuffs to arrest a principal for enforcing a quarantine policy...these are not the acts of concerned parents, nor should they be dismissed as just one off situations"
Something needed to be done about this. Asking for federal help is not the craziest idea I’ve ever heard. The way they asked for it? Not optimal.
Ultimately this was a really bad PR moment but I’m not seeing evidence of actual overreach.
0 points for MAGA
Who Cares?
Most of Trump’s complaints about the FBI are misguided. Crossfire Hurricane is fine. People who broke the law on J6 getting arrested is nothing special. The “domestic terrorists” thing is a PR failure, not actual overreach.
But the laptop thing has legs. And I have a lot of questions about FBI fuckups on J6.
Couldn’t happen to a bigger pack of assholes, of course. I have trouble shedding tears over FBI overreach against people who want to aim the exact same kind of police state against me and my friends. Last night, at a Paul Manafort book signing, the young man behind me confidently asserted that we ought to declare the entire Democratic Party a domestic terror organization. It was in keeping with the tone of the event. The rhetoric is ramping up. I wrote an article about that too.
That line of thinking comes directly from this bullshit lie of the Deep State as communist puppet. It is something conservatives are extremely invested in, and it seems unlikely that anyone can do much to dislodge it at this point.
A good way to fan those flames, though, would be to pretend the FBI is blameless. To laugh at their claims, even the ones that have some basis in truth.
There can be no allying with the right on abolishing the FBI, but there are better and worse ways to talk about it. Telling the truth about the FBI — that they exist to protect the status quo and historically go to villainous lengths to do it — helps avoid the perception that the FBI reflects our own values. Because they don’t.
Abolish the FBI. Abolish the police. Replace both with agencies that prioritize keeping Americans safe over keeping them in line.
And never, ever let your opponents dictate your policy positions.
Cover image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
Perceptive and poignant piece. I admire your growth as a writer.