Png
FTA-——Trump and his team spent days in the final stretch of the campaign denying the unfounded allegations; the president walked out of an interview with “60 Minutes” host Lesley Stahl after she forced the issue in late October.
Some data suggests the media onslaught may have succeeded. Polls showed a precipitous drop for Trump in Michigan after mid-October as Michiganders, and millions of Americans, were voting early for president. Trump will never know how many votes he lost as a result of the damaging headlines but it’s unrealistic to believe the extensive negative coverage had zero impact.
And while the FBI was cooking up the Whitmer and Northam kidnapping hoaxes in 2020, the agency was cooking the books on a real scandal: the Biden family’s overseas grift.
According to whistleblowers, the FBI moved to quash any investigation into Hunter Biden’s financial activities including his ties to Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter $83,3000 per month between 2014 and 2019, purportedly for serving on its board.
“In August of 2020, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment, which was used by a team of agents at FBI headquarters to improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden’s activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down,” Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) disclosed last week.
FBI officials subsequently briefed Grassley and Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) to warn that any information related to a Senate investigation was the product of a “foreign disinformation” campaign against the Bidens; news of the briefing was leaked to the Washington Post on August 5, 2020. Auten, a key FBI figure in the Russia collusion hoax, then buried any future potential probe by placing “their assessment findings in a restricted access subfolder, effectively flagging sources and derogatory evidence related to Hunter Biden as disinformation.”
That opened the door for Team Biden, Democrats, and the media to dismiss any reporting on Hunter Biden as more election-year chicanery by the Kremlin. Reports published in the New York Post shortly before Election Day were quickly designated “Russian disinformation” by top former intelligence officials including former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, two authors of the Russian collusion hoax. The trail of incriminating emails found on the laptop, the chiefs claimed in an October 19, 2020 letter, “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
This is the sort of internal warfare that takes down nations or at least tightens the grip of the ruling regime until it successfully strangles any and all political opposition.
Republicans now have two legitimate examples of how the FBI not only buried evidence of potentially serious crimes committed by Joe Biden’s family—and perhaps the candidate himself—to protect the Biden/Harris ticket in 2020 but also have evidence of how the agency fabricated other crimes to damage Donald Trump. The latter is not without a human toll; Brandon Caserta and Daniel Harris, the men found not guilty, spent 18 months in jail despite their innocence and now struggle to put their lives back together. Adam Fox and Barry Croft, Jr. have been in jail since October 2020 and will withstand another trial beginning August 9. It’s very likely they’ll either be acquitted or face another hung jury.
Then what?
It does not appear that congressional Republicans have any plan to deal with this subversive agency aside from a flurry of sternly worded letters and heated television interviews—the same failed strategy the GOP pursued after 2016, which only emboldened the FBI to again play politics in the 2020 election. Some Republican leaders miraculously—infuriatingly?—hold unjustified trust in FBI Director Christopher Wray, who hasn’t faced a single question about his foreknowledge and involvement in the Whitmer caper.
“I would expect Wray to come up with some concrete program where he’s gonna be able to tell the 22 members of this committee what he’s going to do to take political bias out of the investigations that the FBI is doing,” Grassley said during a Fox News interview on Sunday. (Wray is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary committee this Thursday.)
But the time for Wray to clean up the FBI’s act is long gone. And the problem isn’t just a matter of leadership; as both the Whitmer hoax and the ongoing military-style roundup of January 6 protesters show, the rot at the FBI extends to each of the agency’s 56 field offices. Combined with other scandals, not the least of which is the FBI’s delayed investigation into serial molester Larry Nasser, it’s obvious the FBI is not salvageable.
Republicans in the House and Senate must develop a strategy to dismantle the FBI and punish its most egregious offenders if the GOP takes control next year. A free country cannot exist much longer under control of a Praetorian Guard that the opposition party is too afraid to confront.