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Posted on 11/04/2025 8:43:11 AM PST by MtnClimber
A former special agent says the agency has become top-heavy and self-absorbed.
“Uh, Pat, the FBI is at the door,” my wife called out to me on an otherwise quiet Tuesday morning last month.
Those words would strike fear in most, but this wasn’t the first time I’d heard such a thing. In my almost two decades with the FBI, colleagues helped with childcare, invited one another over for holidays, and drove each other to doctor appointments. A pop-in wasn’t out of the ordinary.
But this time seemed different, and I could hear it in my wife’s voice. Two agents stood on my front stoop. They didn’t appear to be there to catch up with an old pal. Their unmarked car was wedged in my driveway, and their tone sounded adversarial. They presented a nondisclosure agreement that I had signed last year when I resigned out of frustration with both the bureau and my deteriorating mental health.
Their concern, it seemed, was my cooperation with an international media investigation that could expose embarrassing failures within the FBI, the Department of Justice, and our German police partners.
As the Washington Post, Der Spiegel, and others have reported, investigators uncovered a sprawling, sadistic child-abuse network called “764.” Its members shared images of torture and abuse and pressured children to harm themselves.
In 2022, we identified and warned German police about a key suspect in Hamburg who used the alias “White Tiger.” Despite detailed, specific intelligence, German authorities failed to act. Only after additional crimes—including the death of a 13-year-old Gig Harbor boy, which I investigated—was the suspect arrested, years later.
The case raised disturbing questions about missed opportunities and international law enforcement. But the failures were not limited to German police. They also illustrate how the FBI, once fearless in its mission, has become paralyzed by bureaucracy and risk aversion—and how desperately it needs reform.
I saw the FBI’s transformation firsthand. In my time at the bureau, investigators who knew cases best were second-guessed by managers with little operational experience. Every agent misstep spawned a mandatory training module, which distracted from pursuing urgent leads. Bureaucrats stalled big cases, micromanaged small ones, and stifled resources for critical national security work. The American people paid the price.
Meantime, street agents—those who execute the bureau’s mission—were underpaid and overburdened. Many senior ones counted the days until retirement. New agents, many recruited from lucrative careers elsewhere, were sent with their families to expensive cities and paid salaries near the poverty line.
When I joined the FBI after 9/11, I knew my work was meaningful. I deployed to war zones, ran informants into terrorist groups, and sought to recover hostages. Many rank-and-file agents retain that sense of mission.
But excessive administration, obsolete technology, and careerist executives have degraded morale and distracted the bureau. What should be the world’s premier law enforcement agency has become top-heavy and self-absorbed. The Hamburg case is a devastating reminder of what happens when the FBI loses sight of its purpose.
The FBI can correct course, but it should embrace three reforms. First, leadership needs to reconnect with and advocate for the rank-and-file. That means honest feedback, candid conversations, and respect for agents’ financial and personal sacrifices.
Second, agents, not managers or political appointees, should become the FBI’s backbone again. To do that, the FBI must streamline intelligence functions, send resources into the field, and remove unnecessary oversight.
Finally, the bureau must return to its core mission: protecting the vulnerable and upholding the law, not shielding itself from embarrassment or bending to partisanship. The FBI serves our nation, not any one administration.
To be sure, the bureau today still accomplishes righteous work. Agents stop complex cyber and financial crimes, combat foreign influence, and disrupt terrorist plots every day. But these successes happen despite the FBI’s leadership and general dysfunction.
The bureau I joined was not perfect, but it was fearless. Today’s FBI too often is scared of its own shadow—hiding behind legal threats while demoralizing its workforce and ignoring real priorities.
I want only protection for future victims—and to sound a warning. I, too, want to see justice rendered in the White Tiger trial. But some leaders will always be company men first, public servants second. Maybe that’s precisely the problem.
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Obama packed all organizations with leftists and we are still paying the price.
The FBI has been corrupt since Hoover. You can find plenty of examples over the years.
Only when the burr is under this fellow’s saddle does he seem to notice it.
Maybe if they lost their way, they just stopped Seth Rich to ask for directions and lost their temper?
Tony Hillerman, when writing his mysteres, already had these FIB traits pegged.
No.
Politically compromised. Anti-American. Pro-Progressive Globalism. Anti-Constitution.
"People will lose faith..."
Yeah, sorry bud but that horse is out of the barn and running down the road carrying a red flag, neighing for all it's worth.
When you find bad agents you need to yank them out and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law publicly.
We know that there are bad people in every organization, we are not children. If we see you taking care of the problem we are far more likely to support and trust then we are if you pretend the problem is not there.
We know it is. Once again, we are not children.
“our German partners”
” I deployed to war zones, ran informants into terrorist groups, and sought to recover hostages.”
How much FBI went overseas in WWII? Korea? Vietnam? Lebanon? Desert Storm? The FBI has a double whammy of negatives. They filled their ranks with women and rainbow people. And they decided that they were a global police force with worldwide jurisdiction with a primary focus on political repression.
When they were sent to investigate the firefight in Tahir Square, that should have told America everything. There was no Status of Forces agreement with Iraq whatsoever. But whatever, we send the FBI, prosecute Blackwater guys in the USA where they broke no US law.
They are nothing but the Roman Praetorian Guard and we will not be free until they are disbanded.
The 1920s excuses are gone. Every state knows how to do fingerprints etc.
The FBI is America’s KGB.
We aren’t that different from the Soviets - when you have a huge, bloated, ideological and social-engineering government that controls the flow of resources in the economy and details of everyone’s life - the top law enforcement agency becomes the political arbiter of what policies get enforced at the highest levels, and becomes the monitoring agency to control infighting and stability at the top.
🎯
And they dress like common bums now. If they knock on your door it could be some dumpy woke girl in a raid jacket, some guy with the tacticool beard in a lumberjack shirt, or a skinny metrosexual like the backflipping dancer who lost his pistol in Denver dancing in a nightclub.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN2fRtudDv8
Bkmk
I am not sure about WWII (Allen Dulles hated J. Edger and the feeling was mutual) but I do know they went over seas in all the other conflicts.
They like so many spoiled kids in our society have been raised in a culture that teaches them that they are special and that the laws don't apply to them.
Just watching cop shows on TV is enough to show that they are always compromised and most likely on the take.
Their fed tough guy status and low pay make them susceptible to bribery which is almost certainly everywhere.
Because they intimidate prosecutors and judges nobody ever takes them to the woodshed.
So start the FBI, wait 100 years, nobody ever punishes them, give them extraordinary powers and complete impunity, and this is what you get.
May not be correctible, but Kash and Bongino seem to be trying, and having some successes.
But come on! If you are dealing with weirdo lying creeps like Comey (a Swifty for crying out loud) you are going to have some really lawless behavior, and they are going to be reprobates. They will lie and lie until their last dying breath.
True.
Today you have two dangerous ingredients:
1. Government (Intel and law enforcement) have the capabilities to invade your privacy, mass collect, share, sort, filter information. They have special powers with FISA, NSLs, etc. that are frankly unconstitutional.
2. These government agencies IC and LE have become part of the political games, leveraged against the political opponent.
What’s the result. Exactly what you claim and sounds ridiculous to some. We are basically the same as what we once called the “bad guys” in the East.
Other than putting a pretty face on it, still pretending to care when a TV camera is there, we do ALL the same things. And if you don’t believe that, go ask a J6 protestor, General Flynn, someone at Trump tower that was surveilled in 2016...
It is in fact a threat to our Republic and democratic system!
The only way to fix this, is to cut the nuts off.
Ever see Lord of the Rings and “my precious?” It’s the same thing. These Intel powers and capabilities we have allowed to grow inside the US and be used AGAINST American citizens are in violation of basic constitutional concepts AND pose a threat because the temptation to use them is just to great.
You can always rationalize / make up some excuse why you need to collect on someone. Trying to fix the system procedurally and through policies will not work in the long haul. We will fall right back into the same place.
You have to physically dismantle much of the system. You have to make it physically impossible to do the sort of things, (or where necessary to retain some of the capabilities) to the scale, being done today.
The FBI never had a proper way, not since its beginning in 1908. It went from the investigation arm of the DOJ, to a homosexual led paramilitary force, to a seditionist organization.
Yup—MKULTRA and COINTELPRO were not aberrations.
They were just examples of when the FBI got caught being bad actors.
I am certain variations of those continue to this day—and Kash and Bondi may not even know about large parts of it.
Thank you!! The same can be said about the CIA from its beginning under Truman, with plenty of examples for over the years.
Let’s start with J. Edgar Hoover then.
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