MCViewPoint

In a 2020 essay, Angelo Codevilla examined the rot at the core of the FBI. He goes far too easy on the FBI in early decades, but he was right enough when it came to the present state of the agency. He wrote:

Thus FBI officers became standard bureaucrats who learned to operate on the assumption that all Americans were equally likely as not to be proper targets of investigation. They replaced the distinctions by which they had previously operated with the classic bureaucratic imperative: look out for yourselves by making sure to please the powerful.

https://mises.org/wire/end-fbi

Ryan McMaken

Special counsel John Durham on Monday released his report on the FBI’s role in investigating the 2016 Donald Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. This investigation, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane,” had been—according to Durham’s report—”swiftly” opened as a full-blown investigation in response to “unevaluated intelligence information” by FBI personnel “without ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information.”

Durham shows that the investigation had been pushed forward largely by FBI agent Peter Strzok, a man known to be politically hostile to candidate Trump. Durham also notes a curious difference between the FBI’s enthusiasm for investigating Trump, and the agency’s more cautious procedures used in investigating the Hillary Clinton campaign:

The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence also reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign.

Durham went on to conclude that

An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the FBI to question not only the predication for Crossfire Hurricane, but also to reflect on whether the FBI was being manipulated for political or other purposes. Unfortunately, it did not.

Rather, the FBI engaged in a “lack of analytical rigor, apparent confirmation bias, and an over-willingness to rely on information from individuals connected to political opponents.”

All in all, the Durham report paints a picture of a highly unprofessional FBI that apparently greenlights investigations based on agents’ political agendas and on politically convenient rumors. Durham sums it up: The FBI and Justice Department “failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law.”

The report was so damning that even CNN’s Jake Tapper admitted it is “devastating to the FBI,” and that the report’s conclusions serve as additional reminders that FBI agents—including many in leadership—played key roles in promoting the “Russiagate” myth. 

See the rest here

Be seeing you