In 2022, it is utterly naive for any self-respecting conservative to be trusting federal law enforcement bodies. They’re unconstitutional and corrupt to the core.
Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs is chief among Republican leaders who is willing to investigate the FBI and expose its malfeasances. According to a Fox News report, Biggs “contends Democrats have a stake in digging for more details about the FBI breaking its own rules to probe elected officials, political candidates, religious organizations and the news media.”
The FBI carried out an internal that discovered 747 “compliance errors” in 353 separate cases that concerned
“sensitive investigative matters.” The bureau admitted that the 2019 audit findings were “unacceptable.”
In recent years, the FBI has been placed under the microscope for the politicized investigations of former President Donald Trump.
Though Biggs believes that the FBI’s issues are much larger and extend well beyond the report’s findings.
“It possibly includes information about the surveillance of candidate Trump and later President Trump. But this is almost 750 compliance problems in 350 cases,” Biggs said to Fox News. “The next step is to call on the committee to have a hearing on this. If I was in the majority, I would want to get to the bottom of this. I suspect this conduct goes back for multiple administrations and has been an ongoing problem affecting members of both parties.”
Biggs was one of the congressmen, which included Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan and Louisiana Congressman Mike Johnson, who signed a March 21 letter directed to FBI Director Christopher Wray. In that letter, per the Fox News report, the congressmen demanded that Wray turn over “an unredacted copy of the report, documents referring to or relating to the audit, an explanation of whether the FBI resolved the matters and a description of the FBI’s predicate to open investigations into politicians, religious groups and others named in the audit.“
Biggs revealed that if the House, which is under Democratic control (222-210), doesn’t launch an investigation into the case at hand and is not willing to force the FBI to produce the documents and testimony, then a new Republican House majority is prepared to investigate and carry out hearings in 2023. Biggs’ assumption of a Republican victory is not out of line given how the party not occupying the presidency tends to make gains in the midterms and often retakes one or both chambers of Congress depending on where the political winds blow.
“We can’t let this go. It’s an important issue. We’ve got to get to the bottom of it,” Biggs stated. “The Judiciary Committee will have oversight in the next session of Congress.”
The audit stated that officials ran afoul of FBI policies when they failed to receive approval from supervisors and attorneys prior to initiating a sensitive investigation. The audit also pointed out how officials violated FBI policies by not sending the appropriate United States Attorney’s Office a written notification within a month of commencing the probes, which is a required procedure.
Initially, the Washington Times published a report on the 45-page audit that highlighted 747 “compliance errors” that took place during a short period between January 1, 2018, and June 30, 2019.
The audit didn’t specifically identify the people and groups the FBI was investigating. Though it showed cases that involved 191 public officials, dozens of religious groups, dozens of political organizations, 10 political candidates and 11 news media cases.
“This internal audit and the staggering number of errors it found suggest a pattern of misconduct and mismanagement within the FBI in failing to uphold internal rules for its most sensitive cases,” the House GOP letter to Wray highlighted.
The letter reminded Wray that in testimony before the committee in 2021, he stated that the FBI “investigate[s] individuals with proper predication” and indicated that it does not “investigate First Amendment groups … [or] people for speech, association, for assembly [or] for membership in domestic First Amendment groups.”
The letter continued, “However, this internal review — which you never disclosed and which shows fundamental errors with FBI investigations touching on sensitive political and constitutional matters — calls into question the reliability of your statements.”
All things considered, conservatives need to get more aggressive against federal law enforcement. These law enforcement bodies are lawless and unaccountable to the American people. In an ideal world, agencies like the FBI would be abolished. But for now, investigations exposing the FBI’s dirty laundry and measures to defund it are good first steps in the battle to get rid of this agency.
