ANOTHER FBI PERSPECTIVE
I hear, a lot, from people who reflexively support law enforcement, that the FBI “rank and file,” as Sean Hannity calls them, are assumed to be untainted by political corruption which is endemic, even rife, among the senior management, those careerists whose like we all know in our own work lives. You know them, those who spend more time and effort on clawing their way to the top of the organizational ladder than working the mission.
But is that even true?
We have had examples of courage which have cost people greatly since liberty went away in this country: pastors who pastor despite shutdowns aimed at churches but not marijuana dispensaries and strip clubs; truckers who risked jail and confiscation of their capital investments in the form of big trucks; police who quit or retire rather than participate in the intentional dismantllng of law and order; nurses who quit or were fired rather than submit to mRNA injections which caused as many problems, or more, than they solved; airline pilots who refused to be intimidated; military officers who had their stellar careers destroyed in the name of covid compliance; SEALs, among the most elite warriors in the world, kicked out of the Navy.
Where are the federal employee martyrs, and especially the FBI martyrs? These agents, who have always styled themselves as more expert, more professional, and probably just a little better than local and state law enforcement, have had TV shows made about them, and movies. The agency has always had a healthy PR presence in American media, going back to J. Edgar Hoover.
But let's look at the mirror image often shown by Hollywood. If the program is focused on a law enforcement agency other than the FBI, then the feds are often, usually, portrayed as button-down professionals from far, far away, more neatly dressed, and a lot more arrogant. Is this fair? Let me tell a story.
Almost forty years ago, when I supervised a unit of a state agency which investigated fraud, an agent visited me in my office because he wanted, he said, to work together on some projects. Apparently he, or a supervisor, had gotten wind of some big cases we had made, and wanted some of that glow to rub off. I asked why, if the Bureau wanted to work together, they had borrowed a case file from one of my investigators and then refused to return it to him so he could file charges in the case. He said that once material becomes part of an FBI file, they couldn’t share it outside the Bureau. I asked, even if all the material they had was provided by the investigator? He said Yes. So I said that we had had about all the help we could stand from the FBI, stood up, and said thanks from coming by. When he realized he was being thrown out of my office, the look on his face was one of complete disbelief that he could be treated so disrespectfully.
This is not the only example of the FBI being bullies, but it serves as an illustration.
Are there fine people doing fine work in the field? I certainly hope so, but they work within a culture, and that culture is suspect. Who, after all, is arresting former Trump advisor Peter Navarro, a seventy-three year-old man, and shackling him in the D.C. airport, or rooting through Melania Trump’s undies, or creating the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping case where there were more informants than “conspirators,” and even providing the explosives they then charged the men for having? Was that top-floor management, or “rank and file?”
Their procedures are suspicious, to say the least. Why does the FBI not record interviews with subjects, while local law enforcement gets scrutinized over every detail of a police interrogation, and therefore regularly record interviews? Could it be so that is easier to charge a subject later with lying to the FBI, based later on the testimony alone of two special agents?
Police step outside the law at times, we know, but when they do, it is almost always in violation of established policies, procedures, written codes of conduct, and culture. Errant police action is not part of the culture, but rather a violation of it. With the FBI, the culture is the problem.
Until the FBI’s behavior and priorities change, I will assume any agent showing up at my door will be more Peter Strzok than Efrem Zimbalist’s Lewis Erskine or Clarice Starling. We need to decapitate all federal agencies and “build back better.”