Our Political FBI

National Review Online

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

 

Quiet pink slips are not good enough anymore. The Federal Bureau of Investigation owes the nation an explanation about whether, yet again, it intervened in American politics in the heat of a closely contested presidential election. And Congress should begin to consider whether, after years of malfeasance and incompetence, it is time to reimagine the organization of federal law enforcement.

 

Last week, the assistant special agent in charge (ASAC) of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, Timothy Thibault, was discreetly terminated and reportedly escorted out of the building. His dismissal owes to his demonstrated political bias, which appears to be endemic among bureau bigwigs.

 

It was bad enough that Thibault was using a personal social-media account to trash Republicans, conservatives, the Catholic Church, and the American South (e.g., “Can we give Kentucky to the Russian Federation?”), and to exploit his FBI credentials in violation of various government rules. He is free to do those things as a private citizen or as a political candidate, but it is entirely inappropriate behavior for the head of a federal law-enforcement office that regularly conducts investigations in the storm center of national politics. According to Senator Chuck Grassley, the ranking Judiciary Committee Republican, while Thibault was advertising his partisanship, he was also doing the heavy lifting on a bureau-led effort to bury the Hunter Biden scandal in the waning weeks of the 2020 presidential race.

 

By then, Grassley and Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) had for months been conducting a probe of millions of dollars of foreign money that had ended up in the Biden-family coffers, including from such entities as CEFC, a corporate front for Xi Jinping’s regime and the Chinese Communist Party. In the main, it seems that when President Obama asked his vice president, Joe Biden, to steer administration policy regarding such nettlesome countries as China, Ukraine, and Russia, and when Biden later emerged as the likely Democratic nominee in 2020, people connected to the regimes in those countries found it expedient to pay exorbitant sums to the now-president’s ne’er-do-well son. It is not hard to guess what these bad actors thought they were buying.

 

While the Hunter laptop — patently authentic and chockablock with blackmail material — is now the most notorious aspect of the scandal, Senators Grassley and Johnson had been following the money long before the computer emerged. So, apparently, had the Justice Department, which months earlier had launched a criminal investigation of Hunter — and which, in 2017, was evidently conducting FISA national-security surveillance of the Biden family’s CEFC business partners, one of whom was subsequently convicted on foreign corruption charges. (If you’re keeping score, that was Patrick Ho, whom Hunter labeled “the f***ing spy chief of China,” and who is thus not to be confused with two other Biden business partners, Devon Archer and Bevan Cooney, who were convicted in a different scheme to defraud a Native American tribe.)

 

In essence, Hunter Biden is what Democratic fever dreams depicted Donald Trump to be, complete with the porn tapes, the payments to Russian accounts for prostitution services, and the dingy financial ties to corrupt and anti-American governments — with whose cronies he conducts transactions counter to American interests. A politically disinterested law-enforcement agency would treat him as such.

 

Instead, Thibault and other FBI agents colluded with Democrats to portray as “Russian disinformation” the mounting, unsavory information about Hunter, as well as indicia of Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s longstanding habit of cashing in on his political influence.

 

In the summer of 2020, top congressional Democrats began suggesting that questions being raised about foreign influence on Biden could signal foreign interference in the presidential election, and that the Biden evidence Grassley and Johnson were amassing could be shot through with Russian disinformation. One must be impressed by the chutzpah. The FBI collaborated, working up an intelligence “assessment,” which concluded that derogatory Biden evidence must be disinformation. The assessment was written by FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten, whose previous claim to fame was to have led the FBI’s interviews of Igor Danchenko, the principal source of the notorious Steele dossier, after which the FBI continued relying on this actual disinformation in representing to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that Donald Trump might be a Russian asset.

 

Grassley now says that FBI whistleblowers have informed him that frontline agents working on the Biden investigation pushed back against their supervisors’ assessment, pointing out that much of the evidence they’d gathered was based on records from U.S. financial institutions, not uncorroborated rumor and innuendo in the style of the Steele dossier. Yet the bureau forged ahead, convening an August 2020 briefing for members of Congress that was designed to cast doubt on the Biden evidence. The FBI assessment was conveniently leaked to Democrat-friendly media, which suggested that the Republican senators’ investigation was “mimicking” Russian disinformation efforts and “amplifying its propaganda.”

 

It was the FBI and its network of intelligence-community politicos that was peddling propaganda. Without specifically mentioning the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter laptop story, Grassley notes that, as Election Day 2020 loomed, “an avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was closed at the direction of ASAC Thibault.” Grassley elaborates that, besides failing to “provide a valid reason as required by FBI guidelines” for this action, Thibault “attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future.” Around the same time, the motley crew of 51 self-described national-security professionals issued their “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails,” in which they deceptively suggested that the laptop disclosures had “all the classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation (while fleetingly conceding that they “do not have evidence of Russian involvement” — they were just “deeply suspicious”).

 

The Biden campaign clung to the “Russian disinformation” fairy tale without providing an iota of reason to doubt the authenticity of the laptop’s Biden-family photos, its videos of Hunter’s sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll forays, and its emails tying Joe Biden to several of Hunter’s shady business partners. Facebook buried the Biden damage, too, limiting its members’ ability to share the story. Mark Zuckerberg now says that decision was made soon after the FBI warned the social-media giant about foreign interference in the election. Zuckerberg recalls that the bureau’s briefing did not mention Hunter Biden in so many words, but that the Post’s reporting “fit the pattern” of the FBI’s admonitions. In a statement, the FBI deflects but doesn’t dare deny: Yes, it provides U.S. media platforms with “foreign threat indicators,” but it is up to these companies to decide whether to take preventive measures. Who gave the FBI the job of policing political speech during American elections? Congress should make explicit that it has no such authority.

 

Hillary Clinton likes to pose as the victim of FBI skullduggery, but she was only able to seek the presidency in 2016 after then-director James Comey usurped the Justice Department’s charging discretion and distorted federal law in claiming she should not be indicted for mishandling classified information by storing it in her own home. The bureau, meantime, aggressively conducted the Trump–Russia “collusion” investigation, based substantially on absurd political opposition research from the Clinton campaign that it found too good to check. And now it appears that multiple scathing reports by the Justice Department’s inspector general, documenting its malfeasance, leaking, and political bias, could not stop the FBI from putting its thumb on the 2020 election scale.

 

Defunding actual federal law enforcement is not the answer. But the current structure of the FBI need not be immune to rethinking. Republicans, however, would be wise to promise that, if voters put them back in charge of Congress, there will finally be accountability for the FBI’s shoddy performance and consideration of whether the bureau needs to be replaced by an agency dedicated to police work and uncorrupted by politics.