Democrats, the media, and even some fragile-minded Republicans are accusing Trump sympathizers of being insufficiently pro-“law and order” for taking notice that our nation’s top law enforcement agency has proven time and time again to be another corrupt and borderline worthless bureaucracy.
“So much for backing the blue,” wrote the ever-so-clever James Hohmann of the Washington Post on Friday.
The point, such that it is, is very, very stupid. It makes sense, then, that former Vice President Mike Pence was among those to make it. “The Republican Party is the party of law and order,” he said last week in New Hampshire. “Our party stands with the men and women who serve on the thin blue line at the federal, state, and local levels. These attacks on the FBI must stop.”
If you didn’t react to that by gagging, I assume you haven’t been following the shockingly fast deterioration of the FBI as a legitimate agency. Here’s a cursory review of its greatest hits in recent years:
—This year, for the first time ever, FBI agents raided the home of a former president, who has endured more scrutiny by that same agency than any president in history. The latest information indicates that it was for the purpose of retrieving “social media records” (?) and documents of “official business” that Trump White House aides “had conducted on their personal electronic messaging accounts.”
That’s the gravity of the situation, as described by the New York Times: tweets and clerical notes. Not that I’m in favor of illegally retraining government property, but this should have been nothing more than a drawn-out legal fight wherein courts simply order Trump to hand over anything that didn’t belong to him. Multiple times, if needed. That’s our legal process. And recall that Empress Hillary and her henchmen took the duration of an entire presidential campaign to print out thousands of copies — on physical paper! —of government emails she had illegally withheld after her tenure as secretary of state. That took forever, yet her private residence remained unmolested by trigger-happy FBI agents.
—At this very moment there’s a criminal trial wherein the FBI is proven to have instigated and encouraged a conspiracy to kidnap a sitting governor. The plot was carried along by FBI informants, FBI agents, and FBI money. These aren’t accusations. These are facts that have been substantiated in court.
—An exhaustive review of the FBI’s desperate investigation into Trump’s links to Russia found: Agents lied to obtain warrants allowing them to spy on Trump’s campaign; overwhelming documented evidence shows agents involved were outright hostile to his 2016 candidacy; and the agency relied on fabricated materials from Trump’s political opposition to justify its probe.
—By my count, we are on about mass shooting No. 5 billion wherein the gunman was on the FBI’s “radar” yet still managed to end and ruin the lives of countless men, women, and children.
—Along with every other federal agency, the FBI is on a multi-year campaign agitating racial divisions by hyping up the nonexistent threat of “white supremacy.” In 2019, two of the FBI’s top officials delivered a statement to Congress on “confronting white supremacy,” in which they testified that “individuals adhering to racially motivated violent extremism ideology have been responsible for the most lethal incidents among domestic terrorists in recent years.”
Of the embarrassingly thin body of work that the federal government has made public to back up this claim, none of it actually does. They either throw out some number of “incidents” without any citations to trace, or they offer up examples that have nothing to do with white supremacy. (Like when a white guy who supposedly belonged to a white prison gang shoots a white cop. Classic racial violence!)
Emboldening this kind of extreme incompetence, when it’s not outright corruption, is not pro-law enforcement. It’s the opposite. Attacking the rancid FBI, it turns out, is the most patriotic, pro-law and order thing anyone can do.