Though the public was unaware at the time, the seminal Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) director, J. Edgar Hoover, was a political extortionist. Deftly manipulating both his political opponents and the press, Hoover was able to retain his job, pursue his causes, indulge his friends, and crush his enemies with impunity. The Constitution proved no bar to this venal reprobate whose innumerable violations of Americans’ civil rights were legion.
When death finally ended his arbitrary, capricious, and wholly unaccountable one-man reign over America’s national law enforcement, one would expect the response to be relief accompanied with the recognition of his maladministration and a refusal to permit a recrudescence of this sordid chapter in governmental abuses of power.
Instead, the FBI headquarters is named the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
The past is prologue in our disordered age. Recently, a gaggle of the self-professed “moderates” of the “New Democrat Coalition” sent a letter to U.S. House Appropriations Chairman Kay Granger (R-Texas), demanding ever more millions for the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies.
Per Fox News, the signatories contend “the partisan Republican budget proposal that recently passed the House would cut critical resources, exposing communities across the country to increased levels of crime.”
‘The first duty of government is to protect the safety of its citizens,’ a letter sent by the New Democrat Coalition to House Appropriations Chair Kay Granger, (R-Texas), read. ‘Therefore, Congress has a responsibility to sufficiently fund essential programs that empower law enforcement agencies to address the diverse set of criminal threats facing the communities we represent.’
They’re asking for $569.6 million for the FBI in fiscal year 2024, to go toward ‘investigating extremist violence and domestic terrorism.’
Employing the same false reasoning that brought you the COVID lockdowns, these Democrats refuse to recognize that the first duty of government is to secure the God-given, constitutional rights of its citizens. This refusal allows the New Democrat Coalition to studiously ignore the FBI’s recent return to the politicized abuses of power of Hoover’s COINTELPRO heyday.
The public, however, cannot.
According to whistleblowers’ congressional testimony, the FBI has been “cooking the books” to falsely increase the incidences and locations of “domestic terrorism” to stifle political dissent.
As reported in the Washington Examiner:
‘Whistleblowers assert that the FBI pressured agents to reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism (DVE), and even manufactured DVE cases where they may not otherwise exist, while manipulating its case categorization system to feign a national problem.’ The whistleblower claims were made public in an 80-page report released Thursday by the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
And who were some of these falsely labeled Americans? Fox News provides a partial answer: “The FBI targeted pro-life groups, Catholics, and parents attending school board meetings with investigations in an effort to ‘inflate’ the sense that they were a domestic terrorism threat, according to new whistleblower reports.”
The reason the FBI is inflating these numbers? For this, Andrew C. McCarthy—who has prosecuted actual terrorists—has an answer:
The projection of dystopian America mired in a terrorist war waged by the Democrats’ political adversaries is false. Since it doesn’t exist in reality, congressional Democrats and the Biden administration are trying to create it by FBI bookkeeping. As we’ve seen over the last eight years, and again this week with the release of the Durham Report, when Democrats say jump, the FBI says, ‘How high?’
“How high?” would also include going easy on Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden. For the whistleblowers who refused to jump and are instead bringing the truth to light, the FBI’s retaliation has been swift. Not surprisingly, the FBI denies it.
But, unlike the New Democrat Coalition, the FBI could not ignore the Russiagate scandal (although it did downplay it). For the confused members of the New Democrat Coalition, the New York Post provides a nice recap of the Durham report’s major findings. But here is a CliffsNotes version: the FBI knowingly participated in the Democrats’ seditious undermining of a duly elected president.
As the earlier U.S. House’s Republican Judiciary Committee Staff Report of November 4, 2022, concluded:
The FBI’s Washington hierarchy [is] ‘rotted at its core,’ maintaining a ‘systemic culture of unaccountability,’ and full of ‘rampant corruption, manipulation, and abuse.’ . . . The FBI has abused its law-enforcement authorities for political purposes, and how actions by FBI leadership show a political bias against conservatives.
Like Hoover, today’s Democrats view the Constitution as an obstacle not to be obeyed but overcome. And they have been rewarded for it. In contrast to Hoover, who sought to stop political change, the Left aims to “fundamentally transform” America. But neither end justifies the use of unconstitutional means. At least in Hoover’s era, both parties had to be politically extorted to ignore his abuses of power. Presently, the Democrats do not just willingly ignore such abuses of power—they embrace them.
In submitting their monetary demands, the New Democrat Coalition laughably proffer that they are taking a stand against crime by increasing funding for a federal law enforcement agency that has abused its powers against American citizens, especially the Left’s political opponents. Unlike the rest of us, Democrats are most pleased with the weaponization of the FBI’s police and counterintelligence powers against the Left’s enemies.
In the cold, autocratic logic of the Democrats: why not accelerate when you are already on a roll . . . especially when all it takes is half a billion more taxpayer dollars to pay homage to Hoover’s ghost?