Deep State Rot and Corruption Festers With Russiagate Unpunished and Receding

A seal reading "Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation" is displayed on the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building in Washington, on Aug. 9, 2022. (Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

As special counsel John Durham’s report demonstrated in stark detail, our national security and law enforcement apparatus has grown hyper-politicized and been weaponized against its perceived opponents.

Since virtually none of the powerful perpetrators of Russiagate—one of the greatest and gravest scandals in American history—have been held to account for it, including by the special counsel himself, that the corruption would fester would seem an inevitability.

And indeed, it has, with the Deep State targeting not just a president it feared and loathed but now also the half-the-country-plus whose views it disfavors as potential domestic terrorists.

It has gotten to the point that talk of pervasive institutional rot (pdf) and corruption (pdf) within the Department of Justice and FBI once limited to coffee shop conspiracists and street corner crackpots has grown, more than justifiably, commonplace among members of Congress.

Some recent developments illustrate the extent to which these institutions have self-immolated, to our great detriment.

In late May, FBI whistleblowers testified before the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government that the Bureau sought to ruin their lives for shining a light on politicization around the Capitol riot and much else.

These and other whistleblowers alleged, as the Subcommittee detailed in an associated report (pdf), that, among other things:

• The FBI’s Washington Field Office pressured a Boston field office to open investigations into 138 people who traveled to Washington DC on Jan. 6, 2021, without any indication they were involved in criminal activity. Their apparent crime was in busing down to the District with two people who entered restricted areas of the Capitol that day.
• One targeted whistleblower reportedly found himself suspended for holding “conspiratorial views in regards to the events of January 6th.” His thought crime was in collecting open-source materials touching on potential issues concerning the role of informants during that day, and the FBI’s coyness about their conduct, and circulating those materials to colleagues for their “situational awareness.”
• The FBI has essentially cooked the books on domestic violent extremist (DVE) cases to “create the perception that DVE is organically rising around the country.”
• The FBI awards cash bonuses for meeting arbitrary metrics and goals—creating “perverse incentives for the FBI to utilize law-enforcement tools and resources where they may not be needed or appropriate in order for FBI leadership to benefit financially.”

As for what befell the whistleblowers, several of them were left suspended and unable to pursue outside work—their careers ruined, finances wrecked, and lives turned upside down.

Suspended FBI special agent Garret O’Boyle, former FBI special agent Steve Friend, and suspended FBI analyst Marcus Allen testify during a hearing before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government of the House Judiciary Committee on May 18, 2023. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

One such whistleblower was Special Agent Garret O’Boyle, who made protected disclosures to a superior about potentially illegal activity. For that act, after being transferred across the country, he arrived to find he was put on unpaid, indefinite suspension, and without his personal effects, which were locked in FBI storage.

The O’Boyles were effectively rendered homeless.

Reduced to seeking out charity, to his chagrin, O’Boyle testified that he “would name the church” that supported his family “to give them [sic] recognition, but I’m too worried that the FBI would send informants to infiltrate that church.”

Later, O’Boyle would testify that having gone through this ordeal, he wouldn’t advise colleagues to come forward to report abuses as he had.

“The FBI will crush you. This government will crush you and your family,” he lamented.

In another Jan. 6-related story, Chairman Jim Jordan and others penned a letter (pdf) to FBI Director Christopher Wray asking him to explain how the FBI still hasn’t identified the would-be Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee headquarters pipe bomber, when, under its Jan. 6 investigation, arguably the most extensive in the history of the Bureau, authorities have arrested more than a thousand people and promise to ensnare a thousand more. None of them have been charged with carrying or using a firearm in the Capitol, let alone seeking to detonate an explosive there.

As the letter notes, a former FBI agent who worked on the investigation said authorities tracked the suspect via a MetroRail card to a stop in Northern Virginia, which led the FBI to a vehicle the suspect entered. The Bureau got the license plate number. Yet somehow, it apparently doesn’t know who the suspect is. Having already called for briefings, to no avail, the Judiciary Committee is once again calling on Wray to appear before it and explain himself.

The Bureau, of course, hasn’t been forthcoming on other issues. The FBI stonewalled in the face of a House Oversight Committee subpoena calling for the agency to produce a document detailing a trusted informant’s allegation that a foreign national sought to bribe then-Vice President Joe Biden with $5 million in exchange for favorable policy. Due to the continued obfuscation, Committee Chairman James Comer is now making good on his threat to hold Wray in contempt.

This follows recent reporting (pdf) from the Comer-led Committee demonstrating that “Biden family members and business associates created a web of over 20 companies—most ... limited liability companies formed during Joe Biden’s vice presidency,” through which the Bidens and their associates received over $10 million from foreign nationals’ companies both during and after Biden was in office.

“After foreign companies sent money to business associates’ companies,” the report details, “the Biden family received incremental payments over time to different bank accounts. These complicated financial transactions appear to conceal the source of the funds and reduce the conspicuousness of the total amounts made into the Biden bank accounts.”

Millions, in particular, seem to have come from China and Romania.

So where has the FBI been?

At the very same time this investigation is ongoing, whistleblowers have come out of the IRS claiming Hunter Biden was being given favorable treatment in a criminal tax probe into his activities. One whistleblower says he was passed over for promotion and removed from the investigation, then fired. The IRS, in fact, has reportedly removed the entire team probing Hunter Biden’s tax returns—talk about obstruction—in alleged retaliation for whistleblowing.

The protection of the Bidens seems to have potentially extended from the FBI to the CIA, which apparently intervened on Biden’s behalf in the 2020 election. Last month, the Weaponization Subcommittee released a joint report (pdf) with the House Intelligence Committee containing two startling claims: (i) that the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB) cleared for public release, and with unusual haste, the infamous letter signed by 51 prominent ex-intelligence community officials underpinning the claim the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation; and (ii) that a then-current PCRB employee may have proactively solicited signatures for the letter.

Returning to the FBI for a moment, recent revelations show it once again fudged the FISA rules, improperly using its warrantless search powers against U.S. citizens more than 278,000 times in 2021. It probed those involved in Jan. 6, the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, and even donors of a failed congressional candidate via these wrongful queries.

Last but not least, we now know stunning additional details about the apparent administrative state targeting of disaffected liberal-turned-independent journalist Matt Taibbi. One of the drafters of the Twitter Files, Taibbi had an IRS agent show up at his house the day he testified before the Weaponization Subcommittee about his findings of government weaponization. Now, that Subcommittee has found that the IRS apparently opened the case on Taibbi on Christmas Eve, Saturday, Dec. 24, 2022—implying a seeming sense of urgency. This was just weeks after he published his first installment of the Twitter Files and the day he published the ninth such installment. The IRS built a dossier about Taibbi that included his voter registration and whether he possesses a hunting or fishing license and concealed weapons permit. The agent on the case also examined Taibbi’s work. This was all concerning a 2018 tax return about which the IRS actually owed Taibbi a refund.

As Taibbi put it, “When the IRS checks to see if you have a carry permit and visits your home, at a time when they owe you money, it’s time to worry.”

The size, scope, and nature of these actions collectively—necessarily covering only a fraction of Deep State chicanery—should have every American up in arms and demanding impeachment of agency leaders, defunding, and radical restructuring.

That the public isn’t so outraged is a testament to the power of the state and its media stenographers, as well perhaps to how desensitized we have become to these depredations—living as Americans have under continued Deep State interference in, and manipulation of, our political system since at least 2016.

The perpetuators of this police state malevolence have grown so brazen in fact that they take to the airwaves claiming their victims are poised to weaponize the justice system against them should they get into power—so the police state must intensify its efforts.

This is what happens when government politicization, weaponization, and corruption go unpunished.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.