The Crime Prevention Resource Center (CPRC) has released the results of an extensive study of the FBI's statistics on how often crimes are prevented by legally armed citizens. In a finding that should come as a surprise to no one, the CPRC has determined that the FBI has massively under-reported instances of defensive gun use by legal gun owners. My colleague Jeff Charles wrote about this a few weeks back, but let's take a little deeper dive into the numbers.

https://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Cases-where-armed-citizens-have-stopped-active-shooter-incidents_2022-with-FBI-data-and-gun-free-zone-info-2.xlsx //

What is particularly troubling is the unwillingness of the FBI and the media to correct these omissions when informed about them. When Dr. John Lott worked at the US Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy and the Office of Justice Programs in 2020, the FBI was notified of their omissions involving potential mass public shootings, but they refused to correct those errors. Lott had previously alerted the FBI to similar problems back in 2015 and he published the list in the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Today in March 2015, but corrections were never made even after the FBI admitted they were missing cases.

More important to America’s future than unearthing Biden family corruption is uncovering corrupt bureaucrats who violate the rule of law. //

Yes, the CHS’s allegations offer more evidence of a Biden family pay-to-play scandal, and unraveling any criminal conduct by the Biden family remains important. But more significant to the future of our country is uncovering government actors responsible for violating the rule of law: America can survive select injustices, but it cannot withstand a corrupt bureaucracy that obstructs justice and interferes in elections. //

Not only does this evidence suggest FBI headquarters obstructed justice, but the date of the CHS’s report indicates those responsible for misbranding the intel as disinformation sought to interfere in the 2020 election. //

In contrast, when the bureau received a vague tip from an Australian diplomat of unknown veracity that a low-level Trump volunteer had claimed the Russians possessed dirt on Hillary Clinton, within days FBI headquarters opened an investigation into the Trump campaign.

Monday’s special counsel report detailed extensive evidence of Department of Justice and FBI misconduct concerning the launch and handling of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and equally overwhelming proof of partisan motives and double standards. While the facts are critical of both the bureau and the DOJ, more scandalous is John Durham’s conclusion that the inexcusable targeting of a political opponent cannot be prevented absent a curing of the corrupted hearts and minds of law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Durham’s 306-page report opened with an executive summary capsulizing the results of the special counsel’s four-year investigation into the intelligence activities and investigations arising out of the 2016 presidential campaigns. While calling the findings “sobering,” and previewing the widespread misconduct on which the body of the report elaborated, Durham’s introductory comments emphasized he “does not recommend any wholesale changes in the guidelines and policies.”

It is here that Durham made his damning indictment of the DOJ and the FBI when he stressed that “the answer is not the creation of new rules but a renewed fidelity to the old.” Ultimately, he continued, justice “comes down to the integrity of the people who take an oath to follow the guidelines.” And “the promulgation of additional rules and regulations to be learned in yet more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of ‘Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity’ are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’ s mission of ‘Protect[ing] the American People and Uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States.’” //

For all the misconduct the special counsel exposed, it was [Pres. Gerald Ford's Attorney General] Levi’s warning that Durham left us. And that, I fear, is the most significant revelation to come from the investigation: that after four years of inspecting the underbelly of the FBI, Durham saw a creature reminiscent of the one running wild under Nixon.

Yesterday in these pages Margot Cleveland rightly noted that the most damning finding in the 306-page report from Special Counsel John Durham is not necessarily the FBI’s scandalous Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016, but that the egregious abuses of power detailed in the report cannot be remedied “absent a curing of the corrupted hearts and minds of law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”

For all the FBI’s blatant partisanship, its disregard of exculpatory evidence, and its outright deception to secure FISA warrants on Trump campaign associates, writes Cleveland, “what should terrify the country is not the catalog of malfeasance the special counsel recited — for mistakes and even gross failures can be corrected — but that Durham warned of corrupted hearts and minds, unfaithful to the people and their Constitution.”

For his part, Durham didn’t recommend any changes to FBI guidelines or policies, because no amount of reform will be sufficient if the people in charge feel free to disregard guidelines and policies whenever they see fit to do so. As such, wrote Durham, “the answer is not the creation of new rules but a renewed fidelity to the old. The promulgation of additional rules and regulations to be learned in yet more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of ‘Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity’ are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’s mission of ‘Protect[ing] the American People and uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States.’” //

That people like former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, along with the entire cast of villains and liars in the Durham report, rose to positions of such power, and then proceeded to abuse that power by arrogating to themselves the right to decide who should be president — a right that belongs solely to the American people — says something about the state of our republic.

What it says is this: We have produced, and are still producing, a totally corrupt elite bereft of any sense of “Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity,” to say nothing of moral virtue or the common good.

Put bluntly, an elite like that makes self-government in a republic of free citizens impossible. It also means that the elite will work to corrupt ordinary Americans, eroding their respect for the rule of law and fidelity to the Constitution. As the elites go, so eventually the entire country goes.

Seen in this light, the Durham report should be understood as a dire warning about the fate of our country. John Adams issued a similar warning when he penned his famous line, that “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” George Washington did the same in his farewell address when he said, “’Tis substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” //

The founders knew what we seem to have forgotten: Without a virtuous people, without citizens and leaders who believe in objective moral truth and understand themselves to be bound by it, we cannot be a free people, and we cannot sustain a republic. Laws alone, to say nothing of guidelines and policies, are not enough to support and sustain self-government. You need citizens who will respect and uphold the law, and leaders who actually believe in the principle of self-government — something our current crop of leaders clearly rejects.

Without a morally virtuous citizenry, the founders also knew we would eventually become a society not of free men and women, but of slaves to a tyrannical regime. That’s the real warning embedded in the Durham report. The corruption of the FBI, the CIA, and the entire federal intelligence community, which led to the Russia-collusion hoax and almost took down Trump’s campaign, and then his presidency, cannot be fixed with new rules and policies. It’s a moral failing, moral corruption, and it can only be fixed by a spiritual renewal in America, by a return to — let’s be honest — a civic culture shaped and guided by Christian moral virtue.

Jordan requested Tristan Leavitt further explain from a Congressional perspective, what constitutes a whistleblower:

In light of all these obstacles for FBI whistleblowers, you think Congress would do everything that it could to welcome their disclosures here. But FBI employees coming to Congress have unfortunately been shamefully treated by Democrats on this committee. It’s one thing to hear allegations and find them unpersuasive or even distasteful. An office can even ignore the allegations if they choose, that is their prerogative. But to go out and actively smear the individuals making disclosures, is far worse. That’s what the Democrats on this committee did when they released the March 2nd report entitled, “GOP Witnesses: What Their Disclosures Indicate About the State of the Republican Investigations.”

That report was inaccurate, both on the law and on the facts. The law doesn’t define the term “whistleblower.” Instead, it protects from retaliation individuals who engage in protected activity. For over a century, simply making disclosures of any information to Congress has been a protected activity. Furthermore, an appropriations rider in effect at this time prohibits money from paying the salary of any federal employee who prohibits or prevents any other federal employee such as FBI whistleblowers from communicating with Congress. The Democrats’ report denied whistleblower status to individuals engaged in the precise activity the legislative branch has considered protected since 1912. The report’s reliance on evidence for whistleblower status is also misplaced. Simply communicating a reasonable belief of misconduct is protected whistleblower activity under the law. This applies regardless of whether the whistleblower produces evidence at that time backing up their allegations. Only protecting whistleblowers disclosures accompanied by conclusive evidence, as the Democrats seem to require, would have disastrous consequences for retaliation throughout the federal government. My experience working for Congress was that whistleblowers brought allegations, and where the committees found those allegations worthy of further follow-up and congressional action, we conducted investigations.

No one expects a private citizen to investigate a crime before going to the police. And we didn’t expect the whistleblower to investigate their own agency.

It’s also essentially how the law for remedying retaliation through the MSBP is set up. Where making a non-frivolous allegation, leads to discovery, interviews, and more. Simply put, the burden isn’t on the whistleblower to produce the evidence at the outset. That’s why there’s an investigative process.

Durham uncovered several red flags that should have dissuaded the FBI from opening its ‘seriously flawed’ Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

Among the highlights was that they had absolutely nothing to justify going after the Trump campaign on Russia collusion. They had no information that the Trump campaign had been in contact with any Russian officials. They could not corroborate anything claimed in the Steele Dossier. Peter Strzok was essentially telling a London FBI employee that “there’s nothing to this.”

“Again, the FBI’s failure to critically analyze information that ran counter to the narrative of a Trump/Russia collusive relationship exhibited throughout Crossfire Hurricane is extremely troublesome,” the report said.

On top of that, the Report then took on who knew what when in pushing this story against the Trump team. It notes that the Clinton campaign plan to link Trump to Russia was known to the CIA and was briefed by CIA Director John Brennan to President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, AG Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director James Comey. //

Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee
·
🧵 1. The gravity of the misconduct uncovered by Mr. Durham cannot be overstated.
washingtonpost.com
Durham report sharply criticizes FBI’s 2016 probe of Trump campaign

2. The LEAST one can say of it is that it involved a malicious use of federal law-enforcement officers to conduct a contrived investigation utterly lacking any valid, factual foundation from the very beginning. That is itself incredibly troubling—and also unconstitutional.

3. But this was SO MUCH WORSE than that. It was an effort to use use a powerful, long-respected, federal law-enforcement agency to render a presidential candidate unelectable—entirely in the absence of any valid, good-faith basis for doing so.

4. So make no mistake—this can’t be dismissed as mere carelessness or even a severe example of garden-variety misconduct. No—this is as corrupt and as subversive of the Constitution as it gets.

5. Regardless of your political leanings or your feelings about Donald Trump, you should find this terrifying.

6. When federal law-enforcement agencies can undertake such a brazen effort to frame someone they don’t like to throw the outcome of an election—and then remain largely protected for seven years thereafter—popular sovereignty in America is under serious attack. //

The top line of the Durham report is incredibly simple. Namely, there was zero evidentiary basis for the FBI to pursue what would become Crossfire Hurricane, the infamous Trump-Russia investigation that was headed up by disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok. There was no hook, no justification, and no excuse for continuing to hound Trump throughout not only his 2016 candidacy but years into his presidency as well.

Despite knowing there was nothing to investigate, he FBI continued to push forward anyway until eventually, former FBI Director James Comey and the rest of his underlings got what they wanted: The Robert Mueller special counsel.

That was always the end goal. To ensure that Trump, even after he was elected and it became obvious no evidence of collusion existed, would be hobbled by an intrusive, headline-producing special counsel. In the end, the FBI succeeded in its quest. //

this was always about electoral interference. That was the goal from the word go, to diminish the Trump administration to the point that winning re-election in 2020 would be nearly impossible.

The Dirty Truth (Josh)
@AKA_RealDirty
·
Follow
.@DavidSacks explains how the FBI was using a tool called “ teleport” to communicate with Twitter. They were able to send instructions that deleted after 10 days and they weren’t able to take a screenshot of the communication.

5:20 PM · Jan 15, 2023

But they could tell that some messages were sent via the teleport tool when they were looking at the emails and the FBI would tell Twitter Safety head Yoel Roth to look at the messages they just sent him on teleport. “It was a very weird detail,” Sacks said, “And it shows the way our government prefers to operate, which is in secrecy.” “What basis is there for the FBI first of all even to be engaged in censorship on social media to the extent they were,” Sacks said, noting they had an 80-agent team flagging posts for the FBI and other parts of the government. //

“What was the crime that they were investigating here,” Sacks declared. This was all coming under the heading of searching for “foreign interference” in elections, a truly nebulous justification. Add to that the instructions were secret, disappearing, Sacks said, “Why isn’t that a matter of public record?” He said first of all, it was a violation of the First Amendment if they were pushing censorship, but on top of that, they weren’t even being transparent about it. “We have a right as citizens of this country to know what our government is doing, and for them to be engaging in this sort of um, you know, magic trick, where the instructions they are giving are disappearing, it’s almost like the cover-up part of this crime.” //

What that means is that it’s harder to find the evidence of secret instructions that they were giving to Twitter if you were trying to figure out what they were doing. It also raises questions about why they’re erasing the evidence unless they knew that what they were doing was problematic. Yet, we still haven’t gotten any real answers from the FBI on this, just a response that claimed that this was “traditional” contacts they’d had with private companies (that alone is chilling if this is “traditional”) and they called the Twitter files “conspiracy theorists. //

Quiverfull
10 minutes ago
Relevant to the discussion, and hopefully a jury instruction read during the trial of numerous federal employees who participated in this mass violation of Americans' civil rights, here is the Federal Court Jury Instruction:

1.20 SPOLIATION/DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE
[Party] contends that [Other Party] at one time possessed [describe evidence allegedly destroyed]. However, [Other Party] contends that [evidence never existed, evidence was not in its possession, evidence was not destroyed, loss of evidence was accidental, etc.].
You may assume that such evidence would have been unfavorable to [Other Party] only if you find by a preponderance of the evidence that:
(1) [Other Party] intentionally [destroyed the evidence] [caused the evidence to be destroyed]; and
(2) [Other Party] [destroyed the evidence] [caused the evidence to be destroyed] in bad faith. //

anon-8f8k
17 minutes ago
Isn't destruction of official government communications a crime in and of itself?

. If this committee focuses solely – or even mostly – on malfeasance that negatively affects Republicans and conservatives, the rest of the country will not view the probes as credible. Most people are aware of the reality that the FBI and intelligence agencies have long had a problem with corruption. Throughout history, their misconduct has harmed Americans on both sides of the political divide – and is likely doing so even today.

The issues surrounding the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago and the way it has approached the abortion issue certainly indicate that the Bureau is biased in favor of the left. This is likely the case with intelligence agencies as well. But the investigations must be geared toward rooting out all corruption regardless of political affiliation.

Additionally, it is also worth noting that even if these investigations reveal smoking guns, it won’t matter if there is no accountability. Indeed, if heads don’t roll, what exactly is the purpose of bothering to investigate in the first place? This is the concern I – and several others – have expressed. It’s not enough to simply expose wrongdoing; the people engaging in these actions must be punished. Unfortunately, we know this is not going to happen. //

Quizzical
2 minutes ago
There are two major reasons why the January 6 committee lacked any credibility. That Democrats wanted the committee to exit and Republicans didn't is not one of them. //

If the price of a serious investigation into FBI abuses is that the committee must also look at some government agencies abusing power in ways that offends the left, that's fine. The important thing is to uncover the abuses that have happened and figure out how to prevent it from happening again. If Democrats want to argue that it's okay for the FBI to tell social media companies which Americans to ban for saying things that the FBI disapproves of, then make them put that on the record.

Twitter’s top ranks were riddled with ex-FBI agents and executives, stitching the company even closer to the federal agency now under fire for leaning on Twitter to meddle in the 2020 elections.

More than a dozen former feds flocked to the company in the months and years prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of the social network in October.

The Post found FBI influence was considerably more significant than just James Baker, the FBI’s former general counsel who later worked in the same role for Twitter. He was recently fired by Musk for interfering in the billionaire’s efforts to come clean about past transgressions at the company.

In some cases, the former G-men and -women held positions that would have put them close to company leadership directly involved in censoring The Post’s Hunter Biden coverage in October 2020.

Techno Fog @Techno_Fog
The FBI caught Steele primary subsource Igor Danchenko in a number of lies.

What did the FBI do in response?

It signed Danchenko up as a paid FBI confidential human source.

Durham's latest:
technofog.substack.com
Durham shocker: Danchenko was a paid FBI informant
3:20 PM · Sep 13, 2022

Durham dropped a pretty stunning revelation regarding Igor Danchenko, who is currently being prosecuted for lying to the FBI. Danchenko was the primary sub-source for the discredited Steele Dossier and was caught in several falsehoods regarding the document.

Now, we are learning that after those lies were known, the FBI didn’t stop using him as a source. On the contrary, they made him a paid confidential informant until the month before the 2020 presidential election. //

Techno Fog @Techno_Fog
·
The FBI caught Steele primary subsource Igor Danchenko in a number of lies.

What did the FBI do in response?

It signed Danchenko up as a paid FBI confidential human source.

Durham's latest

technofog.substack.com
Durham shocker: Danchenko was a paid FBI informant

Techno Fog @Techno_Fog

The purpose should be quite clear -

The FBI buries Danchenko from inquiry by making him a CHS.

In doing so, the FBI prevents discovery of its own misconduct.

Utterly corrupt and self-serving.
3:47 PM · Sep 13, 2022

NARA told Trump it would proceed with “providing the FBI access to the records in question, as requested by the incumbent President, beginning as early as May 12, 2022,” according to the order.

Contrary to Biden’s claims, per the order, it was Biden who requested that the documents that had been turned over to NARA be provided to the FBI.

While Biden might not have known of the moment of the raid, he knew of the involvement of the FBI because he had requested the documents be turned over to them. He was directly involved in the FBI action. //

Robert A Hahn
3 hours ago
I wish someone could explain to me why every judge involved in this case prefers to ignore the existence of the Presidential Records Act, which would appear to render moot the issue of whether any of these documents were classified. That law, on its face, anticipates that some of the records taken by an outgoing president will be classified. Yet the law contains no penalties or even restrictions on taking them. This would appear to make it impossible to charge a former president -- as the Democrats and their blue media insist must happen -- with "possession of classified documents." Given that, what possible legal reason could there be for even asking for a search warrant, let alone conducting a raid on someone's home? And now here we are again with the "review which ones were classified" nonsense, when the law draws no distinction in that area?

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook algorithmically suppressed stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 election at the request of the FBI weeks before the November contest.

Speaking on Joe Rogan’s podcast on Thursday, Zuckerberg said the FBI approached employees at the tech giant to warn that the laptop was a vehicle of Russian interference.

David Rivkin and Lee Casey in WSJ: “if the Justice Department’s sole complaint is that Mr. Trump had in his possession presidential records he took with him from the White House, he should be in the clear, even if some of those records are classified.” //

Someone whose legal analysis I would credit is David Rivkin. I’ve seen him and his team in action, and they are really good. He’s been involved in the notorious Wisconsin John Doe cases representing the conservative victims of the prosecutorial misconduct.

Rivkin and his law partner Lee Casey, had an Op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on August 22, 2022, that confirms my gut instinct that the search warrant was rotten from the get-go, The Trump Warrant Had No Legal Basis. Here’s an excerpt, but read the whole thing at the link:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-warrant-had-no-legal-basis-mar-a-lago-affidavit-presidential-records-act-archivist-custody-classified-fbi-garland-11661170684?st=0nb40x5729qgbtx&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink //

The materials to be seized included “any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021”—i.e., during Mr. Trump’s term of office. Virtually all the materials at Mar-a-Lago are likely to fall within this category. Federal law gives Mr. Trump a right of access to them. His possession of them is entirely consistent with that right, and therefore lawful, regardless of the statutes the FBI cites in its warrant.

Those statutes are general in their text and application. But Mr. Trump’s documents are covered by a specific statute, the Presidential Records Act of 1978. It has long been the Supreme Court position, as stated in Morton v. Mancari (1974), that “where there is no clear intention otherwise, a specific statute will not be controlled or nullified by a general one, regardless of the priority of enactment.” The former president’s rights under the PRA trump any application of the laws the FBI warrant cites.

A look at the FBI’s last six years shows a pattern of irredeemable corruption.

As Mike Anton presciently wrote two weeks ago, the political persecution of Donald Trump is not about him at all, but about his representation of what a large block of voters want that the national security state refuses to allow.

The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.

Complaints about the nature of Trump are just proxies for objections to the nature of his base.

No wonder Democrats keep bleating loudly about “our democracy” — they know we don’t live in one presently. And this FBI raid is going to make a lot more people aware of it.

If Republicans continue to submit to this farcical arrangement, it will be more confirmation that America’s two-party system is also a pretense, and Republicans are merely a fake opposition party kept on life support to help some people believe our elections are legitimate.

Republicans’ promised hearings aren’t enough. Republicans also held hearing after hearing on Spygate, and nobody was brought to justice. They should be using every peaceful tool of dissent, protest, and refusing to cooperate, as well as preparing to replace the entire FBI and DOJ with completely apolitical staff. Anything Democrats want or need from Republicans from now on, including providing the appearance of a consenting two-party system, should be completely off limits until this banana republic governance ends.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/06/09/fbi_chief_comey_misled_congresss_gang_of_8_over_russiagate_lisa_page_memo_reveals_836434.html

Declassified for Durham’s probe, a March 2017 memo prepared by Lisa Page for FBI head James Comey’s meeting with Congress’ “Gang of Eight” — the bipartisan House and Senate leaders who oversee the most classified stuff — was a total cook-up job.

It advised Comey to present accusations that Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort and foreign policy adviser Carter Page were working with the Russian government as coming from a confidential Russia-based source with real intel-community chops. In fact, the FBI had already established that the root source was US-based former Brookings flunky Igor Danchenko’s utterly speculative gossip with an ex-girlfriend and a Democratic Party hack.

That, plus publicly reported info, was all Christopher Steele (a retired British spy who doesn’t even speak Russian) ever had to back up his “dossier.” And the FBI knew it since at least January 2017, when it interviewed Danchenko.

Comey hid all this during his meetings, and after. Yet the public only learned it years later, once the Durham probe began.

The Comey meeting where he served up these nonsense stories prompted both House and Senate Intelligence committees to open probes. But that was hardly the only poisoned fruit. FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, counterintelligence officer Peter Strzok, analyst Brian Auten and Justice attorney Kevin Clinesmith pretended the Danchenko “intel” was credible to get the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court’s OK for wiretaps on Carter Page and dupe the Justice Department to keep granting approval for Trump campaign surveillance (which did not corroborate the wild claims). Again, all while they knew Danchenko had admitted it was baseless.

For years, the media lionized these people as saviors of the Republic, even after special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe turned up zero evidence in support of their claims.

It was a purely political hit job from the start, by top members of the highest law- enforcement agency in the land, against a candidate-and-then-president they opposed. For all the justified anger at Trump over the Jan. 6 riot, this methodical and effective deception plot looks far more like an attempted coup.

Yet, other than losing their jobs, none of the plotters has paid any real price. Comey and Strzok both wrote best-sellers; McCabe even had his retirement benefits restored (after being fired for lying under oath) under the Biden administration.

Of course, most media have no interest in sharing the truth. They won Pulitzers and endless clicks from hyping Russiagate, using it to kneecap a president they despised.

If Baker, the man to whom Sussmann lied, adopts such a disinterested approach to justice, and Priestap, an assistant director at the FBI, shows disdain for the special counsel’s case, surely a jury of Sussmann’s peers will too.

The men and women of the jury live and work in D.C., with men and women like Sussmann, Baker, and Priestap. Their kids go to school together—literally in the case of one juror—and they likely can envision a friend or neighbor in Sussmann’s position.

While Sussmann’s lie was “material” in the legal sense, jurors seem likely to shrug the lie off as harmless, mentally parroting the woman several jurors acknowledged they donated money to when she ran for president in 2016: “What difference at this point does it make?”

I may be wrong. But I don’t think so.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s long history of abusing its power is once again prominent amid the continued expose by Special Counsel John Durham. His prosecution is demonstrating the FBI’s use of its power to deploy federal intelligence assets against political opponents of Democrats.

The FBI routinely intervenes in politics, such as when the FBI assisted the Hillary Clinton campaign in painting former President Donald Trump as a Russian intelligence asset, as Durham’s investigation is emphasizing with more evidence. By getting a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant on Carter Page, the FBI also likely spied on Trump and his inner circle via something called the two-hop rule.

Stunningly, it appears the FBI’s animus for Trump was rooted in disagreements about the foreign policy that Trump campaigned on. Spygate, however, is only a more recent manifestation of a long history of FBI abuses that Congress must rein in as soon as possible. //

When breaking up the FBI, locate the headquarters of those agencies across America, especially in the Midwest, rustbelt, and southeastern United States. The organized crime agency can be placed in Indiana, the counterterrorism agency in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the anti-human trafficking agency in Kansas City. The heads of all these new, smaller, agencies will still be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The upside is obvious. The FBI’s roughly $10 billion budget can be apportioned across these agencies, but the creation of separate agencies allows Congress much more control over funding. //

In other words, this new framework would create more direct and less opaque accountability to Congress and the president. This then would allow the public—who are actually smarter than the politicians—to better hold the government accountable.

The public would be stunned to know how little our federal government spends on measures to fight against trafficking and child exploitation. The public would also be stunned to know how much more we are spending on entrapping people in the name of fighting “domestic terrorism,” which the public would rightly judge far less a problem than the human trafficking problem. So let the sunlight in. //

The whole point of America’s founding documents is that too much power concentrated in too few hands is always corrupting, especially when this power is unaccountable to the people. The D.C. bureaucracy and specifically the intelligence agencies have long become powers unto themselves, and a threat to our democracy. The FBI is a poster child for this perversion of our system, and no political movement will save our democratic republic without reforming it.