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.