“The Republican Party is the party of law and order,” Mike Pence declared in New Hampshire this past week. “Our party stands with the men and women who stand on the thin blue line on the federal and state and local level.
“And these attacks on the FBI must stop. Calls to defund the FBI are just as wrong as calls to defund the police,” Pence said. However, most of the “attacks” on the FBI don’t demand “defunding” the agency, but instead demand real accountability for its abuses and errors — a failure of elected officials for years, and perhaps decades, including Pence himself.
Should a few fringe threats and extremist demands push those calls for accountability into silence? Before we answer that question, and Andrew McCarthy’s robust response, let’s first take a look at this report from Reason’s Eric Boehm. This story about dishonest predicates for FBI searches and misrepresentations to a federal magistrate has a certain, ah, … familiarity to recent events, no?
The FBI told a federal magistrate judge that it intended to open hundreds of safe deposit boxes seized during a March 2021 raid in order to inventory the items inside—but new evidence shows that federal agents were plotting all along to use the operation as an opportunity to forfeit cash and other valuables.
Federal agents failed to disclose those plans to the federal magistrate judge who issued the warrant for the high-profile raid of U.S. Private Vaults, a private business in Beverly Hills, California, that had been the subject of an FBI investigation since at least 2019. When the raid took place, the FBI also seems to have ignored limitations imposed by the warrant, including an explicit prohibition against using the safe deposit boxes as the basis for further criminal investigations.
Those details regarding the planning and execution of the FBI’s raid of U.S. Private Vaults are now out in the open after a different federal judge ruled this week that the government could not keep those details out of the public record. As Reason has extensively reported, the raid on U.S. Private Vaults resulted in federal agents seizing and attempting to forfeit more than $86 million in cash as well as gold, jewelry, and other valuables from property owners who were suspected of no crimes. Attorneys representing some plaintiffs who are trying to recover their possessions interviewed the FBI agents who planned the raid, but federal prosecutors tried to keep some details of those depositions redacted.
The unredacted legal documents, filed in federal court on Thursday, show why the government was eager to keep those details under wraps. (Reason filed an amicus brief in the case arguing that the redacted documents should be made public.)
Reason has worked on this investigation for years, as Boehm details in the rest of the report. This raid — and there’s no better word for it, given the intent to plunder the contents rather than inventory them — took place three years ago in a case with little political or national-security implications. This was a rather routine criminal probe into money laundering or at the least money sheltering for alleged syndicates, the kind of investigation that the FBI has been perceived as handling in a by-the-book manner, at least until now. And even in this instance, the FBI’s own now-unredacted internal documents show that they materially misrepresented their intentions behind the raid and their aims to seize as much loot as possible — even though most of the customers of this business weren’t suspected of any criminal activity at all.
And that’s from the FBI’s law-enforcement side, whose reputation has remained relatively unscathed, at least until now. Their intelligence group just spent the last six years chasing the ridiculous allegations from the Steele Dossier, which their agents apparently couldn’t discover or wouldn’t admit came from Hillary Clinton’s oppo-research efforts, and then lied to a FISA court to get surveillance on a political organizers who had actually worked for the FBI — Carter Page. And all of that turned out to be a gigantic waste of time, a political lie that crippled a presidency and convulsed a nation for no good reason at all.
The FBI badly needs to have its house cleaned again, Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review, and Mike Pence does no favors to the bureau or the country in pretending otherwise. Their counter-intel groups have apparently decided to revert back to pre-Church Committee status quo ante over the last six-plus years. The pattern of deceiving federal judges on the purposes and predicates for search warrants got well established by Inspector General Michael Horowitz in his scathing review of Operation Crossfire Hurricane.
Its rapidly degrading credibility has infected all parts of its operations, and as McCarthy argues, deservedly so:
Do you know what is the most notorious criminal trial taking place in our country today? It is a retrial in the case against two defendants accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer. It is a retrial of those two defendants because the last time around, a jury could not convict them and outright acquitted two others.
That tends to happen when a jury smells a rat — when it perceives that the FBI may have been fabricating rather than investigating a crime, may have been leading a group of ne’er-do-wells by the nose in order to fuel a progressive narrative of a nation under siege by racist Republican militiamen. Maybe it was the fact that the defendants under indictment seem as if they couldn’t kidnap a ham sandwich — although a federal grand jury could obviously indict one. Maybe it was that the FBI had more informants in the case than there were suspects complicit in the purported plot. Maybe it was that one of the agents on the case leaked information while the probe was ongoing, apparently to promote a cyber-intelligence venture he had going on the side. Or maybe it was because of the main case agent: the one who was posting on social media about Trump’s being a “douchebag fu**ing reality tv star”; the one who was later arrested for beating his wife to within an inch of her life after they argued because she didn’t like the “swingers” party he had just taken her to.
McCarthy spent years working with the FBI on both criminal and national-security investigations. The agents with whom McCarthy worked inspired confidence through their honesty and fidelity, McCarthy writes, but that’s no longer true of the organization and especially its leadership. Pence is not just wrong to tell people to keep FBI criticism quiet, McCarthy argues — it amounts to a moral disqualification from office:
As someone who criticizes the FBI out of reverence for the institution and what it should be, I no longer believe the bureau can get its priorities straight. We have to be honest: Things are headed in the wrong direction. Over the last decade, as it took on the cast of a spy agency, the bureau returned to its Hooverian roots, becoming enmeshed in politics and serving a partisan agenda — inevitably that of the Democratic Party because Democrats are the party of government and the bureau knows where its bread is buttered. There is a reason the FBI, taking cues from its political masters, now translates the term domestic terrorism to mean the right-wing extremism of white supremacists, even as left-wing radicals and the criminals they coddle destroy America’s cities.
Funny, but I don’t recall Vice President Pence’s being a ferocious defender of the FBI while his boss, to whom he was the very model of obsequiousness, spent four years attacking it. If he gave a “Now, now, Mr. President, let’s not throw out the thin-blue-line baby with the Hoover Headquarters bathwater,” I’m afraid I missed it. But if he really thinks that negative criticism of the FBI, on the current record, is a form of dangerous incitement, then he has no business running for president.
Indeed. In fact, as McCarthy argues, the moral equivalence of defunding local police and defunding the FBI is itself a myth. Read his whole piece to get to his logic on that point, but essentially, police help make communities safer, while federal law-enforcement functions focus on broader and less community-focused issues. Pence gets that wrong too, even if one agrees that defunding the FBI would be pointless. (Federal laws would still need a federal law enforcement agency; such a move on its own would essentially be little more than changing letterhead.)
One doesn’t necessarily have to have lost confidence in the FBI to reach McCarthy’s conclusion about Pence’s standing as a leader. For the past two weeks, we have been inundated with lectures from stakeholders in the Beltway governing clique that criticism of government and demands for answers to these abuses equate to violence and domestic terrorism. That kind of suppression of dissent and criticism recalls — thankfully, in a soft way thus far — the Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a crime to insult or abuse the US government:
Aimed at socialists, pacifists and other anti-war activists, the Sedition Act imposed harsh penalties on anyone found guilty of making false statements that interfered with the prosecution of the war; insulting or abusing the U.S. government, the flag, the Constitution or the military; agitating against the production of necessary war materials; or advocating, teaching or defending any of these acts. Those who were found guilty of such actions, the act stated, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both. This was the same penalty that had been imposed for acts of espionage in the earlier legislation.
At least that atrocious act was passed as part of a wartime effort, an understandable if terrible intrusion on political rights of free people. There’s no war to service with such a demand now; all we have is the enforcement arm of an increasingly unaccountable federal government, and the people running it (or who want to run it) telling us that our criticism enables or equates to random acts of stupid violence.
There is something very wrong at the FBI and Department of Justice. We need leadership that will recognize it, address it, and make these organizations operate in a legal and accountable manner. We don’t need leadership that tells us to look away and shut up about these endemic problems, especially after we went down this road with the FBI for decades before the Church Committee. And let’s not forget that the Church Committee also included the CIA, NSA, and the IRS in its reforms — the same IRS that will double over the next ten years, courtesy of the same people telling us to shut up and be good little drones rather than active and concerned citizens.
And if you’ve made it this far, perhaps you’ll enjoy my latest podcast with Nick Searcy on these same matters. Nick produced and narrated Capitol Punishment, which deals with some of these same FBI issues. I’ll also speak with Power Line’s John Hinderaker on similar issues on Monday. Let’s keep this conversation going, because to stop it is to acquiesce.
Addendum: Don’t forget to read Jazz’ article on how the FBI might have made off with tons of Civil War gold — and covered it up.
Update: Let’s not forget which agency got its start by enforcing the Sedition Act of 1918 … and the career of the man who would run it for fifty years.
