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As FBI director Chris Wray performed his usual smarmy stonewalling in Congress Wednesday, a damning report on his $10 billion agency’s “cult of narcissism” was delivered to the House Judiciary Committee by an alliance of retired and active-duty agents and analysts.
The same group gave us the scathing DEI report last year about the FBI’s degraded recruitment standards and cosseting of physically unfit, mentally ill, drug-taking or generally useless agents to satisfy diversity requirements at the expense of merit and experience.
This time they have assessed the entire bureau and drawn several worrying conclusions, including that local law-enforcement partners have developed a “disturbing loss of trust in the FBI” and are subsequently reluctant to share information, with alarming consequences for national security and public safety.
“Police officers and sheriff’s deputies on patrol and detectives investigating illegal activity in their jurisdictions have unparalleled visibility into street-level crime. . . . When this information is not immediately shared with the FBI, the FBI is left to address complex, evolving threats facing the United States with an unacceptably vast and debilitating ‘blind spot’ because [it] does not have enough personnel and resources to see into every corner of the country.”
Loss of trust
While Wray testified that the FBI is facing a “complex threat environment” that is unprecedented in his experience, the loss of trust in the bureau on his watch only exacerbates the risks, which include terrorist suspects flooding over the southern border.
Republican members of Congress questioning Wray reflected a widespread distrust of the FBI’s investigation of the assassination attempt against Donald Trump.
The whistleblower report draws on testimony from more than 30 “independent, highly credible law-enforcement sources and sub-sources” across the country who “do not trust the FBI because they believe the FBI in recent years has been operating as a partisan federal agency motivated by a political agenda.
“They are not only reluctant to work with the FBI but reportedly have decided to no longer share actionable, substantive information on criminal and other intelligence-related activity with the FBI.”
Most concerning is what the alliance of whistleblowers call a “crisis of confidence” in FBI-led task forces where relationships with local cops have deteriorated to the point of “imploding” in some cases because of “poor management and ineffective leadership by the FBI.”
Local cops said their precipitous decline in trust for the FBI was triggered by its excessive response to the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, followed by the raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
One source, a 25-year veteran sergeant in the Major Crimes Division of a large police force in a Western state, said “he/she cannot understand why the FBI is not going after [far-left militant group] Antifa, BLM and pro-Palestinian rioters with the same vigor the FBI brought to bear against” J6 participants.
Another source, a 15-year veteran cop from a Southern state, said many local law-enforcement officers “believe they could be targeted by the FBI and the DOJ because of their love for the United States of America and may be perceived as domestic terrorists because of how they may vote.”
Plummeting morale
The pressure placed on local law enforcement to assist with J6 cases in their areas “has impacted morale within these agencies” and led to a belief that the FBI has been contaminated by a “partisan, political agenda.”
Sources believe that “FBI leadership would exploit any information provided to them to violate the law and the constitutional rights of suspects who are under investigation, as well as innocent citizens.”
One said the FBI’s behavior was “that of a Third World country [and the bureau] should be dismantled and its personnel prosecuted and given long prison sentences.”
The head of a multiagency task force said the newer FBI agents in the team “do not bother to conceal their distaste for disfavored political and religious views . . . Newer FBI special agents identify themselves as ‘woke or liberal’ and are often openly critical
of Conservative or Christian values.”
Another source described FBI personnel generally as “almost always . . . arrogant, aloof and condescending [with] little, if any, tactical skills to support themselves or the safety of their team while out on the streets.”
The picture that emerges of the FBI is of an incompetent, arrogant bloated bureaucracy in which a new generation of DEI hires described as “completely worthless” and “the worst batch of people.”
The report’s final damning indictment is reserved for the FBI Academy for New Agent Training in Quantico, Va., which “promotes a cult of narcissism by imbuing a false sense of superiority over all local, state and federal law enforcement.”
Taxpayer resources have been lavished on a new “wellness center” for yoga and meditation at the academy instead of teaching trainee agents the value of “humility and a higher sense of service and professionalism” when working with local law enforcement.
The FBI Academy has become so politicized that at one point a group of conservative students held up handwritten signs displaying the word “STOP” in response to the instructor’s constant political denigration about Trump and Republicans.
The report also backs up whistleblower documents obtained earlier this month by Empower Oversight that revealed that the FBI’s Security Division has been abusing the security-clearance process to purge conservatives from its ranks.
The FBI has suspended or revoked clearances for employees who expressed support for Trump or objections to the COVID-19 vaccination in answer to a series of improper and intrusive questions.