House Judiciary Committee Republicans released a report just ahead of the midterm elections on the “politicization” of the Justice Department and FBI, including its handling of investigations related to Hunter Biden and the Capitol riot.
The 50-page report, which included whistleblower claims and had nearly 1,000 pages of oversight letters attached, was put out by GOP members led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who is poised to hold the gavel next year if Republicans win the House.
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the stewardship of Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, is broken. The problem lies not with the majority of front-line agents who serve our country, but with the FBI’s politicized bureaucracy,” the House GOP said, arguing that Garland and Wray “have weaponized federal law enforcement to target the Administration’s political opponents and protect political allies.”
“Over the last year, a multitude of whistleblowers have approached Judiciary Committee Republicans with allegations of political bias by the FBI’s senior leadership and misuses of the agency’s federal law-enforcement powers,” the new GOP report said, adding that “one startling conclusion is clear: the FBI and its parent agency, the Justice Department, have become political institutions.”
The GOP report concluded that “the FBI downplayed and sought to reduce the spread of the serious allegations of wrongdoings leveled against Hunter Biden.”
“Mounting evidence from the last two years shows that Hunter Biden, son of President Biden, has received preferential treatment from federal law enforcement, who seem to have turned a blind eye to the potential national security threats presented by his business dealings with Chinese, Russian, and other foreign nationals,” Republicans contended. “Other evidence suggests that the FBI may have even colluded with social media platform Facebook to suppress information on these allegations from the public in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election.”
GRASSLEY AND JOHNSON SEND PROSECUTOR EVIDENCE ON HUNTER BIDEN
Whistleblower allegations emerged this summer that FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment in August 2020 that was used by FBI headquarters to mislabel accurate information about Hunter Biden as disinformation, according to disclosures made public by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
Whistleblowers also said Timothy Thibault, the now-former FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Washington Field Office, shut down a line of inquiry into Hunter Biden in October 2020 despite the fact that some of the details were known to be true.
Grassley revealed whistleblowers told him Thibault had “ordered closed” an “avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting,” even though “all of the reporting was either verified or verifiable via criminal search warrants.”
The GOP report said Thibault’s refusal to testify before Congress “ignores the importance of congressional oversight, as well as the Committee’s past practice in examining allegations of misconduct at the FBI.”
Wray said he found these whistleblower allegations “deeply troubling” when asked about them in August.
Facebook and Twitter both restricted access to the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop stories just weeks ahead of the 2020 election after receiving Russia-related briefings from the bureau.
The House GOP report also argued that “the FBI is artificially inflating and manipulating domestic violent extremism statistics for political purposes,” including those related to the Capitol riot.
“At a time when the Biden Administration maintains that DVE is the ‘greatest threat’ facing the United States, the FBI appears to be complicit in artificially creating the Administration’s political narrative,” the report concluded. “Whistleblower disclosures made by multiple FBI employees from different field offices indicate that the Biden Administration’s narrative is misleading.”
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security revealed last month that a “significant” part of the massive rise in domestic terrorism investigations between 2020 and 2021 is related to the Justice Department’s investigation into the Capitol riot.
The bureau and the DHS revealed the FBI was conducting approximately 1,400 pending domestic terrorism investigations as of the end of fiscal 2020 and was conducting roughly 2,700 domestic terrorism investigations by the end of fiscal 2021.
The Justice Department said this week that more than 880 people have been arrested in relation to the Capitol riot in the 21 months since the event.
The Republican report also concluded that “the FBI appears to not be aggressively investigating pipe bombs placed by political party headquarters … while prioritizing other January 6, 2021-related investigations.”
The person who planted pipe bombs the night before outside both the Republican and Democratic national committee headquarters in Washington remains at large.
The report also argued that DOJ and the FBI “continue to allow attacks on pro-life facilities and churches to go unabated, while pushing an anti-life agenda.” The report included an appendix that listed roughly 67 alleged acts of vandalism or violence aimed against anti-abortion groups.
The report also charged that DOJ and the FBI were “using counterterrorism resources to target parents resisting a far-left educational curriculum.”
Garland’s controversial October 2021 school boards directive was put out just a few days after the National School Boards Association argued to Biden that “the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes” and called upon DOJ to review whether the Patriot Act “in regards to domestic terrorism” could be deployed. The NSBA letter was subsequently withdrawn.
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The Jordan-led report also contended that the raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was “unprecedented”.
The DOJ revealed early on that Trump is being investigated for a possible Espionage Act violation and possible obstruction of justice, according to the unsealed warrant for the controversial Aug. 8 bureau raid of Mar-a-Lago.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the report.
“The FBI has testified to Congress and responded to letters from legislators on numerous occasions to provide an accurate accounting of how we do our work,” an FBI spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. “The men and women of the FBI devote themselves to protecting the American people from terrorism, violent crime, cyber threats and other dangers. Put quite simply: we follow the facts without regard for politics. While outside opinions and criticism often come with the job, we will continue to follow the facts wherever they lead, do things by the book, and speak through our work.”
