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Whatever happened to the days of the FBI going after mob bosses, organized crime, public enemy #1, the Ten Most Wanted? (I predict the usual anti-Trump hustlers here to say that is Trump.)
In normal times, the televisions are humming at the FBI’s 56 field offices nationwide, piping in the latest news as agents work their investigations. But these days, some agents say, the TVs are often off to avoid the crush of bad stories about the FBI itself. The bureau, which is used to making headlines for nabbing crooks, has been grabbing the spotlight for unwanted reasons: fired leaders, texts between lovers and, most of all, attacks by President Trump. “I don’t care what channel it’s on,” says Tom O’Connor, a veteran investigator in Washington who leads the FBI Agents Association. “All you hear is negative stuff about the FBI … It gets depressing.”
Many view Trump’s attacks as self-serving: he has called the renowned agency an “embarrassment to our country” and its investigations of his business and political dealings a “witch hunt.” But as much as the bureau’s roughly 14,000 special agents might like to tune out the news, internal and external reports have found lapses throughout the agency, and longtime observers, looking past the partisan haze, see a troubling picture: something really is wrong at the FBI.
The Justice Department’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, will soon release a much-anticipated assessment of Democratic and Republican charges that officials at the FBI interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign. That year-long probe, sources familiar with it tell TIME, is expected to come down particularly hard on former FBI director James Comey, who is currently on a high-profile book tour. It will likely find that Comey breached Justice Department protocols in a July 5, 2016, press conference when he criticized Hillary Clinton for using a private email server as Secretary of State even as he cleared her of any crimes, the sources say.
The report closely follows an earlier one in April by Horowitz, which showed that the ousted deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, had lied to the bureau’s internal investigations branch to cover up a leak he orchestrated about Clinton’s family foundation less than two weeks before the election. (The case has since been referred to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., for potential prosecution.) Another IG report in March found that FBI retaliation against internal whistle-blowers was continuing despite years of bureau pledges to fix the problem.
There have been other painful, more public failures as well: missed opportunities to prevent mass shootings that go beyond the much-publicized overlooked warnings in the Parkland, Fla., school killings; an anguishing delay in the sexual-molestation probe into Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar; and evidence of misconduct by agents in the aftermath of standoffs with armed militias in Nevada and Oregon. FBI agents are facing criminal charges ranging from obstruction to leaking classified material. And then there’s potentially the widest-reaching failure of all: the FBI’s miss of the Russian influence operation against the 2016 election, which went largely undetected for more than two years.
In the course of two dozen interviews for this story, agents and others expressed concern that the tumult is threatening the cooperation of informants, local and state police officials, and allies overseas. Even those who lived through past crises say the current one is more damaging. “We’ve seen ups and downs, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Robert Anderson, a senior official at the FBI who retired in 2015.
The FBI’s crisis of credibility appears to have seeped into the jury room. The number of convictions in FBI-led investigations has declined in each of the last five years, dropping nearly 11% over that period, according to a TIME analysis of data obtained from the Justice Department by researchers at Syracuse University. “We’ve already seen where the bad guys and witnesses look at those FBI credentials, and it might not carry the same weight anymore,” says O’Connor.
Indeed, public support for the FBI has plunged. A PBS NewsHour survey in April showed a 10-point drop–from 71% to 61%–in the prior two months among Americans who thought the FBI was “just trying to do its job” and an 8-point jump–from 23% to 31%–among those who thought it was “biased against the Trump Administration.”
Many of the bureau’s woes developed on Comey’s 3½-year watch.
Last May, McCabe, then the FBI’s deputy director, sat down at the table in his seventh-floor office for a meeting with two agents from the inspections division. The agents had some questions about the Clinton Foundation leak just before the election. It was a quick meeting. McCabe, an FBI veteran who rose through the ranks over a 21-year career, told them he had “no idea” where the leak came from. The agents left after just five minutes or so, according to the Inspector General’s April 13 report.
McCabe had offered that same basic assurance months earlier to his boss, then director Comey, investigators said, and had angrily lit into FBI officials under him, suggesting the Clinton leak had come from their offices and telling one senior agent in Washington to “get his house in order.” But as it turned out, McCabe knew exactly where the leak had come from. He personally authorized it, Horowitz’s investigators found, to counter charges that he favored Clinton. (His wife received $467,500 from the PAC of a Clinton ally, then Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, in a failed 2015 bid for state office.)
The McCabe findings have shaken the FBI. The bureau has massive power, and as a result, it has strict rules. Lying to investigators is considered a dire breach in an organization built on trust. The referral to the U.S. Attorney’s office, which emerged a week after the report was released, could result in charges against McCabe of making a false sworn statement. He has challenged the findings, disputing even the most basic elements, like how many people were in the room. The IG said it did not find many of his objections credible, with some elements contradicted by notes taken contemporaneously by an agent. McCabe previously called his firing part of a “war on the FBI” and the Russia investigation. But viewed against the backdrop of other Horowitz reports, McCabe’s alleged rule-breaking looks like part of a much larger problem.
Others are doubtful. Jeffrey Danik, a retired FBI agent in Florida who now works with whistle-blowers at the bureau, blames the state of affairs on “a severe lack of leadership” and transparency at headquarters in owning up to recent mistakes. Those damaging failures, he says, “have just about pushed our incredible organization over the brink.”
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...s-paying-the-price/ar-AAwG1Vt?ocid=spartanntp
Whatever happened to the days of the FBI going after mob bosses, organized crime, public enemy #1, the Ten Most Wanted? (I predict the usual anti-Trump hustlers here to say that is Trump.)
