Pence's questionable defense of FBI

 Andrew McCarthy:

So . . . does Mike Pence think Mike Horowitz should stop criticizing the FBI?

Does the former vice president believe the lives of those he this week called the “brave men and women who stand on the thin blue line” at the bureau have been put at risk by the hundreds of pages of reports (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) in which Horowitz, the Justice Department’s own inspector general, has scalded the bureau for serial abuses of its national-security surveillance powers, shocking political bias, lying under oath to investigators, leaking investigative information, usurping the authority of federal prosecutors, petty corruption, and so on?

Or perhaps Pence thinks that it is the federal judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) who have imperiled the lives of FBI agents? In late 2016, the judges lambasted the bureau for its institutional “lack of candor.” They weren’t referring to the FBI’s misconduct in connection with that year’s election — that rebuke would come later. Instead, they were exasperated by the bureau’s years of systematically flouting restrictions on its surveillance authority and misrepresenting the scope of that illegality to the court — with the result that millions of innocent Americans were swept into its national-security monitoring.

When the FISC issued that rebuke, the FBI was just getting started with its FISA abuses in connection with the 2016 election — the investigation in which top agents vowed to stop the Republican candidate from being elected and, failing that, to secure “an insurance policy” by snooping on his presidency. Later, after yet another humiliating internal investigation by the Justice Department, the chief FISA judge condemned the FBI’s systematic failure to honor the court’s rules and the agency’s own internal guardrails.

This malfeasance — not misfeasance, malfeasance — resulted in the presentation to the court of utterly unreliable information. It is not enough to say this misinformation, to which FBI agents swore in FISA-surveillance applications, was unverified despite the requirement of verification in presentations to the FISC. In some instances the bureau agents didn’t even try to corroborate their representations to the judges. And in some instances in which they claimed to have tried, they failed to maintain the supposedly supporting evidence, despite the mandates of their own regulations.

Mind you, these examples of condemnation, not by alarmed Republicans but by United States judges, all arose in connection with the bureau’s foreign-counterintelligence mission. That is the domestic national-security mission, in which the FBI is trusted to wield awesome powers under the cloak of secrecy — not just outside public view but also beyond effective judicial and congressional oversight. It is the mission in which the only due process an American citizen gets hinges on the FBI’s adhering to the rules and playing it straight with the courts. It is the mission that asks the American people to believe the bureau when it looks them in the eye and says, “You can trust us.”

But can we? When a court that relies on an agency’s integrity assesses that, institutionally, it lacks candor, that doesn’t mean it screwed up a few times, as we all do. That doesn’t relate to errors which we would expect well-meaning people to make in high-pressure jobs where tough decisions frequently have to be made based on imperfect knowledge. No, that is warning of rot from within — a judgment about institutional character rather than institutional competence.

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.

We’re not talking Efrem Zimbalist Jr. here.
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There is much more.

McCarthy is a former federal; prosecutor who brought cases against Islamic terrorists who attacked New York.   His criticism of the FBI appears valid from my own perspective.  The agency has become politicized and abusive and was so long before its raid on Mar-a-Lago.  In recent times they have been acting more like the enforcement arm of the DNC.