FBI Director Christopher Wray pledges allegiance prior to testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, July 24, 2024. (Credit: Ken Cedeno/UPI/Shutterstock)
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 coddling 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 therefore 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 former President 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 calls 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 loss of trust in the FBI was triggered by its excessive response to the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, followed by the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
One source, a 25-year veteran sergeant in the Major Crimes Division of a large police force in a Western state, said they “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.”