Several of the biggest scandals in recent FBI history have all stemmed from the bureau’s over-dependence on working with liberal sources to achieve a left-wing agenda, which has only led to greater backlash and scrutiny, Just The News reports.
Three of the most prominent examples include the dossier written by former British spy Christopher Steele, alleging with zero evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump was colluding with the Russian government during his 2016 campaign; the dossier later turned out to have been directly funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Later, under the Biden Administration, the FBI faced further blowback for its respective attempts to label parents protesting at school board meetings, as well as “traditionalist Catholics,” as domestic terrorists on the recommendation of far-left advocacy groups.
All three of these have since led to investigations that have subsequently produced multiple cases of finger-pointing between the bureau and the leftist groups and figures they worked with, each accusing the other of being more responsible for the blunders.
“They need to have an understanding that there are folks out there that are looking to manipulate them for political purposes and every time they fall for it, they’re damaging the reputation of the FBI in a way that is fundamentally harmful to not only the FBI, but to the country,” said Jason Foster, a former U.S. Senate investigator who specialized in FBI wrongdoing for twenty years. Foster now represents FBI whistleblowers at the Empower Oversight whistleblower center.
The most recent scandal involved the FBI’S Richmond office, which posted an intelligence bulletin declaring that “traditional Catholics” and the holding of Latin Mass could prove to be hubs of “White supremacy.” The Richmond office further suggested that agents begin infiltrating Catholic churches to investigate so-called “extremists.” Part of the information that the FBI used as a source in this particular memo came from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a far-left hate group.
The national FBI headquarters eventually issued a statement retracting and condemning the memo, claiming that it did not meet the “exacting standards” for the intelligence community.
“It is lazy, it is absurdly speculative, it provides no evidence for its thesis,” said Kevin Brock, the former chief of FBI intelligence. “And it relies exclusively on sources known to be aligned with the political left, such as the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center, Salon, and the Atlantic, that have been known to be habitually critical of the Catholic Church. That’s not intelligence analysis. It’s parroting.”
As a result of these and other scandals, the FBI is now in the crosshairs of a new investigation led by the House GOP, led by the newly-formed Government Weaponization Committee. Chaired by Congressman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the committee is set to investigate abuses of power by the federal government, including the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ), with regards to targeting of political opponents of the Biden Administration.