Amid calls from former President Donald Trump to “defund” the partisan Department of Justice and FBI, which treats its friends above the law and its enemies below it, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer defended the agencies.
But a review of the agencies’ track records shows them to be indefensible. Here are 19 times Democrats and DOJ politicized the rule of law, deploying federal resources to do Democrats’ bidding.
1. Infiltration of Catholic Parishes
House Republican Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan subpoenaed FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday after a whistleblower revealed the agency is targeting Catholic parishes.
In February, former Special Agent Kyle Seraphin revealed that “the FBI’s Richmond Division would like to protect Virginians from the threat of ‘white supremacy,’ which it believes has found a home within Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass.”
“The document assesses with ‘high confidence’ the FBI can mitigate the threat of Radical-Traditionalist Catholics by recruiting sources within the Catholic Church,” Seraphin reported.
Jordan’s letter to Wray Tuesday said the FBI sought to use local religious organizations as ‘new avenues for tripwire and source development.’”
2. FBI Targeted Parents for Domestic Terrorism
Weeks before the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, in which parental rights in education were the centerpiece of Republican campaigns, the FBI deployed counterterrorism resources on parents who raised issues at school board meetings. Parents identified as extremists by FBI activists were labeled with “threat tags” under Attorney General Merrick Garland’s guidance. Whistleblower documents suggest Garland lied about the scandal when testifying before the House Judiciary Committee that October.
In March, the committee published an interim report on the debacle concluding the Biden administration had “no legitimate basis” to crack down on parents as terrorists.
Garland has refused lawmakers’ demands to repeal the controversial memorandum, according to the committee.
3. Crossfire Hurricane
The campaign to impeach former President Donald Trump began well before his 2017 inauguration.
Deep-state officials within the FBI concocted plans known as Crossfire Hurricane to frame Trump as a Russian agent after the Republican businessman secured the GOP presidential nomination. Within four months of Trump’s first term, a special counsel was appointed to investigate allegations of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. After the more than two-year special counsel investigation run entirely by Democrats with unlimited resources, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team found not one person, let alone Trump himself, colluded with the Kremlin.
4. Hillary’s Emails
While the DOJ investigated the Trump campaign in 2016, the agency gave cover to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over her private email server scandal.
The FBI told journalists there was no evidence that a foreign power reviewed Clinton’s emails improperly stored on a private server. According to a report from the DOJ inspector general in 2018, however, texts show they almost certainly did, “at least one of them classified,” as Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi wrote.
5. FBI Raids Mar-a-Lago
In August, the FBI conducted an unprecedented raid of former President Trump’s Florida residence at Mar-a-Lago. The search, personally approved by Biden’s attorney general after Trump blocked Garland’s 2016 Supreme Court nomination, authorized agents to confiscate any and all documents Trump may have come in contact with as president.
Federal law enforcement officials ultimately left with 15 boxes of allegedly classified material after their search of the 128-room complex, including through former First Lady Melania Trump’s wardrobe.
6. DOJ Investigates 2024 GOP Front-Runner
Trump remains under two special counsel investigations within the Department of Justice, one over the boxes of allegedly classified material from his Florida residence and another related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Last week, Trump was arraigned in a Manhattan courtroom where he pled not guilty to a 34-count felony indictment brought by a George Soros-funded prosecutor over 2016 hush-money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels. House Republicans found Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg used federal forfeiture funding in the investigation.
Trump’s compulsory appearance in New York court gives both President Biden and President Vladimir Putin something in common: Their chief political opponents are both under arrest.
The discovery of classified documents in Biden’s private possession from his time as vice president was far less dramatic.
7. DOJ Fuels J6 Conspiracies
As the Department of Justice continues to concoct crimes to charge Trump with related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the agency has continued on a nationwide hunt to find any and all in Washington, D.C., that day, even questioning 71-year-old grandmothers.
The agency, meanwhile, has refused lawmakers’ questions about the extent of federal law enforcement’s involvement. Wray played down the agency’s own negligence about federal preparedness at an August Senate hearing and claimed, “We did not have any credible intelligence that pointed to thousands of people breaching the Capitol. According to Newsweek, however, the FBI deployed commandos with “shoot to kill authority.”
The FBI has been even less forthcoming about a pair of pipe bombs planted at the RNC and DNC headquarters.
8. FBI Pressured Twitter to Censor Hunter Biden Laptop
After acquiring Twitter, CEO Elon Musk gave a group of independent journalists exclusive access to the company’s internal communications. The ensuing “Twitter Files” exposed how the federal government co-opts social media platforms to manipulate public opinion through censorship campaigns.
Part 6 of the “Twitter Files” detailed how Twitter was a conduit for the FBI to influence voters ahead of the 2020 election. The two were reportedly in “constant and pervasive” contact. The agency partnered with Twitter to suppress right-leaning content throughout the election cycle. That suppression still continues under Musk’s leadership.
Part 7 of the series, published by California-based Substack reporter Michael Shellenberger, illustrated how the FBI launched an operation to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop stories, which implicated then-candidate Biden in global influence-peddling schemes. The FBI even arranged security clearances for senior employees at Twitter and paid the company $3.4 million in taxpayer dollars.
“American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship industrial complex run by America’s scientific and technological elite, which endangers our liberties and democracy,” Shellenberger told lawmakers on the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in March. “The censorship industrial complex combines established methods of psychological manipulation, some developed by the U.S. military during the global war on terror with highly sophisticated tools from computer science.”
9. FBI Pressured Facebook to Censor Hunter Biden Laptop Stories
At the House Weaponization Committee’s second hearing held last month, Subsack reporter and lead “Twitter Files” author Matt Taibbi testified, “We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation requests from every corner of government, from the FBI, the DHS, the HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.”
“A focus of this fast-growing network … is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations or sympathies are deemed misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation,” Taibbi said. “That last term is just a euphemism for ‘true but inconvenient.'”
In August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and revealed the FBI prepped the company to wrongly deem the Hunter Biden laptop story a vehicle of Russian interference.
“The FBI basically came to us and spoke to some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda on the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump similar to that,'” Zuckerberg said.
Once the laptop stories broke from the New York Post, Facebook promptly suppressed their distribution on the platform.
“I think it was 5 to 7 days when it was basically being determined whether it was false,” Zuckerberg said, without disclosing who was responsible for the network’s “fact-check.” “Fewer people saw it than would have otherwise.”
10. DOJ Drags Feet on Hunter Biden Investigations
Days after Zuckerberg’s appearance on Rogan’s podcast, a whistleblower report from Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson accused the FBI, which possessed the laptop’s contents long before the New York Post, of slow-walking investigations of the president’s son.
“After the FBI obtained the Hunter Biden laptop from the Wilmington, DE computer shop, these whistleblowers stated that local FBI leadership told employees, ‘you will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop’ and that the FBI is ‘not going to change the outcome of the election again,'” Johnson wrote in a letter to Wray. “Further, these whistleblowers allege that the FBI did not begin to examine the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop until after the 2020 presidential election — potentially a year after the FBI obtained the laptop in December 2019.”
Hunter Biden has remained under DOJ investigation since 2018, with federal prosecutors investigating tax crimes. In September, Senate Republicans demanded that a special counsel lead the investigation.
Insiders at the Justice Department complained to The Federalist that the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office lacks the proper resources to conduct a comprehensive investigation that a special counsel’s office could offer.
11. DOJ Jails Meme Creator
A pro-Trump internet meme creator faces 10 years in prison after being criminally convicted last month of “election interference” for a post generated amid the 2016 contest.
The Justice Department sought charges against Douglass Mackey in January last year over the 2016 post mocking how low Democrats want to move barriers for voting.
“Save time Avoid the line Vote from home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925 and we’ll make history together This November 8th,” the post read. Fine print at the bottom read, “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by Hillary For President 2016.” Most online users played into the prank by texting the number “Hillary for Prison.”
Mackey, however, now faces a decade behind bars.
12. DOJ Cracks Down on Pro-Life Activists
The Department of Justice indicted 22 pro-life activists last year while neglecting to go after pro-abortion extremists who firebombed pregnancy centers, according to a Federalist review.
Among those indicted was 73-year-old Chet Gallagher, whose home was raided last fall by the FBI over alleged violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. Gallagher is one of 11 who were indicted by the Justice Department for standing in the hallway outside the Carafem abortion facility in Tennessee two years ago. Gallagher was also charged with civil rights conspiracy with six others. While the DOJ claims the pro-life activists, “aided and abetted by one another, used force and physical obstruction to injure, intimidate and interfere with employees of the clinic and a patient who was seeking reproductive health services,” they were mostly just praying.
The department only announced its first two indictments of violent pro-abortion extremists who targeted pro-life pregnancy centers in January.
13. FBI Connects Common Internet Slang with ‘Violent Extremism’
Records made public by a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative Heritage Foundation on Monday revealed the FBI is flagging common internet lingo as indicators of extremism.
Words such as “based” and “Red Pill,” popularized by “The Matrix,” are identified by the FBI as markers of “Involuntary Celibate Violent Extremism” or “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism.”
14. Inflating Extremism
Whistleblowers claim the FBI is inflating the number of “domestic violent extremism” cases to fit the Democrats’ hyperbolic narrative that home-grown extremism is the nation’s worst national security threat.
“From recent protected disclosures, we have learned that FBI officials are pressuring agents to reclassify cases as ‘domestic violent extremism’ even if the cases do not meet the criteria for such a classification,” Rep. Jordan wrote in July, detailing whistleblower allegations in a letter to Wray. “Given the narrative pushed by the Biden Administration that domestic violent extremism is the ‘greatest threat’ facing our country, the revelation that the FBI may be artificially padding domestic terrorism data is scandalous.”
15. FBI Calls Extremist Shooter Targeting GOP Baseball Practice ‘Suicide By Cop’
The FBI sought to downplay the left-wing extremism of a 66-year-old gunman who targeted a 2017 GOP congressional baseball practice by claiming the assailant was motivated by a desire to commit “suicide by cop.” The agency has stood by the description years later.
“It’s fair to say the shooter was motivated by a desire to commit an attack on members of Congress and then knowing by doing so he would likely be killed in the process,” Jill Sanborn, the executive assistant director of the FBI, told the House Appropriations subcommittee in 2021.
16. FBI Covers Up Antisemitism
The FBI claimed that an attack on a synagogue last year by 44-year-old Malik Faisal Akram had nothing to do with targeting Jews. Akram took hostages at a Texas synagogue to demand the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani national also known as “Lady Al Qaeda.”
“We do believe from our engagement with this subject that he was singularly focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community,” said Matthew J. DeSarno, the FBI’s special agent leading the Dallas field office.
Except Chuck DeVore of the Texas Public Policy Foundation reported that Akram “was heard to say via the live stream that operated from the synagogue for much of the incident that he chose it because he thought it was the closest assemblage of Jews to the federal facility holding Siddiqui.”
17. Whitmer Plot
Just as Democrats were branding Republicans as dangerous extremists during the 2020 campaigns, the FBI revealed a plot to kidnap Michigan Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. A group of far-right militiamen, according to the tale, conspired to kidnap the governor and try her as a “tyrant.”
In July of last year, however, long after the 2020 election, BuzzFeed reported that at least 12 people involved were FBI informants orchestrating an entrapment plot.
“The problem with the case is that it appears the FBI, through informants and undercover agents, hatched the kidnapping plot, served in the key leadership positions of the militia group, trained the militia members in military tactics, actively recruited participants, and funded much of the militia’s activities,” former CIA Paramilitary Operations Officer Max Morton wrote. “Then, when various members of the Watchman militia became uncomfortable with the kidnapping plot, with several quitting, the FBI’s primary informant pushed the plot along, eventually becoming the militia group’s leader.”
18. FBI Took Down Rep. Jeff Fortenberry
Trump is far from the only Republican the FBI has recently sought to imprison. Nebraska Republican Rep. Jeff Fortenberry stepped down from the House of Representatives last year after federal prosecutors successfully secured a conviction. The case was classic entrapment.
The saga began in 2019 when a pair of FBI agents showed up at Fortenberry’s Nebraska residence ostensibly over a national security issue, not a criminal probe. Prosecutors convicted Fortenberry of scheming to conceal material facts from federal officials and two false statements.
One false statement was attributed to Forteberry not recognizing a person whose 10-year-old picture was presented to him by agents on their trip to his home. In July 2019, the FBI reportedly lied to Fortenberry and his attorney, former Rep. Trey Gowdy, claiming Fortenberry was not under criminal investigation when he was.
19. FBI Went on Offense Against Kyle Rittenhouse
As Kyle Rittenhouse faced murder charges in Wisconsin over three men shot in self-defense at the Kenosha riots of 2020, the FBI gave prosecutors aerial surveillance footage of the scenes to land a conviction. When the defense tried to access “the rest” of the FBI footage, the bureau claimed it was no longer available.
