Daily Verse | Isaiah 66:2
“These is the one I esteem:
he who is humble and contrite in spirit,
and trembles at my word.”
Friday’s Reading: Jeremiah 1-3
Saturday’s Reading: Jeremiah 4-6
Friday and we’re already hitting the middle of August. The days are hurtling by on the road to November and our last chance to right the ship before 2024.
So Attorney General Merrick Garland made a rare statement yesterday and took responsibility for approving the raid on President Trump’s personal residence on Monday.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said he “personally approved” the decision to seek a search warrant for former President Trump’s private residence at Mar-a-Lago, saying the Justice Department has filed a motion to unseal the search warrant and property receipt from the FBI’s raid, amid “substantial public interest” in the matter, while defending the “integrity” of law enforcement officials.
The raid was outrageous not just for its brazen disregard of historical precedent, or for the reported purpose of recovering potentially “classified” materials that Trump had (even though the FBI had already seen everything that he had), or even for the overkill of sending 40 agents to swarm Trump’s home.
No, the real outrage is in the selective application of enforcement and the absolutely appalling corruption that exists in agencies like the FBI, putting the lie to Garland’s defense of the “integrity” of the agency. The FBI in particular and our law enforcement institutions in general have become much too large, much to unaccountable, and much too smug.
They are a danger to the republic.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, once so popular it had its own TV show solely dedicated to its heroics, has become a hyper-politicized, jackbooted bully that no longer serves the American people or the U.S. Constitution, which its employees are sworn to protect. It has become, instead, the intelligence arm and domestic enforcer of the far left.
Did we say defund? Yes. But we don’t mean simply to cut its funding, as leftists have disastrously proposed for police forces across the country. We mean tear down the entire rotting edifice of the FBI and replacing it with a new agency that respects the Constitution and holds itself accountable to all Americans, not just the woke far left.
The Editorial Board of Issues & Insights isn’t the only group calling for a complete dismantling of the FBI. See Kyle Shideler’s recent essay at American Greatness, “For the Rule of Law to Reign, the Bureau Must Be Destroyed.”
Nevertheless, the FBI must be abolished.
The solution to the abuses we now endure is not just to subject the FBI to another fruitless inspector general investigation but to dismantle it completely. The bureau cannot be the focus of yet another congressional hearing. FBI Director Christopher Wray, like his predecessors, is more than happy to sit smirking while a handful of grandstanding congressmen and senators pound the table and yell on C-SPAN. Then he’ll jet off for a holiday vacation on a taxpayer-funded private jet while the same congressmen vote to increase his budget. Again.
No, the FBI must be rendered into component parts and distributed to the four winds…
…The FBI’s actions over the past six years make perfectly clear that the FBI is more than willing to serve as the enforcement arm of the Democratic Party. It serves as its patron’s shield in matters large and small. It exonerated Hillary Clinton for her illicit server. It raided James O’Keefe and Project Veritas when Joe Biden’s daughter lost her diary. It eliminated investigation into Black Lives Matter and other black identity extremists because those pursuits annoyed the Democrats’ Congressional Black Caucus. It refuses even to utter the word “Antifa” while churches and pregnancy centers are fire-bombed. It continues to cover up for Hunter Biden’s corrupt dealings with enemy nations, along with his indulgence in criminal prostitution and drug abuse.
But the FBI has also served as the Democrats’ sword as well. It knowingly laundered the Russian collusion hoax, lying in order to secure FISA warrants. It ambushed the president’s sitting national security advisor in a nonsense perjury trap. The FBI hunts down January 6 protesters while dodging congressional inquiries about the role of federal agents in provoking the incident. The FBI ginned up a fake kidnapping plot in Michigan to instill fear of right-wing terrorism, manhandled the former president’s lawyer, and shackled one of his former high-level aides.
And it has now raided the former president’s home under a mere pretext, while the Democrats openly crow on cable news about using a political prosecution to prevent Trump from ever again being able to serve in office.
That’s what makes the raid on Trump so impossibly outrageous: the flagrant double standard the FBI and any number of other agencies flaunt in our faces. They don’t even pretend to be impartial and even-handed. In fact, they seem to revel in the fact that they’re only serving one team.
It’s been going on for years.
Did former president Clinton’s National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, who stuffed documents down his pants and in his socks, walked out of the National Archives with them, and lied about doing so, get raided by the FBI to recover any other potentially “classified” materials? No, he got fined and two years’ probation after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material.
Unlike Berger, Trump was the president, the chief executive and, as such, could declassify any documents he wanted. But the FBI decides to raid his home.
Victor Davis Hanson, one of my favorite essayists, puts it just as bluntly as the others:
The FBI is dissolving before our eyes into a rogue security service akin to those in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
Take the FBI’s deliberately asymmetrical application of the law. This week the bureau surprise-raided the home of former President Donald Trump—an historical first.
A massive phalanx of FBI agents swooped into the Trump residence while he was not home, to confiscate his personal property, safe, and records. All of this was over an archival dispute of presidential papers common to many former presidents. Agents swarmed the entire house, including the wardrobe closet of the former first lady.
Note we are less than 90 days out from a midterm election, and this was not just a raid, but a political act.
An October surprise in August. I wonder what they have planned for October?
The FBI interferes with and warps national elections. It hires complete frauds as informants who are far worse than its targets. It humiliates or exempts government and elected officials based on their politics. It violates the civil liberties of individual American citizens.
The FBI’s highest officials now routinely mislead Congress. They have erased or altered court and subpoenaed evidence. They illegally leak confidential material to the media. And they have lied under oath to federal investigators.
It’s time to dismantle the FBI, tear out the studs, dig up the foundation and salt the earth where it once stood. There is no reforming it.
And Trump may be just the guy to do it because, well … this, which he and his team released the day after the raid.
Have a good weekend.