Here’s an interesting little insight into the workings of the FBI. You know, the agency that the Republicans want to de-fund? Maybe they need to rethink that seeing as it’s filled with MAGA insurrectionists:
Hi, it’s Jason Leopold with the second installment of my new weekly newsletter, FOIA Files. If you haven’t yet, sign up now to get it delivered to your inbox every Friday.
As news of the Mar-a-Lago raid unfolded on the morning of Aug. 8, 2022, it unsurprisingly drew fierce reaction from Trump, his biggest backers, and many Republican members of Congress. But a cache of documents I recently obtained from the FBI shows just how much the historic event roiled some of the bureau’s rank and file, forcing FBI Director Christopher Wray to engage in damage control.“Did this really just happen? Am I dreaming? The FBI served a Search Warrant on a former president?” wrote an incredulous bureau employee in an email that was sent to the FBI’s acting ombudsman, Chauncenette Morey, shortly after the Mar-a-Lago search. “If he took documents, give him a call and ask for them back. Like … Seriously? My own agency …. A bunch of democrat political hacks up top…I’ve lost just about all faith in our leadership.”
Of course they did ask … and ask … and ask again for him to give them back and he refused. And then he lied. And then he tried to hide them. And now we’ve learned he may have removed some of them from the premises. But sure, he’s innocent as a newborn babe. I feel so safe knowing people like this are in the FBI looking out for our democracy.
It gets worse:
A handful of records came from the FBI’s little known Office of the Ombudsman, the division within the bureau where employees can confidentially raise concerns. That partially explains why the FBI cited a privacy exemption under the FOIA to justify redacting the email sender’s name. Still, the documents showed that Morey forwarded the email to Paul Abbate, the FBI’s deputy director.
“Just wanted you to be aware of the concerns/comments our office has received regarding the search of former President Trump,” Morey wrote.
Another FBI employee was even harsher, characterizing the bureau as a “Banana Republic” and an “embarrassment,” and demanding answers to a series of questions.
[…]
Rumors have long swirled that FBI agents at various field offices had been sympathetic to Trump even as the bureau launched investigations into his campaign and his business dealings. The claims were always attributed to anonymous sources. An email I obtained last year after a separate FOIA lawsuit related to the Jan. 6 Capital riots backs up those assertions.
“There’s no good way to say it,” read the email to deputy director Abbate. “So I’ll just be direct: from my first-hand and second-hand information from conversations since January 6th there is, at best, a sizable percentage of the employee population that felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol and said it was no different than the BLM protests of last summer,” the person wrote a week after the riots.
[…]
The FBI agent went on to summarize his view of the climate at FBI offices based on his conversations with his colleagues. Agents, especially those who work counterterrorism cases, he said, sympathized with the insurrectionists’ “frustration” and chalked it up to “everyone having been quarantined at home for months” due to COVID, losing their jobs and “fake news,” for example.
“A senior analyst from my first unit who retired less than 2 years ago has a Facebook page full of #StoptheSteal content. These are not one-off events – they are representative of a larger group within” the FBI, the agent wrote.
This agent sounds like he was concerned about these MAGA FBI types but maybe I’m misinterpreting it. I’d guess there are many Trumpers in the DOJ in general. The emails also showed that people were upset about the threats against the FBI after the search warrant but it’s unclear to me who they blamed, the people who were threatening them or the FBI for issuing the search warrant.
Do you feel secure knowing that people like this are in the FBI protesting that the government is trying to keep nuclear secrets from being stolen and left lying around in a social club where thousands of unvetted people wander unsupervised night after night? Is that ok with them simply because they worship a dangerously ignorant cult leader?
I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel all that good about it.