House Judiciary Committee Republicans have released a 1,050-page tome outlining the alleged politicization of the FBI and the DoJ, with the report expected to serve as a "road map" into congressional investigations, should the GOP take back the House and/or Senate in the upcoming midterm elections.
The report, published just days before the vote, details an array of ways that the US’ main domestic intelligence agency has been compromised by a “politicized bureaucracy” and the active, potentially illegal mistreatment of the Democrats’ adversaries.
The document is based on the testimony of “a multitude of whistleblowers” who have come forward to the House Judiciary Committee “with allegations of political bias by the FBI’s senior leadership and misuses of the agency’s federal law-enforcement powers.”
Among the allegations brought in the report are claims that the FBI has been “artificially inflating statistics” about right-wing domestic extremism by manipulating the case filing system to fit President Joe Biden’s narrative. The agency is suspected of abusing its counterterrorism powers to investigate conservative parents who spoke at school board meetings, and of engaging in illegal spying on persons associated with presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016.
The report also accuses the FBI leadership of mounting a campaign to purge employees who hold “conservative views – or, in President Biden’s view, those who are a ‘threat to American democracy’ – because they hold conservative views.”
Whistleblowers allege in the report that the politicization of the agency has resulted in resources being “‘pulled away" from “real law-enforcement duties,” including the sexual abuse of minors.
18 October 2022, 20:46 GMT
The document also points to “mounting evidence” over the last two years that Hunter Biden “has received preferential treatment from federal law enforcement, who seem to have turned a blind eye to the potential national security threats presented by his business dealings” with foreign nationals. Republican lawmakers also accuse the FBI of colluding with social media companies ahead of the 2020 election to suppress the Hunter Biden story.
The report accuses FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland of turning the FBI into a “fundamentally broken” institution, and alleges that “instead of serving justice and protecting the American public,” the agency’s leadership “has weaponized” its “law enforcement capabilities against half the American public.”
The report features over 900 pages of letters from Republican lawmakers to the DoJ and the FBI citing whistleblower testimony regarding the suspected politicization and misuse of law enforcement powers, mostly from disgruntled FBI agents.
The GOP report comes just days before Tuesday’s midterm elections, in which all 435 seats of the House of Representatives, 34 seats in the Senate, governorships in 34 of 50 states, and thousands of lower offices in state legislatures, mayorships, and judgeships will be up for grabs.
Pollsters project that Republicans will pick up between 15 and 48 seats in the House, and possibly eke out a slim majority in the Senate. Such a result would deprive President Biden and the Democrats of the ability to set the legislative agenda for the remaining two years of his term, and likely result in the end of the long-running congressional probes into January 6 and Donald Trump. The presence of a crop of dozens of Trump-backed candidates inside the GOP are also a wild card in this year’s elections, as they threaten to undermine the traditional inter-party unity on issues like foreign policy and "election integrity."