House Judiciary Republicans Friday released a new report alleging that there is a “rampant culture of unaccountability, manipulation, and abuse,” at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department.
According to the over 1,000-page report, FBI whistleblowers said the bureau’s Washington hierarchy is “rotted to its core” and that it has weaponized the government against its political opponents.
This report comes months after an FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for sensitive documents he kept from his time in the White House. Trump has hinted that he plans to run for president again in 2024.
It also comes around a week after an attacker fractured the skull of Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s 82-year-old husband. He survived the attack, but needed surgery.
David DePape, the 42-year-old identified as Paul Pelosi’s attacker, reportedly said “Where’s Nancy” when he arrived at the Pelosi’s San Francisco, Calif., home – a chant also used during the deadly Capitol riot last January.
Republicans said their report “illustrates how FBI leadership shows a political bias against conservatives, and enumerates instances where senior officials have pressured agents to reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism to fit a political narrative.”
While the main focus of the report is the FBI, it also examines the actions of the Justice Department in some cases.
Included in the report’s allegations against the FBI are that the bureau: artificially inflated and manipulated domestic violent extremism statistics for political purposes and that it downplayed and reduced the spread of the serious allegations of wrongdoing leveled against Hunter Biden. Republicans plan to begin a probe into the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son if they win enough seats in the midterm elections.
It also alleges that the FBI and Justice Department “used counterterrorism resources to target parents resisting a far-left educational curriculum,” stalked a Republican legislator, allowed attacks on pro-life organizations, “purged” employees who didn’t agree with the Biden administration’s politics and helped “Big Tech to censor Americans’ political speech.”
Axios broke the news of the report before it was released, and called it “an eleventh-hour political move by the minority members of the Judiciary Committee to stir up former President Trump’s base days before the election.”
According to the outlet, Geoffrey Berman, the former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, wrote in a recent memoir that Trump’s own Justice Department “kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining – in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.”
Midterms predictions updated Friday by Five Thirty Eight indicate that Republicans have a good chance of taking the House and the Senate from the Democrats, though Senate control is a closer call.
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