OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
A former FBI agent has exposed the leftward lurch of the country’s top law enforcement agency, a shift that has only become more pronounced under President Joe Biden.
In a column for Fox News Digital, James Gagliano wrote about what he says he witnessed “firsthand” while he was still with the bureau while predicting that what is currently taking place there will ultimately lead to the FBI’s demise.
“Americans are losing trust and confidence in the FBI and this directly impacts national security,” Gagliano begins. “A staggering 63 percent view the bureau negatively — and the reasons are hidden in plain sight. Over the past few years, valid criticisms have been leveled at the partisan decision-making within upper echelons of FBI leadership.”
Going back to the “sham” Trump-Russia investigation beginning in 2016, he continued, since then, the bureau has engaged in “heavy-handed over-charging of Trump campaign surrogates, blatantly uneven treatment of right-wing and left-wing protesters and rioters, labeling angry parents speaking out at school board meetings as ‘domestic terror’ concerns, aiding Big Tech’s 2020 election suppression of information, seeming disinterest in Hunter Biden laptop revelations and Biden family’s obvious influence-peddling schemes, and a laughably absurd Richmond division intelligence product warning of ‘radical-traditionalist Catholics,'” all of which is triggering so much distrust in the agency.
Gagliano wrote that many retired agents, including himself, have couched criticisms of the bureau in the idea that bias and partiality concerns are largely linked to certain senior executives while also praising most men and women agents for the hard work they put in. However, he said, “it is becoming exceedingly difficult to separate large swaths of FBI rank and file from its questionable leadership.”
The former agent pointed out that retired FBI Criminal Division Assistant Director Chris Swecker recently explained why the transformation of the bureau and its leftward shift is no longer solely attributed to FBI headquarters executives. Swecker acknowledges the role played by the FBI’s current recruitment processes in this transformation:
“There has been a seismic shift in the [FBI] culture…[I]n comes [FBI director] Jim Comey and he basically parachutes all these DOJ political appointees into the FBI and slowly the culture shifts over Comey’s tenure and then under [FBI director] Chris Wray it’s accelerated because I think the type of recruit they’re bringing in is more opinionated, more idealistic, more liberal, highly educated, more Ivy League, and they tend to not just follow the facts, they tend to insert their own ideologies, their own opinions because the indoctrination that’s taking place in the schools these days – if you’re virtuous and you’re highly educated, you do everyone else’s thinking for them.
You can decide that President Trump is not fit to be president, therefore we need to go after him. You can decide that domestic terrorists only exist on the right side of the political aisle, not on the left side of the political aisle. You can pick winners and losers…It’s no longer ‘Let’s just follow the facts.’ I’m going to say that’s at the highest levels of the FBI…but I think it’s beginning to percolate down to the street level [rank and file agents] as well.”
Gagliano went on to describe several ‘woke’ events over the course of the past decade, to include going along with the removal of the bureau’s founding director, J. Edgar Hoover, from a New York museum so as not to “trigger” agents to changing the language of “radical Islamists” to “combating violent extremism” during the Obama years.
“Contrast that muted downplaying of the Muslim perpetrators of the vast majority of worldwide terror attacks with how DOJ treated the January 6th ‘insurrectionists’ and angry parents at school board meetings — compared again to 2020 ANTIFA and BLM anarchists and rioters,” the former agent wrote. “The FBI has also been accused by a whistleblower of artificially-inflated domestic terrorism data as pertains to rightwing groups. Certainly, appears one-sided and partisan, no?”
He concluded: “As the ideological underpinnings of FBI recruits continue to swing leftward, FBI leadership needs to remain ever more vigilant to ensure trust and confidence in FBI’s impartiality is not further degraded. Why does eroded trust in the FBI matter? Because part of the business is securing trust of crime victims, investigative targets, and the American public – as they all serve as the agency’s ‘eyes and ears.’
“As calls to do away with the FBI grow louder, the FBI needs to heed these warnings. We need the FBI. But it can’t continue to whistle past the graveyard, refusing to embrace necessary reforms. To do otherwise will serve as the agency’s Waterloo.”
