FOOLS & BUFFOONS, INC.

FOOLS BUFFOONS INC

Let’s face it. Thye FBI IS the problem when it comes to Federal law enforcement. It’s clear they were compromised by Trump before he became president, and the situation only got worse during his presidency and over the two years since. There are a significant percentage of FBI agents who are in agreement with Trump’s worldview, who see their duty as protecting him, giving him the benefit of the doubt, and sandbagging investigations by outright opposition or by dragging their feet in execution of orders.

The FBI leadership is a failure. Comey’s announcement of an investigation of Hillary Clinton two weeks before the 2016 election violated every Department of Justice rule about taking actions before an election that could influence the outcome. In this case, Comey took the victory she had and handed it to Trump. His excuse that if he hadn’t done it, pro-Trump FBI agents in the New York field office of the FBI would have done essentially the same has never held water to me. He was the head of the FBI! All he had to do was step in and take control of those agents and neutralize them. It’s not like FBI leaders haven’t done similar things before.

The MAGA moron right thinks Christopher Wray, who replaced Comey as Director, is in the bag for Democrats. That’s not the problem. The problem is that he is not doing his job when it comes to threats from right-wing domestic violent extremists.

This past week, the Government Accountability Office issued a report regarding the performance of different law enforcement and homeland security agencies and police units during the January 6 insurrection.

Among its findings: The FBI “did not consistently follow agency policies or procedures for processing tips or potential threats because they did not have controls to ensure compliance with policies.”

What that means is, agents who agreed with the insurrectionists could sabotage the investigations and the FBI leadership had no way to deal with such things.

The report lists information the FBI obtained in the weeks before the attack on the Capitol, information that came from other sources indicating potential threats. The FBI had identified the increasing threat of violence at special events from reports by confidential informants and observed activity. They had reports tracking domestic terrorists traveling to Washington, D.C. On the day of the insurrection, the Washington Field Office was tracking 18 domestic terrorism subjects as travelers to D.C. Between October 1, 2020, through January 5, 2021, the FBI in Washington obtained and reviewed 73 potential domestic terrorism related referrals from one social media platform, and obtained one referral on January 4, 2021, related to potential violence in Washington, D.C. on January 6.

Despite having this information, the FBI did not act upon it with the urgency required. Shades of 9/11!! The report states: “FBI personnel did not follow policies for processing some tips, resulting in them not being developed into reports that could have been shared with partners. Specifically, the FBI did not process all relevant information related to potential violence on January 6.”

Did the FBI’s failure stem from implicit bias? This was a case of failing to understand a threat posed by conservative White males, people like too many FBI agents.

The report in yesterday’s Washington Post about FBI foot-dragging in the investigation of Trump’s theft of official top secret documents he was hiding at Mar-a-Lago continues this failure and toadying to Trump and his plans. The report stated, “Starting in May, FBI agents in the Washington field office had sought to slow the probe, urging caution given its extraordinary sensitivity, the people said. Some of those field agents wanted to shutter the criminal investigation altogether in early June.”

The excuse given by the FBI is that agents’ caution was the result of the mistakes in the 2016 investigations of Hillary Clinton and and apparently becoming gun-shy from Trump’s attacks that damaged the FBI, subjecting them to sustained public attacks from partisans.

Prosecutors at the DOJ have accused the the FBI failing to treat Trump as it had other government employees who took classified records.

The naivete of these people is astounding. According to the report, “Some FBI field agents then argued to prosecutors that they were inclined to believe President Donald Trump and his team had delivered everything the government sought to protect and said the bureau should close down its criminal investigation.”

As we know, when they finally conducted the search at Mar-A-Lardo, they found

Putting together the January 6 failure, and the resistance to enforcing a subpoena that we know ultimately turned up over 100 additional top-secret documents hidden on the estate when they finally did execute the search warrant, one has to wonder why the FBI seems unable to deal with right-wing domestic terrorist organizations and individuals.

The FBI got notification from NARA that they believed there were still documents at Mar-A-Lardo on February 7, 2022. It took the Bureau until May to take any action and then they accepted the statement by Trump’s apprentice lawyer that all the documents had been turned over. Despite NARA saying there were still more missing documents, and despite intelligence obtained that confirmed Trump was lying about having handed over all the documents, the Bureau kept telling prosecutors there was nothing there but chickens.

In July, there was a showdown between DOJ prosecutors and the FBI.

Prosecutors pointed to new evidence that Trump was knowingly concealing secret documents and urged the FBI to conduct a surprise search. The two senior FBI officials who would leadi the search said the plan was too combative and instead proposed that Trump’s permission be obtained to search his property

Right! Tell the Mafia boss you’re coming and what you’re looking for, so he knows what to hide and when!

Once Trump’s apprentice attorney said a diligent search had been conducted and all classified records had been turned over, FBI agents in the Washington field office wanted to shutter the criminal investigation altogether in early June!

Steven M. D’Antuono, then the head of the FBI Washington field office, which was running the investigation, was adamant the FBI should not do a surprise search and said he would agree to lead such a raid only if he were ordered to.

D’Antuono is also the guy who said the FBI had “no advance notice” of the possibility of violence on January 6.

What happened is, the FBI is now gun-shy about Trump after what he did to them when he was in office in the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation in 2016 about Russian meddling in the campaign, and then the Mueller investigation. They were afraid that even if they were indful of the intense scrutiny the case was drawing and were above reproach while investigating Trump, who was then expected to run for reelection. And both groups had learned how Trump would publicly attack the integrity of the investigation, regardless.

That they reacted like this demonstrates the scope of both the problem of investigating Trump and the ongoing threat to the republic he represents. The Department of Justice and the FBI were both badly shaken when they had to deal with an actual criminal in the White House, one who was ready to use the powers of the office to pervert the system in pursuit of his goal of taking absolute power.

Calling them cowards is being generous. There is some number among the FBI who have gone over to the enemy.

“Back in the day” we called them Fools & Buffoons, Inc. It’s now apparent that too little has changed since the bad old days of J. Edgar Fruitfly.

It appears now that we are lucky Garland assigned a special prosecutor to the investigation, and piked Jack Smith for the job.

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