For the convenience of its massive reach for solving major national problems, the FBI has been allowed to grow far too large and influential. While I don't think disbanding it is the solution, it should definitely be split up into smaller, more focused parts where there's no upper management of unelected political players that exert massive influence the way they do now.
Right-wing has tried to portray them as politically biased against Republicans, but the evidence doesn’t bear this out. Since 1935 there have been 16 directors or acting directors. Only one of those was a registered Democrat and he only served in the position for 71 days.
I’d be really curious to learn more about political registration of agents at the FBI more generally but suspect that’s not possible. Andrew McCabe, for instance, is a key figure in this thread’s discussion. His behavior was partisan, highly unethical and probably illegal in my opinion. The political affiliation of the Director is far too imprecise a signal alone to determine absence or presence of bias in the organization.
I’m glad you brought up Andrew McCabe, because we have public knowledge about his party affiliation!
> “I have considered myself to be a Republican my entire life,” albeit “a moderate Republican,” McCabe said. “I’ve voted for every Republican candidate for president in every election, except the 2016 one, in which I did not vote. And I chose not to vote because of the political nature of the work that we were engaged in.”
He’s Republican. So was Robert Mueller. And James Comey. And Christopher Wray. And John Durham of course.
We might not have overall numbers, but what are the odds that almost every high ranking FBI official you recognize is a Republican, but that the overall leadership structure doesn’t lean Republican?
It’s not a far-fetched concept. 90% of police chose Trump over Hillary. The people going into federal policing are not dissimilar from local police. Likely more educated and more urban than your average local officer, so I’d expect them to lean more Democrat than 10%, but it would be a stretch to believe that they dominate the org structure.
Directors are, for the most part, not making the day to day decisions. They deal with the major and strategic issues that rise up to their desk. The decisions to bury cases, evaluate evidence with a specific perspective, or go on a fishing expedition with surveillance teams are mostly made at the supervisory level at local field offices. There's 56 field offices with many more satellite offices, each with a Special Agent in Charge, Assistant Special Agent in Charge, and many more supervisory special agents who run particular themed groups. It is a sprawling and massive organization of more than 35,000 people in total. I would count those 56 SACs as "upper management" that need more accountability, as well as all the deputy directors for X, Y, and Z at the Washington HQ, Quantico, etc.
OK sure, I'm all in favor of more accountability. But I also think it's absurd right-wing media portrays the FBI as a Democrat controlled and biased organization.
According to a (likely poor quality) poll, when only considering Hillary and Trump in the poll, 92% of police officers chose Trump[1]. I believe it's fair to say that law enforcement overwhelmingly votes Republican, even if the poll is not great quality. 9 in 10? Maybe not. But likely far more Republican than your average voter. That was also in 2016, prior to the Defund the Police movement which would likely bump those numbers up.
That was general law enforcement, but FBI is law enforcement. Given the average FBI agent is probably more educated and urban than the average LEO, their numbers are likely slightly more Democrat, but it's reasonable to believe it would still lean Republican.
65% of FBI's supervisory positions were male, and 78% white[2]. As we know, white male demographics skew Republican at 58%[3]. The total FBI workforce is 75% white, 56% male. Looking at demographics, we'd expect the organization to be more Republican than average.
As mentioned previously, 16 top officials were given the director/acting director title and only 1 of those was a Democrat. If top officials are at all representative of the political beliefs of the organization on average (it's a fair belief, as those top officials typically spent decades climbing the org), picking Republicans that many times would mean either a very rare coin flip, or the numbers skew Republican.
The FBI has spent most of its resources throughout history targeting left-wing organizations a la COINTELPRO. This is still the case over the past decade.[4]
At the same time Peter Strzok was texting about stopping Trump, another agent shared her experience as "The FBI is Trumpland" and that Clinton is "the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel," and that "the reason why they're leaking is they're pro-Trump."
All of this gets overlooked by right-wing media and instead they focus on right-wingers getting investigated and prosecuted. When--I dunno--maybe it's just Republican politicians are more criminal?
Without having actual party affiliation polls of the FBI, I think it's reasonable to look at the information we do have and say if we were to guess, the organization probably leans Republican.
> OK sure, I'm all in favor of more accountability. But I also think it's absurd right-wing media portrays the FBI as a Democrat controlled and biased organization.
Ok, first sentence sounds like we're on the same page. The second sentence sounds like you're very primed to have a political argument but I'm not sure with who. Nothing about the FBI leaning Republican is incompatible with my stance that the FBI is a monstrously large, unmanageable organization that centralizes federal law enforcement power into the unelected hands of supervisory bureaucrats.
You state this as if it were a fact, but how did you come to this conclusion?
Presidents don’t determine the type of people who join the FBI, stay for decades, and work themselves into leadership positions. Presidents just appoint one of these individuals as director.
This would be like believing city police are mostly Democrat because the mayors have been mostly Democrat. Or the same of blue state state-level police.
None of this is factual or living in the real world, it’s simply adhering to an unsupported opinion because it reinforces your feelings.
Right wing and Republican aren't synonymous though any more than progressive and Democrat is. For instance, some of Trump's biggest critics were Republicans and much of the early opposition research on him that was used to create the seeds of what would grown into the Steele dossier was funded by Bill Kristol, a longtime Republican kingmaker.
You’re telling me you believe the heads of the FBI have been registering as Republicans for 85 years and been appointed to the role by Republican presidents all as a long running scheme to lull Republicans into believing the FBI was not the secretly Democrat-controlled organization it truly is?
At no point did I say the entire history it has happened.
Are you saying it's impossible for someone to lie about their party affiliation?
Are you saying that worse hasn't been done by an an agency? (NSA spying, Project Ultra, IRS scandal, etc.)
I believe most people at the agencies have the best intentions, which is why you commonly get leaking, but I do believe there are some people who abuse their powers.
But I am also very very skeptical given the past actions of agencies.
Wait until you hear about all the crimes committed by law enforcement at _every_ level…
The FBI is often involved in some of the most serious crimes (serial murderers, sex trafficking, organized crime), so getting rid of them sounds a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Without a doubt we should be wanting police reform, including better ways to discover criminal wrongdoing and more effective ways to deter it from happening and/or punish those who commit it.
If the FBI is violating people's rights, all Americans lose those rights. Whereas you at least have some say over where you live and your local police.
And, I admit this statement may be controversial, but you need police for a functioning society. People need someone to call if they get threatened or to deal with the aftermath of a murder. Without police, people would demand something that looks very similar to a cop.
You don't need the FBI. It's creation was linked to prohibition which we didn't need either. It's modern form came to be under Edgar Hoover who used it to facilitate Japanese internment, to "purge alleged homosexuals from any position in the federal government" (quote from Wikipedia) and domestic surveillance against civil rights leaders.
They were the agency that should've been responsible for stopping 9/11. Stealing again from Wikipedia, "government documents showed that both the CIA and the FBI had missed 23 potential chances to disrupt the terrorist attacks".
They do help convict murderers though. "Nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000... the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death". [0]
Either way it shouldn't need to be the only evil left in the world before it's dealt with.
Even in your argument against the FBI you give a reason for having them. Yes, they missed 9/11, but they have also prevented unknown numbers of terrorist attacks.
They are also largely the ones called in to investigate serial murderers, child sex rings, drug trafficking, organized crime, etc. I think deferring to state level agencies to handle these crimes would produce worse outcomes.
I’m not saying the FBI is great. They’ve done a lot of awful things and had a lot of failures. But the current bad system isn’t automatically improved by getting rid of it if the alternative is worse.
[edit] it’s a bit like hitting a local maxima. Is there a better system out there for catching interstate and large scale crime? Most definitely. But it seems foolhardy to not have that plan in place when deciding to “dismantle” the FBI when doing so means more terror attacks happen, more children get trafficked, serial murderers kill more victims, drug lords grow bigger operations, etc.
I think you're right about this that disbanding them goes too far, but we could certainly use significant reform.
In particular, they often use 18 USC 1001 to manufacture crimes and the only evidence supporting a charge may be a written report (an FD-302) that could have been written months after the fact. Their current policy is not to record interviews. I think that needs to be reversed and there should be some materiality requirement to the 18 USC 1001 charges, rather than trying to get someone to slip up. They should also have bodycams when involved in raids or similar activities, same as cops do.
I'm also disturbed at how often they "lose" things like Woods files. I think their case files should be externally managed and backed up and audited by a separate agency who can present "missing" evidence in court from backup, along with records of who tried to delete it, regularly audit case files for things like the missing Woods files that shouldn't be, etc.
I'd do the same for cops, too. Body cameras should send the video to a separate organization that doesn't answer to the cops, so they can't "lose" it. And if they "forget" to turn it on, well, that should be subject to regular audits and should get someone in trouble long before it becomes an issue in a big case.
It's weird, we spend lots of time designing computer systems to support accountability, but there seem to be a lot of things we could do better on that front in law enforcement.
Pretty much every orginization that is allowed weapons and use of violence against others (with whatever ROEs) as part of their job, there will always be cases of abuse. When it goes unchecked, it becomes systemic.
This is not the same as a corp commiting financial fraud or other non-violent crimes. If a corp is having people killed to cover up, then we can start trying to equate.
