Memo Reveals the Need to Re-structure American Law Enforcement

It is now evident that some people working for the Department of Justice and the FBI conspired to exonerate one Presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, of serious ethical if not illegals acts while at the same time cooperating with one political party to implicate the other nominee and future President for at best disgraceful and at worst impeachable offenses. When you combine the information in the memo with recent revelations from FBI personnel text messages the intent of the operation seems to have been to ameliorate the suspicions against and Hillary Clinton, insuring her win, and to create enough suspicion against Trump that he would be forced to with draw and his career business and family would be ruined. Things did not go as planned, and Trump won and shortly thereafter fired FBI Director James Comey, who then cashed in “the insurance policy,” which appears to have been a Special  Council  investigation against Trump. The Special Counsel investigation lead by Robert Mueller seems to be seeking enough to discredit Trump to enable the Democrats to recapture the House in 2018 then they can impeach the President. All we need is a few dead bodies and we will have the making of a great novel and movie series. Who do you think will play Donald Trump?

Alas, this is not fiction and it is not Hollywood. It is the real life FBI working to keep one party in power and to subvert the will of the people. Despite what the media is saying this is not the first time in history that the FBI has used gestapo tactics, it is the furthest (that we know about) that they have ever gone towards determining the outcome of an election. Is there any doubt that had Mrs. Clinton won the Presidency we would have never known of this activity, or worse that the reach and power of the FBI would have continued to grow?

Is there any doubt that had Mrs. Clinton won the Presidency we would have never known of this activity, or worse that the reach and power of the FBI would have continued to grow?

When asked about homosexual marriage or abortion Mrs. Clinton said, “When I am President Christians will have to change both their beliefs and practices.” How would she have influenced that change, through civil persuasion, or through jackbooted police state tactics. Remember, it was her husband's DOJ that murdered a family in the mountains of Idaho because they practiced a strange religion. It was her husband's DOJ who sent an assault force into a religious commune and killed several people with no probable cause. Remember it was Bill's DOJ that sent an armed swat team into a private home to to rip a young man, whose mother had brought him here through no act of his own, a dreamer, in other words, and returned him to Cuba. The FBI is not know for the protection of civil liberties

The FBI has a history of abusing civil liberties. ⁱDuring the 1930's the FBI illegally wiretapped members of the US Supreme Court. From 1937 – 1959 the FBI operated Deisel Research Corporation a shadow company, also partly funded by German intelligence, through which they placed a double agent into the magazine Newsweek. President Eisenhower issued an Executive Order banning gays from federal government offices and ordered J Edgar Hoover to create list of homosexuals and their activities in the United States. Because of J. Edgar Hoover's long time relationship with the father-in-law of Daniel Elsburg he refused a Presidential order to investigate his leaking of the Pentagon Paper to the press.

Assistant FBI Director Mark Felt became the spokesperson for a disgruntled group of FBI agents and employees upset with Nixon for appointing outsider J. Patrick Gray to lead the FBI rather than Felt himself. Felt then set himself up as an informant for Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein to leak them information into Gray's investigation of the Watergate burglary. While Felt, whose was known only as “Deep Throat” until his identity was revealed after his death, has become an American folk hero, what did he do that was heroic? There was nothing that Felt revealed that hurt Nixon. It was the testimony before Congress of Alexander Butterfield on July 16, 1973 that revealed the taping system in the Whitehouse. Special Counsel Leon Jaworski then took the President to the Supreme Court to compel there release. Felt's information offered very little evidence of criminal activity on the part of Nixon. Felt merely used his privilege as Deputy Director of the FBI to violate Richard Nixon's fourth Amendment rights to achieve a political outcome. He had Woodward and Bernstein sworn to secrecy not to protect the First Amendment of the United States Constitution but to protect his job and career. Had his identity been revealed he would have been fired lost his retirement and perhaps been prosecuted. Felt was no hero protecting the political process. He represented a corrupt anti-democratic culture that unfortunately has been part of the FBI, since its inception in 1908.

Egyptian agent Emad Salleem provided the FBI with the names of the 6 perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and information about their suspicious activities more than a year in advance of the bombing. The Bureau dropped Salleem as an informant because they feared he was also working for Egyptian intelligence. They failed to act on the knowledge he had supplied. No doubt this failure allowed the 1993 World Trade center bombing to take place, and gave confidence to the 9/11 bombers 8 years later. A former FBI agent who was assigned to the CIA's Counter Terrorism Task Force (CTC) has long criticized the FBI and President Bush for failing to act on alerts about a possible Al-Quaeda attack on the mainland. The FBI covered up information about the 9/11 bombers relationship with Saudi Arabi.ⁱⁱ The FBI has a history of making investigatory decision based on politics. What we saw today was nothing new.

The FBI has a history of making investigatory decision based on politics. What we saw today was nothing new.

An of course, the best example of the FBI's misuse of authority were in the slaughters at Ruby Ridge Idaho an action for which the Weaver family was awarded a 3.1 million dollar judgment against the FBI.ⁱⁱⁱ These slaughters were then followed by events at WACO Texas^iv While many are quick to defend the reputation an actions of the FBI, because the many field agents they employ they employ are dedicated public servants. The examples of abuse that I have cataloged have occurred enough that no one can call them random, coincidental, or isolated. And while some of the incidences reported are disputed one wonders what abuses may have occurred outside of the public attention. A disregard for Forth Amendment liberties seems to be part of the culture of the FBI. While no one denies the patriotism, service and sacrifice agents make, and the protection the FBI has provided our nation it is time to ask how many FBI investigations resulting in prosecution have been politically motivated? Can a republic survive if a national police force sees its role as implementing the political will of the party in power rather than defending the Constitution of the United States?

While the FBI is far from a jack-booted Gestapo, the events revealed in the release of the memo of House Intelligence Committee's memo today makes one wonder just how far they are willing to go?” Could this have been the beginning of the end of our Constitutional Republic? Of course, no one can answer those questions, but the fact that we must now raise them leads me to the conclusion that it is time to reform federal law enforcement system.

There are at least 12 Federal investigative law enforcement agencies of the United State Government empowered to arrest and bring criminal charges: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Criminal Investigation Division, Office of Inspector General, Department of Veterans Affairs; Drug Enforcement Agency; Office of Inspector General of the Environmental Protection Agency; Office of Law Enforcement, Fish and Wildlife Service; Office of Inspector General Health and Human Services Agency; Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Criminal Investigative Division of the Internal Revenue Service; U.S. Marshall Service; US Postal Inspection Service; the United State Secret Service, but the largest with broadest range of authority is the Federal Bureau of Investigation.^v

Every agency is created by legislation, and Congress defines it's authority and sets its boundaries. The FBI has broad powers to investigate threats against the security of the United States, interstate commerce, and crimes that cross state jurisdictions. The FBI is the only police force that operates under the aegis of the Department of Justice, which I believe is one of the reasons the bureau sometimes gets out of control. At every other level of government and in every other federal investigative agency the prosecutorial and judicial authorities are separate from the investigative. If the U.S Marshall Service, which serves under the Treasury Department, seeks to apprehend a fugitive, they either do so with the permission or at the direction of the U.S. Attorney's office of the Department of Justice. While the FBI must needs the same permission, they do so from their own agency. The Attorney General and the Director of the FBI are political appointees to the same agency. They support one another there is a mutuality of focus and objective but no accountability across government lines. In other words, they have a vested interest in mutual self – protection.

This is evident with the release of the memo today. For whatever reason (probably because they thought she was going to win and wanted to protect their jobs) the Justice Department and the FBI protected Hillary Clinton from prosecution in her email scandal fiasco, and attempted to impugn and some would even say frame Donald Trump on false pretexts. The corruption in the Justice Department infected the FBI which became a political tool of the Obama administration, the Democratic National Committee, and the Clinton Campaign. As we have seen above this is not the first time the FBI has been politicized, although it may be the most profound example. The relationship between FBI and justice is unusual.

At every level of government prosecution and investigation are separate functions. In my state if someone is suspected of a crime a police agency will gather evidence and bring it to a local, county or state Attorney to determine whether to pursue prosecution. Although the agencies clearly communicate and an investigation can begin at either level' the investigative agency is not controlled by the prosecutorial agency. This usually enables one group to set boundaries on the other. If the police force is unable to gather sufficient evidence to try a person, the prosecutorial agency will not bring the case to trial. If the prosecutor targets someone for investigation, the police are going to seek a warrant and are going to pursue evidence for a crime based on probable cause not just seek to prosecute an unpopular person. Of, course the system is not perfect, there are examples of investigations that go off track and prosecutions that are malicious, but in general the tension between the two create a just result. The first change that the abuse revealed in the memo should instill is the separation of the FBI from the Department of Justice.

Suppose in 1993 the FBI had been under the aegis of Treasury would the motivation to protect the financial system had lead to evidence being presented to a U.S. Attorney even though DOJ had different interest? What if in the last election cycle the FBI had been under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security, that among other things is charged with protecting the security of our electoral process? If Deputy Attorney's General Sally Yates, or Rod Rosenstein had approach an FBI Director, who was not accountable to them, with contrived evidence do you think they would have agreed to investigate? Or let me ask the question this way, since the FBI was under the auspices of the DOJ, could the Director have refused to participate in an investigation ordered by the DOJ? Which would have been a stronger wall of protection? Of course Homeland Security could have been as corrupt as DOJ and may have jumped at the opportunity, but in all likelihood a request from a parallel agency would have been look at differently then would a request given to a subordinate one. So the first thing that should happen as a result of this memo is the FBI should be transferred to the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security. This makes the most sense when you consider the agencies mission.

But I want to propose one other change. I do think the FBI has too broad a spectrum of authority. One of the complaints of law enforcement agencies after 9/11 was the monolithic nature and the secretiveness of the FBI. They sometimes are not very forthcoming with information for other agencies. It seems to me that their function could be served just as well by spreading some of their authority to other agencies. The United Secret Service is charged with protecting the monetary system and high level government personnel. It seems to me that espionage and terrorism could fall under their authority. What do we need and ATF, a DEA and an FBI sometime investigating the same crimes? These agencies should be consolidate and authority redistributed.

Our electoral system was threatened in the 2016 election, but not by the Russian. Rather, it was threatened by hubristic individuals who thought they knew better than the American people. They in coordination with the Democratic National Committee manipulated the investigative mechanism of government to exonerate a candidate whose activities were questionable and to impugn the integrity of the one who was following the rules. Whether you are Democrat or Republican; regardless of which candidate you love and which one you hate, the memo reveals that the FBI and the DOJ were at best inefficient and careless and at worst conspiratorial, but I think we can all agree the FBI is out of control. It's time to reign-in the FBI.

iBen Jacobs, J Edgar Hoover and the FBI's War on American's Civil Liberties. THE DAILY BEAST https://www.thedailybeast.com/j-edgar-hoover-and-the-fbis-war-on-americans-civil-libertiesS Jan 27, 2018

ii Jeff Stein, FBI Agent: CIA Could Have Stopped 9/11, Newsweek http://www.newsweek.com/saudi-arabia-911-cia-344693, accessed January 27, 2018

iiihttps://www.firearmsandliberty.com/ruby2.html, accessed 01/27/2018

ivAlex Hannaford The Standoff in WACO, The Texas Observer https://www.texasobserver.org/the-standoff-in-waco/ accessed January 27, 2018

vWeb site of the United States Department of Justice, Offices of the United States Attorney, Middle District Pennsylaving https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdpa/federal-investigative-agencies, accessed 02/02/2018