There has always been an element within the FBI that has gone out of its way to protect Donald Trump. In the run-up to the 2016 election, as The New York Times was devoting every single column of the front page to the “scandal” of Hillary Clinton’s email server, a story about Trump’s connections between the Trump campaign and Russian agents was consigned to a brief account on an inside page, in part because FBI sources informed the NYT that there was nothing to the story. (Note that The New York Times was well aware that an investigation into Trump’s connections to Russia was underway, but chose not to run the story until well after the election.)
In January, Charles McGonigal, the former chief of counterintelligence at the FBI, was charged with money laundering for a Russian oligarch. McGonigal worked directly with oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was also a major part of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia in 2016, and the source of many of the lies about Joe Biden and Ukraine that Rudy Giuliani tried to push in the 2020 election cycle. (Lies that The New York Times published unchallenged.)
In the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection, top officials at the FBI were warned that “a sizable percentage of the employee population felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol.” They were also warned that the agency might have difficulty investigating those involved on Jan. 6 because many agents believed that going after the criminals who stormed the Capitol was just “political correctness.”
The FBI is broken. It remains broken. The latest evidence comes from a Washington Post report that FBI agents not only tried to block the search of Mar-a-Lago for the classified documents that the DOJ knows Trump was hiding, but they also tried to stop the investigation entirely at a point when Trump was still holding boxes of secret information.
The FBI search of Mar-a-Lago took place in July 2022, 18 months after Trump left the White House and almost as long after the National Archives first began trying to get Trump to return documents they knew he had taken. Previous attempts to find those missing documents had already turned up a wealth of classified information, including documents classified as top secret and folders for other classified information that wasn’t found. The Archives, and the Department of Justice, had good reason to believe Trump was still holding other documents which he refused to return, even though Trump’s attorneys had assured them both that nothing else remained.
Previous to the July search, the DOJ was provided with new evidence—likely in the terms of testimony from someone who had worked with Trump at Mar-a-Lago—that Trump was knowingly holding classified documents at his Florida resort and was showing these documents to others. But when the department ordered a warranted search of the premises…
Two senior FBI officials who would be in charge of leading the search resisted the plan as too combative and proposed instead to seek Trump’s permission to search his property, according to the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive investigation.
At this point, Trump had returned at least three groups of documents, each supposedly the “last” he had. He had passed on what the DOJ knew to be lies, stating that no more documents were stored at Mar-a-Lago.
This was “one of several previously unreported clashes in a tense tug of war between two arms of the Justice Department over how aggressively to pursue a criminal investigation of a former president.” That included FBI agents working to “slow the probe” into Trump’s handling of classified documents,
Some of those field agents wanted to shutter the criminal investigation altogether in early June, after Trump’s legal team asserted a diligent search had been conducted and all classified records had been turned over, according to some people with knowledge of the discussions.
That’s not just extraordinary, it should be unforgivable. Any law enforcement agent so slanted in their approach that they would protect someone from an investigation, even after they had proven to repeatedly lie in public, in court, and to the FBI, should have been immediately dismissed.
Many of the documents that the National Archives was seeking were not found in the search. Exactly how hard is the FBI working to find those documents now?
Why is the FBI tolerating such behavior? It doesn’t take much more than a look at the very top: Trump-appointed FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Wray was allowed to remain in office even though the agents under his command were acting to undercut the investigation into the Trump campaign’s crimes, even though one of his top officials was working directly with the Russian mob, even though his agents were expressing sympathy for those who took part in the January 6 insurgency.
When the top law enforcement agency in the nation is coming down on the side of those trying to overthrow the legitimate government, that’s not just a red flag; it’s a four-alarm siren. Now it’s clear that not only was nothing done to correct the destructive culture that has taken root inside the FBI, but that sickness has been allowed—or even encouraged—to spread and grow.
The FBI is broken. Fixing it is going to require a lot of work. That work starts with getting rid of Christopher Wray.
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