They must be sweating bullets in the Washington Swamp. Kash Patel was just confirmed by a 51-49 Senate vote as FBI director, and that means there is going to be a caravan of DOGE trucks hauling out the dead bodies right soon.
Especially after the FBI went all-in on the Deep State campaign to defenestrate Donald Trump in 2016 and after, the level of lawlessness and blatant attacks on constitutional processes emanating from the J. Edgar Hoover Building literally knew no bounds. Soon we will have black and white documentation that the FBI not only knew all along that the Russian election interference story was a complete hoax, but that top officials of the FBI were actually even more deeply complicit in its manufacture and dissemination than has already been revealed.
But lawlessness at the nation’s purported leading law enforcement agency was nothing new. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is a rogue institution of the Washington Swamp steeped in a lifetime of ignominy and disdain for constitutional liberty and democracy.
Its forerunner was created during the horrific Red Scare Raids of Attorney General Mitchell in 1918-1919 when thousands of citizens were rounded up without warrants—merely for the crime of holding socialist or other leftwing opinions or for being sympathetic to Germany.
It then flourished during the the “G-man” period, prosecuting the idiotic regime of Prohibition in the 1920s. Yet the overdue repeal of the latter in 1933 simply paved the way to an even more malefic run during the J. Edgar Hoover era of communist witch-hunting and vicious prosecution of civil rights and peace leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. Indeed, Hoover’s malicious campaign to expose Dr. King’s personal life was so odious as to make the fact the FBI headquarters is still called the “J.Edgar Hoover Building” a national disgrace–and one that far outranks obscure courthouses in the south named after some defunct confederate generals.
As it happened, Hoover kicked the bucket in May 1972 while in his 48th year in office, but he had accumulated such as an extensive file of dirt on any and all Washington politicians and national leaders he considered unfit that his personal secretary, Helen Gandy, immediately set upon shredding his files—lest Nixon’s men discovered them first.
In fact, Hoover’s FBI had files on tens of thousands of Americans for no good reason other than their holding opinions or political beliefs that the FBI director disdained. Your editor even got in on that act as young man uninterested in being sent to the jungles of Southeast Asia to slaughter “gooks” who had given the people of our rural county in southwest Michigan no offense that we could ascertain. Yet since we went to SDS anti-war marches and signed “We won’t Go” petitions we earned a “red file” at the FBI—something we still consider a badge of honor.
Unfortunately, Hoover’s passing did not lead to the cleansing of the institution that was long overdue. Instead, during the misbegotten War on Terror it became a fount of false fear-mongering, stings and entrapment ploys. Here are just three of the more notable FBI entrapment operations during this period—all of which were obviously designed to create public fear, arouse the legislators and cause budgets and manpower levels at the FBI to relentlessly expand.
The Newburgh Four Case (2009): In this case, four men were convicted of plotting to bomb synagogues and shoot down military planes. The FBI used an informant to encourage and facilitate the plot, providing fake bombs and weapons. Actually, there was not a shred of evidence that the defendants were predisposed to commit such acts on their own, but instead were systematically lured into the FBI’s entrapment.
The Fort Dix Plot (2007): Here, six men were arrested for planning an attack on Fort Dix, a U.S. Army base in New Jersey. The FBI used an informant who infiltrated the group, encouraged them to carry out the plot and provided the planted evidence that led to their conviction.
The Michigan Militia Case (2020): This scam involved a cooked-up plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The FBI used multiple informants and undercover agents to encourage and facilitate the plot. In this case, the plot ended in acquittals and a mistrial because the FBI’s facilitation was so clumsy and obvious.
Even then, the bad guys at the FBI were not done. So what eventually led to the condign justice of Kash Patel’s confirmation, was the blatant weaponization of the FBI by Deep State nomenklatura determined to destroy the duly elected President of the United States in 2016 and after. In that endeavor, however, they truly crossed a line. The Donald’s justifiable revenge for the outrageous FBI raid on his own home after he left office will be thorough and unstinting, and he could have no more capable and powerful instrument of vindication than his newly confirmed FBI director.
In short, Patel’s confirmation marks the end of 100 years of assault on the rule of law, not its promotion. And, as we have argued in “How To Cut $2 Trillion” ( https://amzn.to/40rgiq40 ), that sordid history is reason enough to abolish the FBI completely.
The fact is, there never was need for the FBI in the first place—outside of political opportunism and the furtherance of crusades which are not within the proper purview of the Federal government. Yet in this sphere of government aggrandizement, so-called Republican “conservatives” share much of the blame owing to their misguided view that “law and order” is a proper Federal pursuit.
Then again, however, we do have 90,000 units of state and local government for a reason. Namely, in order to decentralize, disperse and mute the exercise of government power. So surely the enforcement of the criminal laws is precisely one of those functions best kept as far away from the nation’s capital as possible, as the checkered history of the FBI proves in spades.
In any event, as a practical matter crime prosecution and enforcement is already overwhelmingly conducted by state and local police forces and courts. For instance, there are currently about 7.5 million arrests in the US each year, but only about 10,000 of these are executed by the FBI. That’s just 0.14%.
Likewise, there are currently 1,214,000 police and law enforcement personnel on the payrolls of state and local governments in the USA. That compares to just 15,000 FBI officers (out of 37,300 staff) involved in domestic criminal law enforcement. This includes all agents and support personnel who work on a wide range of matters such as cybercrime, drug trafficking, violent crime, and white-collar offenses, but, again, it amounts to only 1.2% of the state and local police force level.
At the end of the day, just $2.5 billion of the FBI’s $11.4 billion budget is involved in what it generously classifies as “counter-terrorism”. We’d say cut that figure by 60% and spin these personnel and activities off to a $1 billion per year counter-terrorism unit in DOJ. Any real threat of terrorism in the US, as opposed to self-serving FBI concocted stings like the above-mentioned plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, can be readily handled on a $1 billion annual budget.
After that, Kash Patel’s real mandate should be to gather up and reveal all of the crimes and abuses of the FBI’s scarlet history; set up a museum to dishonor the joint somewhere in
Flyover America, perhaps Alabama as he has suggested; and then shutdown everything else to the tune of a 34,000-headcount reduction and direct compensation cost savings of $5.4 billion per year—along with another $5 billion of savings from FBI overhead, contractors, occupancy, travel and other costs.
The fact is, outside of a residual counter-terrorism function America does not need the FBI to keep the nation’s communities, streets and homes safe. Local law enforcement can handle that function with alacrity.
After all, there is no correlation whatsoever between crime rates in America and the relentless rise of the FBI’s budget. For want of doubt, consider the 64-year arc of the US homicide rate depicted in the graph below.
As it has happened, the murder rate of 4.7 per 100,000 is the same today as it was in 1960—after a long cycle of rising and then falling rates in the interim, largely driven by demographics. That is to say, young men between 16 and 40 years of age commit most of the violent crime—so it was essentially the passing of the Baby Boom through the population that caused the crime rate to rise and fall as shown below.
Nevertheless, the FBI exploited public fears of crime to a fare-the-well to justify budgets that kept on expanding especially during Republican administrations keen to exploit the
law and order issue. For instance the constant dollar FBI budget (2024 $) rose by 54% during the Reagan administration and 42% during the eight years of Bush the Younger— both gains far outpaced the rise during administrations before or after.
Obviously, the relentless 7X rise in FBI spending per capita between 1960 and 2024 had no correlation whatsoever with the demographics-driven chart above. So, at last, the chance to finally uproot this rogue agency from the Washington Swamp may have finally arrived.
Constant Dollar FBI Budget Per Capita:
1960: $5.00.
1980: $9.00.
1988: $13.85.
2000: $20.65.
2008: $29.25.
2024:$35.00
Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.
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