The FBI: Debased, Diminished, and Degraded

After the FBI decided in June 2020 to send an army of agents to investigate a garage door pull for a fake hate crime, I really didn’t think it would be possible for the former premier law enforcement agency in the world to debase itself further.

Just a couple weeks before sending those agents to Bubba Wallace’s garage bay at Talladega Speedway, FBI agents at the DC field office went outside to kneel as Black Lives Matter protesters angrily marched by.

This fall, we learned that the agents who took a knee in solidarity with the group responsible for billions of dollars in damages from rioting and looting across the country in the summer of 2020, were rewarded with $100 gift cards from the FBI Agents Association.

In a nutshell, the FBI didn’t exactly cover itself in glory in 2020. Instead, it got sucked into the slanderous claim that the country is irredeemably racist while turning itself into the Democrat Party’s personal Stasi.

And just when we thought the FBI couldn’t possibly become more debased and diminished than it already was, we get hit with Part 6 of the Twitter Files showing the cozy relationship between the censorious Leftists at Twitter and their “partners” in the FBI.

When I read Matt Taibbi’s thread, “TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY” this morning, I couldn’t believe half of what I saw.

The FBI, using the lines of communication it set up with Twitter, was flagging tweets from random nobodies for “moderation.” And if the FBI wanted an account suspended, Taibbi explains, the censors at Twitter “went on to look for reasons” to accommodate the bureau.

According to Taibbi, the FBI’s “social media task force, known as FTIF,” which was created after the 2016 election to prevent alleged foreign interference in elections, “swelled to 80 agents” who “corresponded with Twitter.”

80 agents.

And here we thought sending 15 agents to Talladega Speedway was insane.

Eighty Nosey Parkers with badges were combing through tweets and then tattling to Twitter like a bunch of girls. They were flagging tweets from parody accounts and random nobodies with practically no engagement, not in connection to a criminal investigation but because the FBI didn’t like what they tweeted.

Taibbi found over 150 emails between the FBI and Twitter’s former Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth between January 2020 and November of this year.

The information Taibbi lays out also confirms an October report about how the FBI, along with Homeland Security, was working with the Election Integrity Project, a consortium made up of the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and the social media analytics company Graphika, to censor speech on Twitter.

44.The takeaway: what most people think of as the “deep state” is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

Read through Taibbi’s thread, and as you do, remind yourself of how often you have seen a report on a mass murderer or some other horrific criminal that includes the phrase, “was known to the FBI.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation used to be the gold standard of law enforcement for the entire Western world.

Now look at what they’ve become.

As Taibbi added in a later tweet:

Instead of chasing child sex predators or terrorists, the FBI has agents — lots of them — analyzing and mass-flagging social media posts. Not as part of any criminal investigation, but as a permanent, end-in-itself surveillance operation. People should not be okay with this.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

The question is, can the FBI be salvaged? Or, like so many other once-trusted institutions, has the FBI become so debased, degraded, and diminished that the only solution is to bulldoze the whole sordid mess and salt the earth?

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