Imagine you’re an FBI agent assigned to interview other FBI agents to determine whether they’re a risk to national security.  What kinds of questions would you ask?  How would you investigate their answers and background?

Would you ask if they have any ties to organized crime?  To terrorist regimes or organizations?  Do they have sympathies for hostile foreign governments or ideologies?  Have they had any contacts with agents of those governments?  Do they hold any anti-American sentiments?  Are they supporters of socialism or communism?  Have they acted on those beliefs?

Obviously, those are the kinds of things you’d ask, because you’re a sane, patriotic American who expects people with security clearances to also be sane, patriotic Americans, people whose allegiance is to the Constitution and to our representative republic. Equally obviously, that’s not what concerns the FBI under the Merrick Garland Department of Justice: 

The memos show that agents for the FBI’s Security Division asked at least three witnesses in spring 2022 whether the employee, whose name and job title was redacted from the memos, had been known to “vocalize support for President Trump” or “vocalize objections to Covid-19 vaccination.” Agents ascertained from at least one witness that the worker, in fact, had declined to get the coronavirus inoculation. [skip]

The agents also asked witnesses whether the FBI worker had “attended the Richmond Lobby Day event” in January 2021, a rally for supporters of the Second Amendment in Virginia. The agents’ notes referred to the colleague they were vetting as a “gun nut” but who engaged in “no promotion of violence.”

Wait a minute.  FBI agents carry guns, don’t they?  They’re comprehensively trained on those guns, and must regularly qualify with them, right? So why would any FBI agent showing an interest in guns, or attending an event promoting the Second Amendment, be somehow suspect? What’s really going on at the FBI?

Graphic: FBI and Omaha Police Department Stand United in the Heartland Pride Parade--FBI Omaha. Wikimedia Commons.org. Public Domain

Special Agent candidates are subject to background and security checks proctologists would think excessive. No one—with the probable exception of diversity hires--  becomes an FBI agent without being vetted up one side and down the other. So why would the FBI open security investigations into people who had already been fully vetted?

Are they investigating people they have reason to believe have betrayed the United States?  People who have violated their oath of office?  People working for hostile foreign governments--spies? People who have committed crimes? No. They’re removing people they consider politically unreliable. You know, Normal Americans, people who take the Constitution and rule of law seriously, people who think something’s wrong when FBI SWAT teams arrest grandmothers at 0500 for praying outside abortion clinics. They’re people who think FBI agents have better things to do than harassing citizens who stood on the grass near the Capital on January 6. Worse, to the FBI’s thinking, they’re people who might speak up about the unethical and illegal actions of superiors.

“The FBl’s intentions are made clear by the questions it chose to put in black and white on a government document,” added [the aforementioned agent’s attorney Tristan] Leavitt, whose group has represented the IRS whistleblowers in the Hunter Biden case as well as several FBI agents and analysts who claim their security clearances were suspended or revoked because of their political views.

One of those FBI employees, intelligence analyst Marcus Allen, was vindicated last week when the bureau restored his clearance and paid him more than two years of back pay, according to CNN.

Who are the agents facing suspension and ruin? Apolitical men and women who play it straight, the kinds of people the FBI once sought and promoted. DEI hires and leftists have no fear of unwarranted security reviews. They’re the people conducting them. The DOJ is systematically cleansing the FBI of honest, apolitical agents, people who are dedicated to equal justice for all regardless of political belief.

The same process has long been underway in the military, where actual war fighters and leaders have been harassed, hounded out of the service, even prosecuted. It’s a process begun under Barack Obama and continued by his plants in the Biden Administration. 

When two FBI agents show up at the front door—they travel in pairs at least—Americans want to believe they can be trusted, that they’re honest people fairly, ethically and honestly investigating violations of federal law. Perhaps many are, but with revelations like these and so many others, how can anyone know whether the two agents standing on the porch are honest or corrupt? Self-preservation demands one assume the latter.

When institutions like the FBI can’t be trusted, can tyranny be far behind?

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.