As FBI Director Christopher Wray’s resignation approaches and President-elect Donald Trump selects Kash Patel to lead the bureau, criticism of the FBI’s alleged political biases under Wray’s leadership continues to grow.
From labeling Orthodox Catholic Americans as extremists and investigating “anti-abortion extremists” as national security threats to the Mar-a-Lago raid, relentless January 6 witch hunts, and heightened rhetoric on white supremacy, many see the FBI as a politically motivated organization.
Kyle Seraphin, a former FBI agent turned whistleblower, argues that the FBI’s shift began after 9/11, when sweeping reforms and expanded surveillance powers were granted to the agency, providing a foundation for the subsequent politicization.
Seraphin told Fox News Digital:
“They use national security words to go after domestic individuals, and they have national security tools to look through your email to grab access to your comms, your phone calls, your text messages, your emails, and so on. They have the ability to look into your bank account and check out your financial records. And should they find evidence of a crime that is not related to what they’re searching for, the threat that they’re actually looking for?
Do we want people to get away with crime? No, but we want the government to be accountable to the freaking Bill of Rights.”
Seraphin also highlights how incentive-driven investigations within the FBI fuel perceptions of political bias, saying:
“What people are seeing is the natural outgrowth of letting FBI agents, or FBI senior management, forecast what they think the crime is going to be in the country, being incentivized to be correct because they’re going to be paid a monetary bonus at the end of it if they’re right, and then they go out and find that crime.
And so it looks very politicized. But I think that’s actually just a mistake of the correlation. In reality, what’s going on is the FBI is serving the interests of the senior management, which is that they want to get paid, and the easiest way to get paid is to go round up MAGA people, which they fall under this category of … anti-government, anti-authority, violent extremist.”
Under President Joe Biden, the FBI has dramatically increased its efforts against domestic terrorism, particularly targeting white supremacy. This has led to a significant rise in investigative work, with the number of cases increasing from about 1,000 to 2,700 between the spring of 2020 and September 2021, as reported by the Government Accountability Office. During this period, Wray testified in Congress that white supremacy is the largest category of domestic terrorism.
However, the FBI’s classification of domestic terrorism remains contentious. Seraphin pointed out that, in New Mexico, “anti-abortion extremists” were ranked as the third-highest security threat. In another case, a Texas doctor faced four federal felony charges for revealing allegations of transgender surgeries performed on minors at a hospital.
Additionally, prosecutions of pro-lifers under the FACE Act have sharply risen under Biden’s administration. As reported earlier:
“The Biden administration has indicted at least 37 individuals on charges under the Freedom of Access to Clinics (FACE) Act. In just over three years, the Biden Department of Justice (DOJ) has accounted for more than a quarter of all FACE Act charges in the law’s 30-year history. Notably, this includes the frequent use of a novel sentence enhancement, signaling a weaponization in the application of this law under the current administration.”
With Kash Patel set to take the helm, there’s an opportunity to reshape the FBI’s reputation for political bias. Patel could work on dismantling the incentive-driven systems that encourage politically charged investigations and reevaluate the definition of domestic terrorism. By fostering impartiality, protecting whistleblowers, and reassessing high-profile cases with a neutral perspective, Patel could guide the FBI back to its core mission of protecting national security.
