The FBI website declares public corruption as the agency’s top criminal investigative priority because it poses a fundamental threat to our national security and way of life. The FBI sees the issue clearly but is becoming a huge part of the problem.
To be effective in fighting public corruption the FBI must be above politics. Public corruption is an inherently political arena. If the FBI shows a partisan tendency, it has crossed the line to become part of the problem, rather than the starting point of the solution.
News from a podcast interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is very troubling on the FBI’s continuing failure to stay out of partisan politics. Facebook algorithms were set to minimize visibility of an October, 2020, New York Post exclusive on documents in Hunter Biden’s laptop computer, because the FBI warned the social media giant of Russian interference in the election, Mr. Zuckerberg said.
The FBI warning, combined with a letter signed by 51 Democratic former security officials, proclaiming the Post story to be a Russian hoax, was enough to cause Twitter to censor the story totally and banish the Post from the site.
Of course as we now know, the laptop was Hunter Biden’s, the connections to millions of dollars from a state-owned Chinese energy firm were also real, as were credible allegations that President Biden was an invisible partner in the Chinese Communist deal.
The national political media also shut down the story, warned off by the FBI. The media that pursued the story and reported facts, verified by the national media 18 months after the story broke, were written off as political hacks.
Now the GOP congressional campaigns feature a promise to investigate the FBI. The GOP was off base with claims of FBI misconduct in the search of former President Donald Trump’s home for the illegal possession of official documents, but no serious person can defend the FBI from investigations of political tampering.
Moreover, if public corruption is truly the top criminal investigative priority of the FBI, we need a definitive answer immediately to the question of Mr. Biden’s involvement in the family business deal with Chinese Communist Party.
First Published August 28, 2022, 4:00 a.m.
