Wray's departure opens door for FBI to turn page on decade of politicization, flubs

Christopher Wray's resignation clears the way for President-elect Donald Trump and his hand-picked FBI director Kash Patel to lift the bureau out a decade-long descent driven by investigative missteps and political weaponization.

It's a mission that begins with empowering front-line agents by returning cases to the field, decentralizing headquarters' control and re-building public trust by eliminating leaders who have corrupted its focus, current and former agents and key lawmakers tell Just the News.

"This is not a walk in the park, going in there with a mandate," retired supervisory agent Jeff Danik said. "There's a den of snakes to deal with. But it's small. It's finite, and in the end, that's where judicial, prosecutorial discretion that Kash Patel has comes into it, discerning between who's the venomous, the small number of them, and the general, larger crew that is, you know, the real patriots."

Polling shows the FBI has plenty of room to build public trust. Gallup found last year a majority of Americans hold a fair to poor view of America's premier law enforcement agency, a far cry from the days of J. Edgar Hoover, and an undertow for an agency that faces grave challenges staving off terrorism, drug cartels and an open border.

"Flush the commode"

"The FBI today is a fraction of what it once was. Its reputation is in the commode," House Oversight Committee Chirman James Comer told Just the News on Wednesday. "So Patel is going to have to come in and flush the commode and try to bring in new people at the top. I think the rank and file FBI agents, for the most part, are good, upstanding people."

Even as Wray was exiting, his bureau was being exposed anew for failures, like rifling through Americans' bank records without warrants and working with the DOJ to spy without warrants on congressional oversight without letting courts know their intended targets.

That followed other embarrassing failures under both Wray and his predecessor, the fired James Comer, like:

• Failing to stop a nightclub shooter who was on the FBI radar;
• A wave of sexual harassment against female agents and employees; 
• Using political litmus tests like Trump support and Second Amendment views during security clearance reviews;
• Launching an unwarranted Russia collusion investigation of Trump based on unverified research sparked by  his chief political opponent Hillary Clinton;
• Targeting traditional Catholics, pro-life activists and parents as domestic extremists based on their beliefs; and 
• Retaliating against whistleblowers who identified problems that need to be corrected.

If Patel can put a quick stop to such abuses and failures, a new culture that treats Americans like the client and not the enemy can grow with its new leadership team, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan told Just the News this week.

"I think this mindset  has to change, and that, frankly, that's the reason I think President Trump has selected Kash because he wants him to go change that approach so that these agencies actually serve We the People, not target and weaponized against We the People," Jordan said Tuesday. 

"Heroic work"

A big part of Patel's job will be to address the top tier of FBI leadership where much of the politicization has taken root. The problem, former supervisor Danik told Just the News, is not the "average day to day agent" that are "doing really heroic work," but the leadership. 

“The top tier of the FBI has an outsized control over the entire organization, and always has,” Danik said. “And these are about 250 people. So it's this small group of high-ranking bureaucrats that keep access to their club very closed to only certain groups of individuals who are proven to them to be acceptable to them in the club. And it's when these investigations get parked at those levels, is where you can see things go off the rail."

This fact was readily apparent in the ginned-up Russia collusion investigation into former President Trump. The Department of Justice Inspector General found that the probe was fraught with impropriety and poor performance by senior leadership. That chimera haunted Trump's first term as well as the consciousness of the left-leaning media and contributed to his animus towards what he calls the "deep state." 

"Our investigation also revealed that senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor towards the information that they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons and entities," Inspector General John Durham wrote in his final report, referring to the Steele Dossier, funded by the Clinton campaign. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee agreed to pay $113,000 to settle a Federal Election Commission investigation into violations of campaign finance law by misreporting spending on the Steele dossier.

Durham also concluded that the FBI "repeatedly disregarded important requirements" to obtain special FISA warrants to spy on Trump's campaign while acknowledging they did not "genuinely believe there was probably cause" the campaign had colluded with Russia. 

"The bigger the screw up, the bigger the promotion"

Patel wants the officials responsible for these and other missteps to be held accountable. In his book "Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy," Patel called for a "house cleaning" of the leadership. He also previously outlined several proposals to decentralize power at the bureau and restore trust with everyday Americans. 

“I regularly used to tell people that the fastest way to move up in the government is to just screw up, and the bigger the screw up, the bigger the promotion,” Patel wrote. “Every person implicated in your mistakes has an interest in covering up what they did, so they will promote you. That means the people at the very top are usually the most immoral, unethical people in the entire agency.”

To address the dominance of what he believes is a corrupt and politicized leadership in Washington, Patel, in several interviews with Just the News over the last two years, has laid out several ideas for fixing the FBI, including canceling plans for a new state of the art headquarters, moving key leaders out of Washington and closer to the people they serve, cutting components of the bureau with no clear public benefit, and holding accountable those leaders responsible for politicization, whether through prosecution or termination.

In a statement nominating Patel, Trump made clear that the plans for accountability and efforts to expose corruption were an important part of why he chose the former DOJ lawyer and congressional staffer. 

“Kash is a brilliant lawyer, investigator, and America First fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People,” the president-elect said in a statement on TruthSocial. “He played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability, and the Constitution.”