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Commentary

Weaponization or Accountability? A Fork in the Road for the FBI

January 31, 2025

“There will be no weaponization at the FBI,” pledged Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, during his Thursday confirmation hearing. “There will be no retributive actions taken by any FBI [personnel] should I be confirmed as FBI director.” Patel added that he “would never do anything unconstitutional or unlawful” and would only launch investigations on “a factual, articulable legal basis to do so.”

That Patel was forced to articulate such obvious principles is shameful. Yet such is the diminished state of the FBI after its weaponization by the Biden administration that senators know it to be capable of stooping to anything. Fearing an eye for an eye, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee hounded Patel for pledges that he would lead the agency more honorably than his predecessor. “The question is, will you lie for the president of the United States? Would you lie for Donald Trump?” exclaimed Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.). The question is not only ridiculous but insulting!

“President Trump has made clear that he will not be continuing a weaponized DOJ [Department of Justice],” noted Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. But “that message doesn’t appear to be getting through to Democrats.” In fact, the same Democrats demanding that Patel act like a grown-up publicly opposed his nomination in a press release bearing the headline, “Radical Extremists [sic] Kash Patel Would Weaponize The FBI To Target Enemies Of Trump, Not Enemies Of America.” Is this the world’s premier deliberative body, or a yellow journalism audition?

“I’ve had a front-row seat to see what happens when the federal government is weaponized against political opponents,” Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) responded on “Washington Watch” Thursday. “If you look at what they did to President Trump, it’s so clear … that … the Democrats, again, were using our justice system to go after a political opponent. As an attorney, as a long-term advocate for civil rights, and civil liberties, and adhering to our Constitution, I was pretty shocked to see how the government was weaponized as quickly as it was.”

“We saw it play out in a couple different ways under the Biden-Harris administration,” she stated. “One of them was the manner in which they charged and prosecuted the J6 folks … overcharging them dramatically. We know that because the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of many of the people who were charged, where[as] the Biden Harris administration was actually using a statute that was adopted to address the Enron situation of disposing of and destroying documents and records … to enhance the sentences.”

“Then you contrast that with what happened in Portland, what happened in Minnesota during the summer of 2020, what happened in New York City,” Hageman continued. “For the people such as Antifa, the people who were involved in CHOP in Seattle, and those kinds of things, they not only dropped charges or didn’t bring charges in the first place., [but] many of those people they settled with and paid them tens of thousands of dollars if they were at all inconvenienced at any time while they were burning down cities and causing billions of dollars of damage.”

Unfortunately, the politicized weaponization of the FBI did not begin under former President Biden. Even before the 2016 election, the FBI knew “that the Steele dossier was a hoax, that it was paid for by Hillary Clinton, that there was no validity to it,” argued Hageman. “Yet they used the ‘whole-of-government’ approach to get FISA warrants against the Trump team, to spy on them, to continue with an investigation against President Trump for a year and a half, under the auspices of claiming that he was conspiring with or colluding with the country of Russia.”

The weaponization of America’s justice system has “been a process,” agreed Perkins. “I think back into the ’80s and ’90s where … RICO statutes — which were created back in the 1970s to go after the mob and racketeering — were used against pro-lifers. … It’s kind of like the camel’s nose under the tent. If you don’t address it, it only gets worse.”

Under the Biden administration, the weaponization of government got much worse, with the FBI targeting not only political opponents but also ordinary citizens, from concerned parents at school board meetings, to pro-lifers praying outside abortion businesses, to traditional Catholics, to people skeptical about taking an experimental new vaccine.

These actions were often far out of proportion to the alleged offense, “for the purpose of making … an example,” said Hageman, “so that no one else would dare risk objecting to and fighting back against abortion” or other favored causes. “That’s probably the most chilling aspect of this, is that it was designed to shock others into silence,” Perkins agreed.

“People want to say, well, he’s going to weaponize this [the FBI] against his enemies. And [Senator] Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), [ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee], is saying that now,” offered Hageman. “No, the people who engaged in this contract need to be held accountable for the decisions that they made. And, so far, no one has been held accountable.”

There are reforms Congress can and should make to safeguard against such weaponization of justice in the future, but none of them matter if the responsible parties can simply break the rules and get away with it. “We need accountability,” Perkins concluded.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.



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