Rotten apples or rotten to the core? That is the question raised about the FBI yesterday by Kim Strassel’s weekly Wall Street Journal column on the Durham report. John excerpted her column in a nearby post. John’s post really helps to bring the question into focus.

In my own “Note on the Durham report” I asserted that the FBI needed to be torn down and rebuilt. I quoted the FBI’s statement on the report (below) and observed: “‘Missteps’ doesn’t quite cut it. It suggests that the FBI remains rotten to the core.”

In support of my own judgment I draw on the news of the past week. Take, for example, yesterday afternoon’s AP story on the FBI’s massive and illegal surveillance of Americans as set forth in the just-released and heavily redacted FISA Court order. The AP reports on the order (links omitted):

FBI officials repeatedly violated their own standards when they searched a vast repository of foreign intelligence for information related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and racial justice protests in 2020, according to a heavily blacked-out court order released Friday.

FBI officials said the thousands of violations, which also include improper searches of donors to a congressional campaign, predated a series of corrective measures that started in the summer of 2021 and continued last year. But the problems could nonetheless complicate FBI and Justice Department efforts to receive congressional reauthorization of a warrantless surveillance program that law enforcement officials say is needed to counter terrorism, espionage and international cybercrime.

The violations were detailed in a secret court order issued last year by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has legal oversight of the U.S. government’s spy powers. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a redacted version on Friday in what officials said was the interest of transparency. Members of Congress received the order when it was issued last year.

Hey, but the FBI has implemented reforms. “The FBI said an internal audit of a representative sample of searches showed an increased compliance rate from 82% before the reforms were implemented to 96% afterward.” The AP story concludes:

In the order, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, said he was encouraged by the reforms and said some appear to be having the “desired effect.”

“Nonetheless,” he noted, “compliance problems with the FBI’s querying of Section 702 information have proven to be persistent and widespread. If they are not substantially mitigated by these recent measures, it may become necessary to consider other responses, such as substantially limiting the number of FBI personnel with access to unminimized Section 702 information.”

The Washington Post puts it this way near the top of its story on the FISA Court order:

FBI officials say they have already fixed the problems, which the agency blamed on a misunderstanding between its employees and Justice Department lawyers about how to properly use a vast database named for the legal statute that created it, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The FBI all but states that its “missteps” have been put behind it. It was just a “misunderstanding.” If there seems to be an echo in the room, we should probably withhold our congratulations.

These stories do not note that the FBI is a recidivist offender in its abuse of FISA. That is why Judge Contreras refers to the “compliance problems” as “persistent and widespread.” One might reasonably conclude that the FISA Court is itself a joke (as in the matter of Carter Page). It is past time to junk them.

At Spiked Sean Collins looked at the Durham report and argues that the FBI is “A danger to democracy.” Collins channels my thought as he renders this judgment in his May 19 column (links omitted):

[T]he FBI itself appears unrepentant. In response to Durham, the bureau claimed that it has already ‘implemented dozens of corrective actions’ that would have prevented the ‘missteps’ that occurred in 2016. By describing its actions as ‘missteps’, the FBI shows that it is not taking Durham’s account of its corruption seriously.

Indeed, the FBI seems to think that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with its actions and behaviour. Hence it has actually become even more involved in the political process since 2016. Having a law-enforcement agency behave in such a partisan way is a sign of the banana-republicanisation of the US. Consider how the FBI colluded with Twitter to suppress free speech, in particular, over the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Or how the FBI has refused to respond to Congress regarding allegations of bribes to Joe Biden. Or how the FBI has gone after disgruntled parents who speak at school-board meetings, or has threatened pro-life activists.

Given the FBI’s role in the Russia-collusion hoax, and its other interventions in political life, little wonder it’s lost the trust of many Americans.

Durham shows in stark detail how the FBI teamed up with Clinton and the Democrats to try to undermine Trump. The FBI’s house needs clearing out, in terms of both personnel and practices. Congress needs to take action and put these jumped-up bureaucrats back in their rightful place.

And then we have my friend Andrew McCarthy’s May 19 NRO column: “Democrats Cook the FBI’s Books on Domestic Terrorism” (behind the site’s paywall). Andy draws on the testimony of the FBI whistleblowers at Thursday’s House subcommittee hearing along with the subcommittee’s interim report that I wrote about yesterday in “Don’t shoot me, I’m only the whistleblower.” He writes:

Thursday’s hearing focused, in part, on testimony from Agent Steve Friend, a twelve-year veteran and SWAT-team member, who has detailed how the FBI labors to inflate the number of terrorism cases and uses SWAT resources unnecessarily in arrest scenarios to create the impression that it is apprehending dangerous terrorists [quotation omitted].

Jordan’s report excerpts portions of a subcommittee interview with Friend, in which he explains that the bureau is deviating from its normal case-opening and accounting practices in order to make it appear that there are more domestic-terrorism cases and that the suspected terrorists are making mayhem throughout the country. As you’d expect, these shenanigans are woven out of the events of January 6.

That should tell you much of what you need to know. The operating premise of congressional Democrats, the Biden administration, and — therefore — the FBI is that the Capitol riot was a terrorist attack. That is absurd, for reasons I explicated when Attorney General Merrick Garland, putting his office in the service of this narrative, preposterously claimed that the Capitol riot was the most dangerous threat to American democracy he had ever seen.

The column concludes:

The projection of dystopian America mired in a terrorist war waged by the Democrats’ political adversaries is false. Since it doesn’t exist in reality, congressional Democrats and the Biden administration are trying to create it by FBI bookkeeping. As we’ve seen over the last eight years, and again this week with the release of the Durham Report, when Democrats say jump, the FBI says, “How high?”

I rest my case. The FBI may not be rotten to the core, but its problems are institutional. They go well beyond the few rotten apples in the FBI’s former leadership that Kim Strassel sees lying on the ground.