The authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 want you to believe that the FBI and Department of Justice are infected with “awakened culture”, distracted by “identity politics” and “captured by . . . radical leftist ideologies.” In Congress, Rep. Jim Jordan (OH) and his fellow Republicans on the Government Harmonization Subcommittee also have promoted conspiracy THEORY to claim that the office is biased against conservatives, using picked cherries EXAMPLES of FBI abuse to support a false premise. FBI Director Christopher Wray, a lifelong Republican appointed by President Trump, called the allegation of anti-conservative bias “kinda crazy.”

The real goals of these efforts are transparent: to intimidate FBI and Justice Department employees, to discourage them from investigating crimes committed by Republican leaders and their supporters, and to justify a partisan takeover of these agencies if a Republican president takes power. So it is important to correct the record.

Recent news articles provide ample evidence to debunk these claims, and Senate Democrats’ painstaking oversight investigations are revealing a fuller and more accurate picture of FBI and Justice Department abuses. Far from persecuting conservatives, decades of FBI history show that the department targeted civil rights and racial justice plead as threats to national security and environmental and animal rights activists as terrorists, while failing to respond appropriately to the more lethal far-right violence.

Project 2025’s claim that the FBI is “woke” can be most easily dismissed. Despite vows by every FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover—all Republicans—to diversify the special agent workforce, it remains predominantly white and male. Starting with 202278 percent of the agents were white and less than 25 percent were women. Less than 6 percent of agents are black and less than 10 percent are Hispanic or Latino. Almost 82% of FBI directors are white. The mediocre and ineffective efforts of the diversification office over the years have focused almost entirely on recruitment rather than withholding, ignoring how it treats female and minority agents who successfully navigate the application process.

In September, the FBI agreed to a $22 million settlement discount in a 2019 class action lawsuit filed by 34 women who had been SUBJECT to sexual harassment, discrimination and unfair dismissal while attending the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia. Of course, the FBI will not bear the cost of the $22 million; the American taxpayer will. In 2021, a group of former black agents he wrote directly to Wray to complain about ongoing racial discrimination and demand more aggressive reforms. Muslim office workers have the same reported bigoted FBI counterterrorism training materials and mistreatment based on religious and ethnic bias. This behavior does not indicate an agency overly concerned with social justice.

There are similar holes in claims about the FBI’s alleged political bias. An alarming investigation report issued by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) earlier this month documented how the FBI’s 2018 background investigation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was designed to shield the conservative nominee from scrutiny rather than investigate serious allegations against him.

During Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearings, two witnesses came forward with allegations that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted them while in high school and college. However, the Trump White House organized the FBI’s additional investigation into these matters, despite then-President Trump’s public statements giving the bureau “free rein to do whatever it needs to do.” Agents did not interview the accusers or the accused, for example, nor did they respond to tips received on the FBI’s tip line. When the office’s inaction became clear, senators asked Director Wray to explain. He claimed to have spoken with the bureau’s background investigations specialists and said the investigation followed “long-standing policies, practices and procedures.” In fact, Whitehouse’s investigations ultimately revealed that there were no written policies, practices or procedures to follow.

After the Senate confirmed Kavanaugh’s nomination to the court, many of them citing a lack of evidence to support the assault allegations, Democratic senators sought more information about the FBI’s investigation. Over the next six years, in two administrations, the FBI balked at this investigation, providing misleading information and ignoring or slowing requests for documents. Wray’s failure to ensure a thorough investigation and his inaccurate Senate testimony deprived the Senate of the information it needed to verify Kavanaugh’s fitness for a lifetime appointment to our highest court. The FBI’s continued refusal to provide timely and accurate responses to Senate surveillance requests served no legitimate purpose but to protect Kavanaugh — like Wray, a member of the conservative Federalist Society — and the Trump administration from scrutiny.

It wasn’t the only time the FBI and Justice Department colluded to suppress investigations into allegations of potential criminal activity by Republicans during the Trump administration, according to recent reports. The Washington Post revealed in August that Trump’s top policy appointees at the Justice Department, including Attorney General Bill Barr, intervened to prevent federal prosecutors and the FBI from fully investigating whether Trump or his campaign received a $10 million illegal payment dollars from the Egyptian government shortly before 2016. choice. Project 2025’s recommendations would give political appointees of the Justice Department even stronger control over the FBI.

It is clear that political biases at the FBI played a role in the bureau’s failure to properly assess the threat that Trump supporters, led by far-right militant groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, posed at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, despite a multitude of warnings from a variety of sources. However, efforts by the January 6 House committee to examine the cause of this information failure were cut short. Oversight investigations led by Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) in continuous deficiencies in the FBI’s response to white supremacist and far-right violence, raises concerns that the bureau has not instituted the necessary reforms to prevent such an attack from happening again.

i was warning about the mismanagement of the FBI and the abuses of its authorities since resigning from the bureau in 2004 after a 16-year career as a special agent. i have documented how post-9/11 expansions of the FBI’s investigative and surveillance authorities led to abuses. Inevitable, republicans and other conservatives were among those improperly targeted by overbroad intelligence activities, as we have discussed Here. Because the FBI usually mistreating whistleblowers who violate the law and policy, it is not surprising that agents and analysts identifying right conservative they are also subject to abuse. But using these examples to push a false narrative of anti-conservative bias is not effective oversight, and further politicizing the FBI is not a remedy.

The only way to reduce abuse at the FBI and the Department of Justice is to shrink the office concentrate to evidence of wrongdoing. Requiring a reasonable indication of criminal activity before intrusive investigative activities are authorized would direct agents to search for evidence rather than follow hunches based on bias, error, or intentional abuse. And giving FBI employees the full whistleblower protections afforded to other federal employees, including access to federal courts when their rights are violated, will ensure that Congress and the American public have access to evidence of domestic waste, fraud, abuse, and threatening illegalities . constitutional rights and undermine public safety.