FBI veteran calls out GOP's 'politically motivated' smears on Trump probe

President Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to then-Vice President Joe Biden, yet his ongoing lies to the contrary continue to roil American politics. Indeed, as a former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent pointed out on Thursday, Trump’s lawmakers keep making mistakes when trying to fault the Bureau’s investigation of Trump’s insurrection.

“Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has never concealed his distaste at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department’s attempt to hold Donald Trump accountable for his failed coup, an investigation code-named by the FBI as ARCTIC FROST,” former FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Michael Feinberg wrote for Lawfare. “Beginning as a case managed out of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, it was moved to Jack Smith’s Special Counsel’s Office upon his appointment, and was closed, with the associated indictment dismissed, upon Trump’s second ascension to the presidency.”

Identifying Grassley, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), FBI Director Kash Patel and FBI Co-Deputy Director Dan Bongino as the main promulgators of anti-FBI rhetoric regarding the investigation, Feinberg claimed they are politically motivated rather than objective in their assessments.

“Much like Grassley’s efforts to portray the opening of ARCTIC FROST as a deviation from normal case predications, these ideological confreres—Jordan, Patel, and Bongino—and their attempts to cast doubt on the wisdom and propriety of specific investigative steps once again relied on an unruly mélange of documents, proffered to the public in haphazard order, and without any context or reference to any extant FBI and Justice Department policies,” Feinberg explained. “But for those truly interested in understanding how the case unfolded—and who seek such comprehension without political goals or ideological rancor—it’s worth imposing a narrative architecture on the records, and examining them in a thematic fashion, investigative technique by investigative technique, to understand the special agents’ actions in a more incisive and objective fashion.”

Feinberg continued that “viewed through such a lens, something important becomes obvious: The FBI’s investigation into the fake electors plot was not overly aggressive in any fashion. If anything, the case agents acted logically, prudently, and, to use a phrase beloved by law and order types, by the book.”

Reviewing how the four politicians systematically mischaracterized routine procedures as partisan, dishonest or both, Feinberg summed up his assessment by saying that “the days of the FBI trying to speak only through indictments are apparently over, and Patel’s willingness to endlessly provide piecemeal documents, without any explanation, annotation, or context to the Bureau’s most vituperative critics is just one more sign not that a page has merely been turned, but that it has been ripped out of the book entirely and burned to cinders. But in spite of the help that the FBI’s leadership provides him, Grassley has yet to actually show anything inappropriate, or even out of the ordinary.”

During the 2020 presidential election, Biden defeated Trump by 81.3 million to 74.2 million popular votes and an Electoral College margin of 306 to 232, the same by which he defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who also won the popular vote 65.9 million to 63 million) in 2016. Because he could not stay in power through the democratic process, Trump attempted an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

As conservative columnist George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post in February, the evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Biden defeated Trump.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will said. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

Because Trump has fired FBI agents who investigated his attempted coup (as well as other Trump-related scandals), Feinberg recently created the FBI Support Network to provide assistance to those who need it.

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