Tag Archives: ethics

Trust in the FBI

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It’s rapidly eroding in the aftermath of the FBI’s pre-dawn raid on Mar-a-Lago, a raid that those same agents explicitly barred Trump lawyers from observing.

In response to that eroding trust, FBI Director Christopher Wray had this:

Unfounded attacks on the integrity of the FBI erode respect for the rule of law and are a grave disservice to the men and women who sacrifice so much to protect others….

Unfounded attacks on the FBI’s integrity are, assuredly, wrong.

However, what Wray is carefully ignoring is that this is the same FBI whose agents lied to FISA courts—repeatedly—in order to get search and surveillance warrants.

This is the same FBI whose agents have repeatedly fabricated “evidence” in order to get warrants from Article III judges.

This is the same FBI whose agents routinely lie in other venues.

This is the same FBI that deliberately avoided going to an Article III judge for their Mar-a-Lago raid warrant, choosing, instead to go to a magistrate judge.

The current attacks on FBI integrity are sadly, dangerously, entirely founded.

This FBI needs to be completely disbanded, its line agents reallocated to the US Marshals Service and to the Secret Service, its forensics capability converted to a small independent agency responsible to State and local police departments (and relocated to our nation’s heartland—say Wichita, KS), and everyone else in the FBI reallocated to the private sector.

Late Update: Corrected an erroneous reference to the CDC to be a reference to the FBI.

Again, I Ask

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A canonical example of the journalism guild’s view of what constitutes honest reporting is this from CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell and CBS News‘ response to the outcry over her…error. She emitted a tweet regarding the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, claiming

NEW: According to a DOJ official, the FBI is NOT in possession of former President Trump’s passports. Trump had accused the FBI of stealing his three passports during the search of his Mar-a-Lago home.

This was shown later to be obviously wrong; the FBI returned three of Trump’s passports, which of course they could not have done had they not “been in position” of them in the first place.

Notice: O’Donnell claimed to be citing a DOJ official (emphasis mine).

Regarding that,

CBS News protocol is to confirm news with at least two people before reporting it as fact.

Two people.

It used to be the case that journalists were required to cite two on-the-record sources to corroborate an anonymous source’s claim. The journalism guild has long since walked away from that requirement.

And so I ask again.

Why have journalists chosen to walk away from that standard of integrity?

What concrete, measurable standard of integrity do journalists use today in lieu of that one?

Bitter is…

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…as bitter does.  There’s much to be made of former President Donald Trump’s (R) keeping on about whether the 2020 Presidential election was stolen. (He thinks so, and there was a potful of sloppiness, error, fraud, and illegal changes to the mechanics of voting, but in this not so humble blogger’s view, not enough to aggregate to a “stolen” election.)

Let’s look, though, at soon-to-be former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney and her behavior following her decisive loss in the just concluded Wyoming primary (so desperate was she in the runup to actual voting that she was…asking…members of the Progressive-Democratic Party to cross over and vote for her in the primary).

The Wall Street Journal claims

Ms Cheney is a conservative by any measure and she has the courage of her convictions.

The first part of this is plainly not true. Were she truly conservative, she would have adhered to her implied commitment to the citizens of Wyoming to represent them, a commitment made by the fact of her campaigning for and election to Congress in prior cycles.

The second part of that is either plainly not true, as well, or she has badly misplaced convictions. Had she the courage of her convictions, she would have represented her bosses, those Wyoming citizens. In the alternative, her convictions centered on putting her personal positions ahead of—in place of—those of her bosses. If those two sets of convictions truly were that incompatible, a person of truly conservative principles would have resigned her Congressional seat and pursued her convictions as a private person, where it would be legitimate to represent herself instead of her fellow Wyomingians.

Instead, she abused her position, participating in a by design one-sided House J6 Committee until the very last day, and only then pursuing her convictions as a private person.

And what is that personal conviction? It’s nothing that benefits people generally, or Wyomingians in particular. Her conviction—her single goal in life—is to be in the way of a politician whom she hates so viscerally.

Ms Cheney’s concession speech suggests her mission in politics now is to prevent Mr Trump from becoming President again.

In fact, no suggestion at all:

Immediately following her loss to Harriet Hageman in Wyoming’s Republican primary, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., unveiled her next move, launching a new organization with the primary goal of keeping former President Donald Trump from regaining the presidency.

In fine, Cheney has spent years letting her bitterness vis-à-vis Trump govern her Congressional behavior and her behavior while campaigning.

Rearranging the Furniture

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CDC Director Rochelle Walensky now claims she’s going to reorganize the CDC after saying that her agency did not reliably meet expectations during the course of the Wuhan Virus Situation.

The changes will include elevating the laboratory division to report to the CDC’s director and restructuring the communications office….

Because the CDC needs to do a better job of selling its claims. And this bit:

shift the CDC’s culture from highly academic to focus more on preparedness and response

And

Dr Walensky also wants additional funding and more authority for the CDC on matters including mandating data collection from states….

There it is. The Progressive-Democratic Party’s go-to solution for all of our ails—more government funding and more government power.

No.

Aside from the interest in being better at the agency’s used car salesman patter, the wasteful increase in taxpayer money coming her way, and the dangerous increase in government power, mechanically, this is just a cosmetic rearrangement of the furniture. The CDC needs reorganization, but it needs to be seriously reorganized.

There’ll be no culture change so long as the personnel of the current culture remain. Any reorg must begin with personnel, not a change of office symbols. That beginning, then, must be the termination, for reasons ranging from cause to what the military refers to as the good of the service, of the agency’s managers, from Walensky and her staff through her deputies and their staffs on down through (not to) middle management.

Every single one of them needs to go. And then Walensky’s replacement as Director, before any additional hiring occurs, needs to justify in concrete and measurable terms, line by line and position by position, why the personnel slot for that proposed new hire needs to exist.

Only with that change in personnel and that streamlining can the CDC become an efficient and effective organization and an organization us American citizens can trust.

Just the News Has a Question

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The news outlet ran a poll over the weekend. The question was this:

How concerned are you that additional IRS funding through the Inflation Reduction Act will lead to more audits for typical taxpayers?

As of Sunday morning, the enormously unscientific poll—consisting solely of JtN readers—was running 96% Extremely concerned.

Keep in mind that the IRS has been targeting Conservatives and conservative organizations at least since early in the Obama administration (if not sooner; that’s just when it became exposed).

Keep in mind, too, that Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, since Obama’s first Presidential campaign, have characterized typical taxpayers as merely bitter Bible- and gun-clinging denizens of flyover country, as irredeemable and deplorable, as 15% of us being just no good.

How is this even a question?