> “I have considered myself to be a Republican my entire life,” albeit “a moderate Republican,” McCabe said. “I’ve voted for every Republican candidate for president in every election, except the 2016 one, in which I did not vote. And I chose not to vote because of the political nature of the work that we were engaged in.”
He’s Republican. So was Robert Mueller. And James Comey. And Christopher Wray. And John Durham of course.
We might not have overall numbers, but what are the odds that almost every high ranking FBI official you recognize is a Republican, but that the overall leadership structure doesn’t lean Republican?
It’s not a far-fetched concept. 90% of police chose Trump over Hillary. The people going into federal policing are not dissimilar from local police. Likely more educated and more urban than your average local officer, so I’d expect them to lean more Democrat than 10%, but it would be a stretch to believe that they dominate the org structure.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/words-mccabe-claims-firing-p...
According to a (likely poor quality) poll, when only considering Hillary and Trump in the poll, 92% of police officers chose Trump[1]. I believe it's fair to say that law enforcement overwhelmingly votes Republican, even if the poll is not great quality. 9 in 10? Maybe not. But likely far more Republican than your average voter. That was also in 2016, prior to the Defund the Police movement which would likely bump those numbers up.
That was general law enforcement, but FBI is law enforcement. Given the average FBI agent is probably more educated and urban than the average LEO, their numbers are likely slightly more Democrat, but it's reasonable to believe it would still lean Republican.
65% of FBI's supervisory positions were male, and 78% white[2]. As we know, white male demographics skew Republican at 58%[3]. The total FBI workforce is 75% white, 56% male. Looking at demographics, we'd expect the organization to be more Republican than average.
As mentioned previously, 16 top officials were given the director/acting director title and only 1 of those was a Democrat. If top officials are at all representative of the political beliefs of the organization on average (it's a fair belief, as those top officials typically spent decades climbing the org), picking Republicans that many times would mean either a very rare coin flip, or the numbers skew Republican.
The FBI has spent most of its resources throughout history targeting left-wing organizations a la COINTELPRO. This is still the case over the past decade.[4]
At the same time Peter Strzok was texting about stopping Trump, another agent shared her experience as "The FBI is Trumpland" and that Clinton is "the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel," and that "the reason why they're leaking is they're pro-Trump."
All of this gets overlooked by right-wing media and instead they focus on right-wingers getting investigated and prosecuted. When--I dunno--maybe it's just Republican politicians are more criminal?
Without having actual party affiliation polls of the FBI, I think it's reasonable to look at the information we do have and say if we were to guess, the organization probably leans Republican.
[1] https://www.policemag.com/342098/the-2016-police-presidentia... [2] https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2020/02/fbi-has-failed-mov... [3] https://news.virginia.edu/content/what-exit-polls-are-tellin... [4] https://rightsanddissent.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Stil...
Ok, first sentence sounds like we're on the same page. The second sentence sounds like you're very primed to have a political argument but I'm not sure with who. Nothing about the FBI leaning Republican is incompatible with my stance that the FBI is a monstrously large, unmanageable organization that centralizes federal law enforcement power into the unelected hands of supervisory bureaucrats.
Number of directors is irrelevant. Number of terms/years of party control is.
Since 1935, 13 of 23 Presidential terms were Democrats.
Presidents don’t determine the type of people who join the FBI, stay for decades, and work themselves into leadership positions. Presidents just appoint one of these individuals as director.
This would be like believing city police are mostly Democrat because the mayors have been mostly Democrat. Or the same of blue state state-level police.
None of this is factual or living in the real world, it’s simply adhering to an unsupported opinion because it reinforces your feelings.
The President's nominee doesn't have to be from existing rank-and-file FBI employees, Special Agents or otherwise.
The FBI is often involved in some of the most serious crimes (serial murderers, sex trafficking, organized crime), so getting rid of them sounds a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Without a doubt we should be wanting police reform, including better ways to discover criminal wrongdoing and more effective ways to deter it from happening and/or punish those who commit it.
And, I admit this statement may be controversial, but you need police for a functioning society. People need someone to call if they get threatened or to deal with the aftermath of a murder. Without police, people would demand something that looks very similar to a cop.
You don't need the FBI. It's creation was linked to prohibition which we didn't need either. It's modern form came to be under Edgar Hoover who used it to facilitate Japanese internment, to "purge alleged homosexuals from any position in the federal government" (quote from Wikipedia) and domestic surveillance against civil rights leaders.
They were the agency that should've been responsible for stopping 9/11. Stealing again from Wikipedia, "government documents showed that both the CIA and the FBI had missed 23 potential chances to disrupt the terrorist attacks".
They do help convict murderers though. "Nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000... the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death". [0]
Either way it shouldn't need to be the only evil left in the world before it's dealt with.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-fo...
They are also largely the ones called in to investigate serial murderers, child sex rings, drug trafficking, organized crime, etc. I think deferring to state level agencies to handle these crimes would produce worse outcomes.
I’m not saying the FBI is great. They’ve done a lot of awful things and had a lot of failures. But the current bad system isn’t automatically improved by getting rid of it if the alternative is worse.
[edit] it’s a bit like hitting a local maxima. Is there a better system out there for catching interstate and large scale crime? Most definitely. But it seems foolhardy to not have that plan in place when deciding to “dismantle” the FBI when doing so means more terror attacks happen, more children get trafficked, serial murderers kill more victims, drug lords grow bigger operations, etc.
In particular, they often use 18 USC 1001 to manufacture crimes and the only evidence supporting a charge may be a written report (an FD-302) that could have been written months after the fact. Their current policy is not to record interviews. I think that needs to be reversed and there should be some materiality requirement to the 18 USC 1001 charges, rather than trying to get someone to slip up. They should also have bodycams when involved in raids or similar activities, same as cops do.
I'm also disturbed at how often they "lose" things like Woods files. I think their case files should be externally managed and backed up and audited by a separate agency who can present "missing" evidence in court from backup, along with records of who tried to delete it, regularly audit case files for things like the missing Woods files that shouldn't be, etc.
I'd do the same for cops, too. Body cameras should send the video to a separate organization that doesn't answer to the cops, so they can't "lose" it. And if they "forget" to turn it on, well, that should be subject to regular audits and should get someone in trouble long before it becomes an issue in a big case.
It's weird, we spend lots of time designing computer systems to support accountability, but there seem to be a lot of things we could do better on that front in law enforcement.
This is not the same as a corp commiting financial fraud or other non-violent crimes. If a corp is having people killed to cover up, then we can start trying to equate.