John Solomon, founder and editor-in-chief of Just the News, noted on Tuesday’s edition of the Breitbart News Daily podcast with host Alex Marlow that whistleblowers from the Federal Bureau of Investigaion (FBI) warned of “political manipulation” at the FBI’s Washington Field Office, which conducted a raid on Monday of former President Donald Trump’s personal residence at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has not “taken” the whistleblowers’ allegations of partisan political corruption at the FBI “as seriously as the proof and evidence now merit,” Solomon stated.
FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies before the House Homeland Security Committee in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on October 30, 2019. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
“We had whistleblowers, just last week, [who] said there’s political manipulation of the cases going on,” Solomon said of Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) recent claims of “multiple FBI whistleblowers” warning of partisan political manipulation of some of the bureau’s investigations. Grassley’s office wrote:
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) speaks before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on October 13, 2020. (Tom Williams/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Multiple FBI whistleblowers, including those in senior positions, are raising the alarm about tampering by senior FBI and Justice Department officials in politically sensitive investigations ranging from election and campaign finance probes across multiple election cycles to investigative activity involving derogatory information on Hunter Biden’s financial and foreign business activities. The legally protected disclosures to Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) suggest a political double standard has influenced and infected decisions in matters of paramount public interest.
Solomon described the raid on Trump’s residence as illustrative of a new era of partisan politicization of the U.S. Department of Justice and its subsidiary, the FBI. He remarked, “Twenty years ago, I don’t think we would have had conversations [asking], ‘Is the FBI involved in political investigations?'”
Local law enforcement officers are seen in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida on August 9, 2022. Former US president Donald Trump said August 8, 2022, that his Mar-A-Lago residence in Florida was being “raided” by FBI agents in what he called an act of “prosecutorial misconduct.” (GIORGIO VIERA/AFP via Getty Images)
The FBI’s raid of Trump’s home is “historic,” Solomon added. “We’ve never seen a former president or current president raided by the FBI in this manner. … Normally a search warrant raid is executed when you don’t feel like someone can either volunteer information or there’s an imminent danger that evidence could be destroyed or moved. The president wasn’t even at Mar-a-Lago, and hasn’t been at Mar-a-Lago for some time.”
Solomon reflected on reporting he had done on the FBI over three decades, including misconduct at an FBI lab leading to the overturning of a conviction in 2003 and the FBI’s sieges at Ruby Ridge in Boundary County, Idaho, and the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1992 and 1993, respectively.
The Branch Davidian cult compound observation tower in Waco, Texas, is engulfed in flames after a fire burned the complex to the ground April 19, 1993. (TIM ROBERTS/AFP via Getty Images)
The FBI’s handling of its “Russia collusion” operation similarly degraded public trust in the bureau’s conduct, Solomon held.
“That’s why we have these doubts, and that’s the problem the FBI is going to continue to face,” he said of diminishing public confidence in the FBI’s legitimacy. “If it turns out that the FBI didn’t have the appropriate cause to go do this raid, if the evidence comes out and the litigation shows otherwise, this FBI will have so many black marks in its political registry of investigations that there will be calls to disassemble it, to rebuild it, to fire a lot of people.”
He continued, “The fact that [the raid occurred] one week after a whistleblower said this very office that conducted the raid has a political manipulation problem should concern us all. There should have been a pause. There should have been somebody answering questions. Director Wray called the allegations ‘very troubling,’ and he removed the number two official in that office just last week. But that doesn’t do enough to assuage the very serious questions that Senator Charles Grassley – a very serious senator – has raised, and it doesn’t really assuage all the things that we continue to learn about the Russia collusion case.”
“That’s a problem the FBI has to resolve, or we’re going to be just like other banana republics,” Solomon warned. “We won’t trust our premier federal law enforcement agency, and thus far, we don’t have a good resolution to those questions in … millions of Americans’ minds.”
When partisan political motivations among FBI agents and leaders are “out of the box, they create an erosion of trust in the American public,” Solomon stated, highlighting revelations of such corruption between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page.
Solomon said the public’s trust is “hard to get back” after being lost.
He concluded, “Kevin Brock, one of the great FBI executives of a different era, says that the FBI is deeply damaged right now. There is a lack of trust, and it’s earned by the FBI, meaning that they did things that earned this lack of trust. … Never before this time, have I ever seen such persistent questions that the FBI had people in senior leadership positions that felt comfortable engaging in politics as part of their investigations.”
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