FBI: Pot Calling The Kettle Black

FBI: Pot Calling The Kettle Black
By David A. Clarke Jr., Sheriff (Ret.) Milwaukee County

This headline refers to a proverb that I remember my parents saying to me when I was little boy. It means, “someone guilty of something they accuse another of.” This is very appropriate in the case of behavior by the United States Department of Justice and their investigative arm, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Like every other law enforcement agency, they carry a sense of trust given by the public. It is a sacred trust that must be closely guarded because once law enforcement loses that trust, it is very hard to regain. Nobody needs a corrupt law enforcement agency. I stressed that every day in my time as sheriff of Milwaukee County. The reason is that law enforcement agencies have awesome government power and authority. They can make arrests summarily. Due process doesn’t kick in until afterward. In addition to that, the word of a law enforcement officer carries more weight in report writing and testimony under oath in a court of law. Think about that.

So, when I read accounts about the FBI violating not only its own internal policies but violating people’s rights under the U.S. Constitution, suffice it to say I was not surprised, and I should have been. The reason I wasn’t surprised is because this agency has exhibited a pattern of this behavior for a while now. Just like with state and local law enforcement agencies, they are dealing with the human element in their personnel. Every so often an officer goes outside their documented policies and goes over to the dark side to commit egregious violations of the public trust. There is a difference, however, between a one-off that occurs in local law enforcement agencies and the pattern being exhibited by the FBI.

This goes back to the 2016 presidential election where FBI agents ran with a fake dossier from a previously discredited source by the British intel agency MI5 about then-candidate Donald Trump as the basis to secure a search warrant to wiretap Trump’s campaign. This dossier reached the highest levels of the Bureau. It is not too much to ask the FBI to do its due diligence in getting secondhand information before running to a magistrate seeking a warrant especially involving a wiretap on a presidential campaign. Any local law enforcement officer would know that they have to look at the source and vet him or her for trustworthiness before using the information. They have to tell the judge that they have relied on this source in the past and he is considered reliable. But it doesn’t stop there.

A former FBI lawyer involved in the Trump investigation pleaded guilty to altering an email that the showed source was not a source with the CIA, when the original email indicated that the source was a source used by the CIA. Follow that?

Now, there is this. In 2019, a Judge ruled that the FBI had gone too far in a search warrant raid and delivered a blistering account of those raids in a case involving a Wall Street financier. The FBI said in a statement that a typographical error in the warrant was to blame. The judge called it recklessness. That’s not all.

Now the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is asking the U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General to review FBI agents’ failure to follow rules in sensitive domestic investigations that came to light in an internal audit. Senate Judiciary officials said that, “The violations are widespread and systemic. The sheer number of investigations that fail to comply with Domestic Investigation and Operations Guide rules suggest a pattern and practice of evading rules which opens the door for political and other improper considerations to affect the decision-making process.” That is a scathing indictment. The same audit found that FBI agents violated their own rules 747 times in 18 months while conducting sensitive investigations involving individuals engaged in politics, government, the news media and religious groups. This, ladies and gentlemen, is cultural in nature. To call this department rule violations is putting it kindly. These are violations of people’s constitutional rights. These are civil rights violations. It has become standard operating procedure within the FBI. Worse yet, nobody will be held accountable. The Bureau gave the perfunctory statement about taking this seriously. Sure, now that they have been caught. FBI Director Christopher Wray’s credibility in now under question by the House Judiciary Committee for past discrepancies about these violations in previous testimony before the House Committee.

Here is why I bring this up. I have said over and over again that when law enforcement is right, I will defend them to the wall, but when law enforcement officers and agencies are wrong, I will call them out. The FBI and USDOJ never hesitate with breakneck speed to parachute into a local community when a police use of force occurs, especially when the officer is white and the suspect is black. They turn over every rock looking for the slightest thing that might suggest wrongdoing. They do this without being asked and before the local investigation is completed. They misread statistical data on traffic stops and declare a local agency guilty of a pattern and practice of racial discrimination and then arm-twist them into a consent decree basically taking the agency over, thus federalizing local law enforcement. During the Obama administration, they conducted 22 pattern and practice investigations. They found local agencies guilty of it in 21 cases. That doesn’t pass the smell test folks. They know that weak-kneed mayors will fall on the sword and not fight the ruling. This places the city’s officers under a cloud of suspicion and has them spending time away from the street and filling out onerous federal reports on traffic stops, field interview incidents and even minor uses of force. Then some cop-hating activists exploit the collected data to hammer the officers as engaging in targeting black residents. It is a basic truth that high-crime areas in urban centers have high percentages of black residents. It is also true that a high percentage of crime and violence involves black perpetrators. It stands to reason, then, that most traffic violators, field interview stops and arrests will involve black people. That isn’t targeting. It is a statistical reality.

I would suggest that the FBI focus on a culture change within their own agency. Their credibility and public trust are in the toilet. It reminds me of a Bible passage in Matthew 7:3-5 in thinking about the behavior of the FBI. It says, “Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye (local law enforcement)and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

It is a classic example of the meaning of the pot calling the kettle black.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of Americas Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com