The House Subcommittee on Weaponization of Government revealed this week that the FBI censored American citizens and journalists to shape the administration’s fake narrative about Ukraine. Is there a single federal agency that is more rife with corruption and blazing incompetence than the FBI?
It’s no wonder many Americans would be happy to see FBI headquarters razed to the ground and every employee fired so that the US could start over with a newly reconstituted federal law enforcement agency—one that is strictly restrained and only allowed to investigate actual crimes.
The fact that the FBI censored American citizens on behalf of a foreign government is bad enough. It gets worse, however, when you realize that the idiots at the FBI were duped into censoring Americans for the wrong foreign government.
The FBI censorship began right around the time when Joe Biden started the Ukraine war by deliberately provoking Russia to invade. Shortly after the war started, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) reached out to the FBI and asked it to start censoring Americans.
The FBI was enlisted by the Security Service of Ukraine soon after the Russian invasion to demand social media platforms take down posts and block accounts such as those belonging to American journalists, according to House Judiciary Committee… https://t.co/DShLlufyfV
— The Washington Times (@WashTimes) July 12, 2023
How long has that been an option for the FBI? Some foreign country calls and asks the bureau to violate the civil liberties of Americans—and the FBI complies?
The biggest problem with this is the fact that the SBU was riddled with Russian spies at the time when the FBI was doing its bidding. In other words, according to the Weaponization of Government subcommittee report, the incompetent buffoons at the FBI ended up censoring Americans on behalf of Russia!
In at least one instance, the Russians convinced the dummies to censor a State Department official on Twitter. Great job, FBI!
The report states, “The inclusion of American accounts on the SBU’s lists indicates that the FBI either did not properly vet the SBU’s requests or was aware of their domestic nature and nonetheless carried them out. In so doing, the FBI violated the First Amendment rights of Americans and potentially undermined our national security.”
Five months after the war broke out, Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy ended up firing the head of the SBU. He had learned that his own intelligence agency was full of Russian collaborators, sympathizers, and double agents.
As part of its investigation, the House subcommittee subpoenaed documents from Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram) and Alphabet (parent company of Google and YouTube). There was no need to subpoena Twitter because those files are all being publicly released by independent journalists who were given access to them by Elon Musk.
What the subcommittee found in those documents was that the FBI uncritically had posts taken down from social media if the Russian spies at the SBU requested it. In some cases, the FBI requested that posts be censored, and in other cases, they ordered the social media companies to take posts down.
The FBI didn’t even stop to think about it. The Russian spies were having them take down pro-Ukrainian posts and ones that were critical of Vladimir Putin. The Russians were probably laughing about it the whole time.
The blistering report says, “At times, the FBI would even follow up with the relevant platform to ensure that ‘these accounts were taken down.’ Regardless of its intended purpose in endorsing the SBU’s requests, the FBI had no legal justification for facilitating the censorship of Americans’ protected speech on social media.”
It’s nice to have some sunlight shed upon the FBI’s shabby and illegal behavior during these subcommittee hearings. The question is, what are House Republicans going to do about it?
