The FBI Is Either Incompetent or Criminal. Probably Both.

In July 2015, USA Gymnastics told the FBI that Larry Nassar had been sexually abusing young athletes. The FBI did not open a formal investigation for 14 months. During those 14 months, Nassar abused at least 70 more girls. The Department of Justice's own inspector general confirmed this. No FBI agent was criminally charged.

That is not the aberration. That is the pattern.

The FBI is the nation's premier federal law enforcement agency. It has a $10 billion annual budget, 35,000 employees, and a mandate to investigate the most serious crimes committed against Americans. The record of what it has actually done with that mandate is not a confidence building document.

A significant portion of the domestic terrorism cases the FBI has prosecuted in the past two decades involved FBI informants who recruited the targets, provided the materials, and planned the operations. The people caught in these stings are often mentally ill, financially desperate, and had no capability to carry out an attack without FBI assistance. The Intercept documented more than 50 cases fitting this profile. The FBI calls this counterterrorism. Critics call it manufacturing crime to justify a budget.

From 1956 to 1971, the FBI ran a covert program called COINTELPRO designed specifically to surveil, infiltrate, and destroy civil rights organizations. The FBI sent Martin Luther King Jr. a letter encouraging him to commit suicide. This is not conspiracy. It is a documented federal program that ran for 15 years under J. Edgar Hoover, who also maintained secret files on politicians and used them to blackmail his way into 48 years of unchecked power.

The FBI used an unverified opposition research dossier, funded by the Clinton campaign, to obtain FISA surveillance warrants targeting a presidential campaign. The Department of Justice inspector general found 17 significant errors and omissions in those applications. One FBI attorney was convicted of falsifying evidence to support a warrant renewal. The broader accountability for leadership? There was none.

What connects these cases is not incompetence, exactly. Incompetence is random. This is directional. The FBI surveils the movements it disagrees with, protects the cases it wants to protect, manufactures threats it can solve, and covers mistakes with classification. The institution that is supposed to be above politics is one of the most political agencies in the federal government.

The FBI will tell you it has reformed. It is always reforming. The reforms never seem to change the direction. They just make the next scandal slightly harder to trace.