The Morning Briefing: Trump's Biggest Failure Was in Not Gutting the FBI

Top O’ the Briefing

Trump Should Have Gone Scorched-Earth on the FBI

Happy Thursday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Springtime in the desert is just the preheating of an outdoor convection oven that’s about to be on for five months.

I can’t be the only one who didn’t have “Liberal America Doesn’t Want Cops to Stop Black Girl From Stabbing Another Black Girl” on my bingo card. These people are starting to give me a headache that won’t go away. I prefer my headaches to be the result of having enjoyed too much beer the night before. This, put mildly, is unacceptable.

But that’s not what we’re going with at the top here. I thought about it, but I just wasn’t in the mood to stare that level of insanity in the face while working on this. One needs to pick one’s battles wisely.

It’s no secret that we here at the Briefing are fans of President Trump’s time in office. “We” is me, of course, but I like to get a little full of myself on occasion.

Trump accomplished so much as president that I tend to gloss over the few things that I didn’t care for. The “drain the Swamp” refrain resonated with me because I truly believe that the federal bureaucracy has systemic rot that can only be fixed with a massive purge. That rot is bipartisan, too, and it is at the root of most of the ills plaguing this country.

Bureaucracy is the devil. That’s my statement and I’m sticking to it.

My dislike of the bureaucracy is one reason I never minded the high turnover in the Trump administration. I’m perfectly OK with bureaucrats not lingering in their jobs. When they do, they tend to become an integral part of whatever problem they thought they were going to Washington to fix.

Trump’s promise to exorcise the rot was never fulfilled. A lot of that can be blamed on the fact that the very bureaucracy he wanted to transform was working against him 24/7.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is one agency that could have used a thorough scrubbing from top to bottom from Trump. He looked like he was off to a good start when he got rid of the thoroughly execrable James Comey just three months after he took office.

Things kind of stalled from there.

Tyler wrote yesterday about something that the FBI has been sitting on for a while and it’s a doozy:

Last week, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) revealed an utterly shocking fact: when a deranged leftist named James Hodgkinson opened fire on congressional Republicans in 2017, nearly killing GOP Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), the FBI ruled the shooting a “suicide by cop.” Even FBI agents disputed the ruling, Wenstrup added.

An avowed leftist unloads over a hundred rounds aimed at a gathering of Republicans and the FBI thinks his motive was that he was just looking for a way to off himself. A citizen not in law enforcement who’s only watched cop shows on television knows that this doesn’t fit the “suicide by cop” definition.

Rep. Wenstrup had plenty to say to FBI Director Christopher Wray:

He noted that the FBI did not call any of the congressmen as witnesses about the shooting, but “on November 16, 2017, FBI agents briefed those of us that were on the field that day… Much to our shock that day, the FBI concluded that this was a case of the attacker seeking ‘suicide by cop.’”

“Director, if you want suicide by cop, you just pull a gun on a cop. It doesn’t take 136 rounds. It takes one bullet,” Wenstrup noted. “Both the [Department of Homeland Security] and the [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] published products labeling this attack as a domestic violent extremism event, specifically targeting Republican members of Congress. The FBI did not. The FBI still has not.”

“On November 18, 2019, I went over to the FBI to discuss this conclusion. Although the agents were not part of that investigation, they did not agree that this was suicide by cop. And it’s my firsthand opinion that this was an attempted assassination of many Republican members of Congress.”

When the Bureau came to this conclusion it was being run by Andrew McCabe, a Comey lackey who was acting director at the time. It reeks of petty politics. That’s not a good look for law enforcement.

As Ed wrote over at HotAir, it’s not difficult to see why they “kept this idiotic take to themselves for the past four years.”

As both Tyler and Ed noted, the FBI’s conclusion was so ridiculously stupid that even the Democrats at the hearing sided with the Republicans.

We live in a world where the powers that be want us to believe that every white conservative in America is a domestic terrorist-in-waiting but those same powers that be are willing to dismiss an actual domestic terrorist because he was attacking the right kind of people as far as they were concerned.

Brace yourselves for another real terrorist attack that happens because these politically-motivated bozos are chasing around conservatives who hurt their feelings. And they’ll be doing it under the orders of the drooling puppet president.

If there is a MAGA 2.0 let’s hope it involves a lot more Swamp draining.

Everything Isn’t Awful

Man Returns $10k to Guy Who Left the Cash on His Bumper – And Was Given the Most Surprising Reward 💵

When this Washington state man discovered $10k floating on the breeze and returned it to its owner, the good deed left a good taste in his mouth!https://t.co/JqTVYHRKMv

— Good News Network (@goodnewsnetwork) April 20, 2021