Some years ago Kenneth Anger wrote a book called “Hollywood Babylon” to expose the dark secrets of the nation’s debauched film capital. It’s about time for an ambitious insider with a strong stomach for deceit and hypocrisy to write a tome called “D.C. Babylon.” One whole chapter could be dedicated to the modern FBI and its labyrinth of corruption and calumny.
Or perhaps it will take more than one chapter considering the record of the FBI under the direction of James Comey and Christopher Wray. Both men oversaw blatant exercises in election interference on behalf of Democrats, and then either lied about it or pretended it never happened. It’s almost as though they consider themselves to be above the law.
The refusal of FBI Director Wray last week to honor a congressional subpoena and turn over an unclassified document to the House Oversight Committee should therefore come as no surprise to anyone, even more so since the document in question could potentially end the presidency of Joe Biden.
The FD-1023 form submitted by a confidential informant contains allegations that Biden, while vice president, accepted bribes from a foreign national in exchange for favorable policy decisions. You would think that the FBI, which spent years chasing down imaginary pee tapes involving President Trump, would have a few minutes to confer with Congress about allegations that the sitting president had engaged in potentially treasonous behavior.
But no.
Since that 1023 form would redound significantly against the incumbent Democrat president’s re-election chances, it would be entirely out of character for the FBI to cooperate with the Republican-led investigation. Remember, this is the same FBI that sat on Hunter Biden’s laptop for nearly an entire year prior to the 2020 election, knowing full well that it contained evidence of wrongdoing. Just as the FBI under Wray protected Joe Biden’s son then, it now is working diligently to protect Joe Biden himself as we enter the 2024 election cycle.
No surprise. After all, as Special Counsel John Durham’s report documented, the FBI under the direction of Comey used its police powers to damage the candidacy of Donald Trump in 2016, and then worked to cripple his presidency by giving weight to Democrat lies and leaking stories damaging to Trump and his family and friends.
In other words, the modern FBI, under the direction of first Comey and now Wray, is a political weapon aimed at Republicans in the service of Democrats.
Hopefully, that is becoming plainly apparent to the majority of Americans. Maybe it is. A Rasmussen Reports poll last month showed that 69% of U.S. voters consider the influence-peddling scandal a serious problem for Biden, and more than 50% consider it “very serious.”
This latest standoff between Wray and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer exposes just how wide the gap is between the views of the American people and the Washington, D.C. elites. In D.C. Babylon, a corrupt FBI is merely business as usual, while for the rest of us, it is the poster child for a two-tiered system of justice. No one can honestly claim that Democrats receive the same level of scrutiny as Republicans by either the Department of Justice or the FBI.
On the issue of double standards, a couple of points have not been adequately raised about the significance of Wray’s refusal to honor the congressional subpoena.
First of all, we need to ask why Wray is not being vilified by the mainstream media in the same way that former Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were when they refused to honor subpoenas from the sham House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot.
In those cases, both men have faced not just contempt of Congress citations, but criminal prosecution. Bannon, the architect of Trump’s 2016 victory, has already been convicted of criminal contempt and faces four months in prison pending his appeal. Navarro has not yet been tried, but you can bet that the same heavily Democratic jury base in Washington, D.C. will be happy to send Navarro to prison until they can get their hands on their main target, Donald Trump.
So what is the difference between Bannon and Chris Wray? They both refused to cooperate with a congressional subpoena, but even if Wray is held in contempt by the House, there is no chance he will be prosecuted by the Biden Justice Department, any more than Attorney General Eric Holder was by the Obama Justice Department. Two tiers. Double standard. Call it what you want.
Secondly, we also should weigh Wray’s authoritarian rejection of congressional subpoena power against the current case being put together against Trump by special prosecutor Jack Smith in the Mar-a-Lago documents scandal. If Clark proceeds with an obstruction case against Trump because he didn’t act quickly enough in responding to the federal subpoena for classified documents, we have every right to ask why Wray gets to explicitly reject his subpoena, but Trump’s home was raided by the FBI while his lawyers were still in the process of negotiating with the Department of Justice.
But there’s no need to ask when everyone already knows the answer. Election interference, anyone?