Law Enforcement Exists To Protect The Vulnerable. The FBI Is Protecting Its Powerful Favorites

Elle ReynoldsJuly 26, 2022

An explosive announcement from Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa on Monday revealed whistleblower claims that the FBI had used a sham investigation to smear the mounting evidence of Hunter Biden’s compromised foreign entanglements as “disinformation” and forestall a legitimate probe ahead of the 2020 presidential election. It’s unthinkable that in America, federal law enforcement is obstructing an investigation into political royalty while that same agency is deployed against enemies of the regime — see Donald Trump in 2016, parents at school board meetings, and a cancer-patient grandmother who was sentenced to jail time for “parading” on Jan. 6, 2021.

Law enforcement, by design, must protect the innocent and vulnerable from the powerful. That protection is one of the chief purposes and benefits of society itself. Laws and their enforcement protect the helpless victim of abuse, the elderly man crossing the street, and the defenseless woman walking home from work. They do so by holding accountable anyone who would use strength, intimidation, or power to abuse the less powerful. Justice is blindfolded to strong-arming and nepotism.

It’s not hard to conclude, from crime statistics and even quieter sins we commit and witness, that a society ordered by might would be a hellish place for most. Such observations led philosophers like Thomas Hobbes to understand that men must submit to laws in return for protection against the lawlessness of others.

But what happens when law enforcement uses its delegated authority instead to protect the interests of the powerful, to excuse and cover up their lawlessness, and to silence the objections of those who point it out? It becomes no longer a check on the abuses of power but an accomplice. There are years of evidence of this sort of dereliction of duty at the FBI, but the whistleblower report of the scuttled Hunter Biden investigation still manages to be shocking.

The FBI, the whistleblowers alleged to Grassley, “sought to falsely portray as disinformation evidence acquired from multiple sources that provided the FBI derogatory information related to Hunter Biden’s financial and foreign business activities, even though some of that information had already been or could be verified.” One of the FBI officials involved, Grassley added, “also reportedly ordered the closure of a stream of information related to Hunter Biden and sought to improperly mark the matter within FBI systems in a way that would prevent it from being re-opened in the future.”

If those allegations are true, it appears that the supposedly nonpartisan FBI suppressed information potentially implicating the son of a presidential candidate in a foreign pay-to-play scheme — information the FBI was duty-bound to investigate — for the purpose of protecting the agency’s favored political candidate. That’s the kind of weaponization you might expect in a banana republic but hardly in the United States.

While the FBI protects now-President Joe Biden’s son from the consequences of his own actions, the federal law enforcement agency has been prolific in prosecuting its political enemies. The most outrageous is its involvement in the plot to spy on and smear political outsider Donald Trump as a Russian pawn.

But the corrupt agency has targeted less powerful people too, such as when Biden Education Secretary Miguel Cardona commissioned the now-infamous letter from the National School Boards Association to Attorney General Merrick Garland, who then used the letter as a pretext to sic the FBI on parents who were showing up to school board meetings to protest mask mandates and racist curriculum. There are also indications that the alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer may have been an FBI-concocted scheme to entrap the men involved — indications that were compelling enough to convince a jury not to convict any of the four men on trial for the plot.

By covering up incriminating evidence against its powerful favorites while targeting ordinary citizens, the FBI is undermining its own purpose for existence as a law enforcement agency. It’s looking more and more like a corrupt Third World police department that pins crimes on innocent citizens while dealing under the table to protect an autocrat’s prodigal son. And as the DOJ continues its crusade to criminalize dissent via the Jan. 6 Committee’s politicized show trials, all signs suggest it’s going to get worse.

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.