Morning Wire XX
[0] Growing distrust of the FBI has led to increasing calls for its immediate reform, particularly with the aim of ensuring that it will not be weaponized for political purposes.
[1] As critics say, it has been.
[2] But if the FBI is to be reformed, what safeguards should be put in place and what would the process look like?
[3] In this episode, we talk with the author of a new report that details not only why many Americans now view the FBI as an adversary of freedom, but some specific ways it could be significantly reformed.
[4] I'm Daily Wire, editor -in -chief John Bickley with Georgia Howl.
[5] It's Saturday, July 15th, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire.
[6] Joining us now is Stephen Bradbury, distinguished fellow in the executive vice president's office at the Heritage Foundation.
[7] Welcome, Stephen.
[8] So in your report, you write, quote, there is good reason to rethink the entire idea of the FBI at a fundamental level.
[9] Let's start with the evidence for this conclusion.
[10] You say, quoting again, the executive branch's misuse of federal intelligence authorities gives Congress clear and compelling grounds for enacting forceful reforms.
[11] What are some examples of those misuses or abuses of the FBI?
[12] Well, thanks for asking, happy to be on.
[13] Our report lays those out in some detail.
[14] The first part of our report, which is entitled How to Fix the FBI, recites the record of abuses.
[15] And at this point, the evidence is mounting.
[16] We've seen the reports about the crossfire hurricane, the politicized investigation of the Trump campaign versus the protective treatment given to the Clinton campaign in 2016.
[17] That's detailed even further in the Durham report.
[18] We've seen the Twitter files, revelations, about the FBI primarily, but also other federal agencies, monitoring the online speech of Americans and working with tech companies to suppress constitutionally protected speech.
[19] Really chilling.
[20] That's continuing, to this day, a report from the Weaponization Committee in the House about the FBI doing exactly that with the online speech of Americans critical of the war in Ukraine.
[21] And then we've seen the FISA court, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, unsealing opinions in which it found that the FBI had improperly accessed national security database information to gather.
[22] information about Americans with no national security purpose, clearly improper, done more than 278 ,000 times, according to the FISA court.
[23] So this body of evidence, very concerning, is mounting.
[24] There are other instances I could detail, which we lay out in our report.
[25] As a result of that, there's a lot of people in Congress on Capitol Hill in policy circles in Washington calling for a fundamental rethink of the FBI, starting over from scratch, building a new agency, or at a minimum, making some fundamental reforms that are necessary as a condition of reauthorizing these intelligence tools.
[26] Yeah, let's get into some of the specifics that you discuss in your report.
[27] You say that Congress should define the scope of the FBI's jurisdiction, refocus its mission on traditional law enforcement, and put it under effective control.
[28] Can you unpack that for us?
[29] First, how should Congress better define the Bureau's jurisdiction?
[30] Yeah, in the middle part, second part of our report, we walk through several important elements for what a reconstruction of the FBI might entail.
[31] And that's one of them.
[32] And by narrowing or focusing the jurisdiction, we mean should the FBI continue to have jurisdiction to investigate and enforce every single federal criminal, crime that's on the books.
[33] You probably know that the scope and range of federal crimes is enormous these days.
[34] No one person knows what all the federal crimes are on the books.
[35] A lot of different agencies have jurisdiction.
[36] Some agencies are the expert agencies with primary jurisdiction, for example, drug enforcement agency, alcohol, tobacco, and firearms for certain violations.
[37] There's a number of them we detail in our report.
[38] So one possibility would be FBI would no longer be the general all -purpose investigator, but would focus on those major criminal areas that are not covered by other federal agencies.
[39] Also, rethinking, does it need to be as broad as it is, or should it focus on large conspiracies, organized crime, syndicates, interstate criminal activities that are beyond the reach of state and local law enforcement?
[40] That's sort of the traditional view of the federal jurisdiction, perhaps a rethink of the FBI should involve staking out more limited jurisdiction in that respect.
[41] And then a big question here is should the FBI continue to have an intelligence gathering function?
[42] That's been a prominent part of its portfolio since the attacks of 9 -11.
[43] Made a lot of sense in the days and weeks and months after 9 -11 when we were trying to stop a follow -on attack.
[44] But does it need to have that that same robust, prominent role for intelligence gathering today.
[45] What we've seen, unfortunately, is it's misused those tools to target and track the activities, constitutionally protected activities of Americans with no basis to think there's been a crime or national security threat.
[46] And so probably Congress needs to take a hard look at reining that in, too.
[47] Right.
[48] We saw that with parents raising alarm about the policies at schools and then suddenly being named potential domestic terrorists.
[49] So this reining in of its role is what you mean in your report by refocusing the FBI's mission on law enforcement.
[50] What might that process look like?
[51] We're not in this report telling Congress exactly how to answer that question, but we are saying that's one of the major elements of reform that Congress really needs to take on in a serious way and consider.
[52] We walk through 11 different elements of what a reconstructed FBI might entail.
[53] But then I just want to stress again in the third part of our report, we get very specific as to a particular set of minimum reforms that we think are necessary to stop the abuses and protect the liberties of Americans, whether or not Congress decides to take on the bigger project of reimagining the FBI from the ground up.
[54] Yeah, if you would, walk us through some of those recommendations.
[55] What minimal steps need to be taken here?
[56] So the first set of those focuses right in on FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
[57] We see from the Durham report, and prior to that, the Inspector General report from December 2019, that in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, the FISA authority was abused.
[58] There was no adequate factual basis to ask the FISA court to approve the order to do foreign intelligence surveillance under the FISA authority on Carter Page, part of the crossfire hurricane investigation of so -called Russia collusion with the Trump campaign.
[59] There was not an adequate factual basis.
[60] The Durham report has underscored that in a very damning way.
[61] So there needs to be a fix to how FISA was abused in that case.
[62] In addition, as I mentioned, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has unsealed and published report showing that the FBI has improperly dipped into a national security database, which is very sensitive.
[63] This is the data that's collected under Section 702 of FISA.
[64] This is a broad, powerful foreign intelligence collection tool.
[65] It is not surveillance that's approved by the FISA court on an individualized basis.
[66] It's a very broad program of surveillance.
[67] But the key is it has to be focused not on Americans, but on foreigners, non -U
[68].S.