Do Americans have any reason to trust the FBI?
The once-vaunted reputation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been in tatters for years among conservatives — since well before its deep-state warfare against Donald Trump and his supporters became public knowledge.
But a report this week about the bureau’s dealings with a man arrested in July in a potential Trump assassination plot linked to Iran just made things a good deal worse.
According to Just the News, FBI counterterrorism agents interviewed Pakistani national Asif Raza Merchant in April when he landed at George Bush International Airport in Houston.
“The immigration records from his arrival in Houston on April 13 clearly stated in bright red that he was flagged by the Department of Homeland Security database with the identifier ‘WATCH LIST and denoted as a ‘Lookout Qualified Person of Interest,'” Just the News reported.
Nonetheless, he was allowed into the country on a special parole, Just the News reported.
Maybe it was because he was just an oh-so-smooth talker. The agents who interviewed Merchan found him “polite and cooperative throughout encounter,” Just the News reported, quoting an FBI interview memo.
Or maybe it was because the FBI planned to keep an eye on him, using him as unwitting bait to maybe catch bigger fish in the subterranean sea of terror networks.
That’s how unnamed FBI sources framed it, according to Just the News. But they also pointed out the obvious dangers of simply letting dangerous individuals go free on the expectation that the benefits gained in surveillance would more than make up for any potential hazards.
It’s playing with fire — and in the real world, innocent people get burned.
The sources cited the Obama-era operation known as “Fast and Furious,” in which a plan to trace illegal guns ended up turning into a deadly fiasco, with more than 1,000 weapons disappearing — presumably into the hands of criminals. Two of those guns were found near the scene of the 2010 murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.
The Merchant case hasn’t come with any corpses — at least not that have been publicized so far — so that’s something.
But the fact that the FBI would consider it a worthy risk to allow a known terror suspect, with known ties to Iran — a terrorist-run nation that has been at war with the United States since 1979 — beggars belief.
Or rather, it would beggar belief if the country hadn’t been treated for years to the spectacle of an agency that has exchanged a reputation for stellar law enforcement to become known as an ideologically driven organization.
Americans who follow the news these days see more about an FBI committed to stomping on conservatives — say, parents who speak out at school board meetings — than about an agency battling criminals or the country’s enemies.
Much of the bureau’s current reputational problems no doubt stem from the days of former Director James Comey, who was fired by Trump in 2017. Comey was behind the smearing of retired Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security advisor.
He was the FBI director who helped establish the “Russia collusion” hoax that bedeviled Trump’s presidency.
He was the director who employed FBI Agent Peter Strzok and his lover, FBI attorney Lisa Page, the infamous couple who cashed in their “insurance policy” against Trump winning the presidency by attempting to frame him as a stooge of the Kremlin, and getting millions of Americans to believe it.
In 2019, as NBC News reported at the time, the Justice Department Inspector General issued a report declaring that Comey had violated both Justice Department and FBI policy by his actions after Trump fired him, including keeping official memos he wrote while FBI director and giving one of them to a friend, who in turn leaked it to The New York Times. Those were the kind of games Comey played in American politics.
But the FBI since Comey’s departure clearly hasn’t proven itself to be reformed from those dark days.
Director Christopher Wray, the man Trump appointed to replace Comey, has been a disappointment known more for evasive answers to Republican senators and representatives than he is for being a new broom that sweeps clean.
And now a reputable news source is reporting that the FBI allowed a man with known terror ties into the country, only to arrest him three months later on charges of organizing an Iranian-backed plot to kill the 45th president.
Merchant was arrested July 12, according to a Justice Department news release — one day before Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally.
That isn’t to suggest there was any link between Merchant and Trump’s would-be assassin in Butler, Pennsylvania, but it does highlight how dangerous threats are.
If the FBI was playing Merchant for a dupe, it was playing with fire.
And no American who’s followed the news over the past decade should even trust this agency’s leadership with a pack of matches.
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