When spokesman Kevin McCarthy recently suggested he might block the FBI from moving its headquarters from downtown to a new facility planned for the Washington suburbs, it was more than idle to think about an office renovation.
The Republican speaker’s nod raises a previously fringe proposal to turn around the FBI following the federal indictment of Donald Trump over classified documents and the Justice Department’s prosecution of his allies, including some of the nearly 1,000 people charged in January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
Moving from far-right corners to the mainstream, the emerging effort to overhaul the nation’s top law enforcement agency is rooted in increasingly vocal conservative complaints about an overly biased FBI that they say is being arming against them.
“This is a pretty dramatic reversal of what the policy would have been 50 years ago,” said Beverly Gage, a Yale historian who won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for her biography of the legendary FBI director, “G-Man: J. Edgar”. Hoover and the Making of the American Century.”
Shifting attitudes among Republican members of Congress toward the FBI underscore how Trump’s personal grievances have become legislative policy. Once the party of law and order, Republicans are now antagonistic to federal law enforcement, undermining a storied institution and attacking Justice Department officials whose work is critical to northern democracy – American
While political criticism of the FBI has followed the bureau since its founding under Hoover, who eavesdropped on civil rights leaders and orchestrated the infiltration of left-wing political organizations, the right-wing campaign against the ‘federal law enforcement had boiled over mainly on the fringes of the party. politics.
But the Justice Department indictment of Trump, who has pleaded not guilty to 37 counts of storing and refusing to return classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club, and the ongoing prosecution of Trump supporters that stormed the Capitol, have fueled the anger of conservatives. . The Justice Department is also investigating Trump and his allies over the effort to challenge the election of President Joe Biden ahead of the 2021 attack on the Capitol.
Conservatives criticize federal law enforcement on multiple fronts; among them, its work with social media companies to flag potentially dangerous posts and a COVID-era memo from Attorney General Merrick Garland directing resources to combat violence against school officials. They compare Trump’s investigations to what they say was a deal for Hunter Biden, the president’s son, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion after a lengthy investigation.
“Looking at the actions of the FBI, I think the entire leadership needs to change,” McCarthy told reporters on Capitol Hill last month.
After a visit with law enforcement in California, McCarthy said he plans to decentralize the FBI by expanding operations to the states.
“This idea that we’re going to build a big new Pentagon and put the whole FBI primarily in one place, I don’t think that’s a good structure,” McCarthy said Friday, on a conservative-led proposal to relocate the FBI. in Alabama.
“I would like to see the structure of a much smaller FBI administrative building and more FBI agents across the country, helping to keep the country safe,” he said. “For me this is better.”
In many ways, resistance to a robust federal law enforcement agency extends a thread that has run through American history, since the aftermath of the Civil War, when southern states rejected federal troops for reconstruction, until Trump’s 2024 campaign announcement in Waco, Texas. , a region known for the federal siege of a separatist compound in 1993.
“The Washington headquarters is symbolic,” said Steven G. Bradbury, a former Trump administration general counsel who is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
Heritage is among those outside entities and advocacy organizations encouraging Congress to reimagine the FBI.
Bradbury’s “How to Fix the FBI” report outlines nearly a dozen options. One is narrowing its jurisdiction. Another is to overhaul Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, which was part of the Trump-Russia investigation into 2016 election interference and is a program some Democrats also want to limit .
“We have our finger on the pulse of what conservatives are reacting to,” Bradbury said. “FBI Must Rebuild.”
Last week, FBI Director Christopher Wray appeared before the House Judiciary Committee for the first time since Republicans took control in January, facing a long list of criticisms, complaints and accusations of partiality in the office.
“Are you protecting the Bidens?’ asked Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.
“Absolutely not,” Wray said.
At another point, Wray said, “The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems a little crazy to me, given my personal background.”
He is a longtime Republican who had been appointed by Trump to fill the post after Director James Comey was fired in 2017.
Wray told lawmakers that dismantling or defunding the FBI would be disastrous for the bureau’s 38,000 employees and would “harm our great state law enforcement partners who depend on us every day to work with them in a host of challenging threats.”
Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, called the hearing “strange.”
“I never thought I’d see Republicans attacking a Republican appointed by Donald Trump to lead the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, basically saying they want to defund the FBI,” he said.
The lawmaker said it was also strange to find herself defending the federal law enforcement agency that she also believes needs strong oversight from Congress. But he felt that Democrats needed to step in to counter Republican attacks on the FBI.
“This is their message: They want to shut down the FBI because the FBI continues to investigate Donald Trump,” Jayapal said. “And that’s really what it’s all about.”
Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, introduced a proposal before the hearing that calls for “eliminating taxpayer funding for any new FBI headquarters facility.”
Jordan said in a letter to the Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Committee that he also wants a plan to move FBI headquarters out of Washington, pointing to an existing facility in Huntsville, Alabama, a recommendation that has also done Heritage.
“One of the goals we’ve set for ourselves in this Congress as Republicans is to have oversight so we can affect the appropriations process,” Jordan said in a brief interview on Capitol Hill, and “to put limits on how taxpayer dollars are spent to stop it.” the weaponization of these agencies against the American people.”
Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, who is competing with neighboring Maryland to host the FBI’s new headquarters, called the Republican ideas “a solution in search of a problem.”
“I think they just had a political blunder against federal law enforcement agencies,” he said.
