The authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 want you to believe that the FBI and Justice Department are infected with “woke culture,” distracted by “identity politics,” and “captured by . . . radical Left ideologues.” In Congress, Rep. Jim Jordan (OH) and his Republican colleagues on the weaponization of government subcommittee have likewise promoted conspiracy theories to claim that the bureau is biased against conservatives, using cherry-picked examples of FBI abuse to support a false premise. FBI director Christopher Wray, a lifelong Republican who was appointed by President Trump, called the allegation of anti-conservative bias “somewhat insane.”
The actual goals of these efforts are transparent: to intimidate FBI and Justice Department employees, dissuade them from investigating crimes committed by Republican leaders and their supporters, and justify a partisan takeover of these agencies if a Republican president takes power. So, it is important to correct the record.
Recent news articles provide ample evidence to belie these claims, and painstaking oversight investigations by Senate Democrats reveal a more fulsome and accurate picture of FBI and Justice Department abuses. Far from persecuting conservatives, decades of FBI history show that the department has targeted civil rights and racial justice advocates as national security threats and environmental and animal rights activists as terrorists, while failing to properly respond to deadlier far-right violence.
Project 2025’s claim that the FBI is “woke” can be dispensed with most easily. Despite vows by every FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover — all of them Republicans — to diversify the special agent workforce, it remains predominantly white and male. As of 2022, 78 percent of agents were white and less than 25 percent were women. Less than 6 percent of agents are Black and less than 10 percent are Hispanic or Latino. Almost 82 percent of FBI executives are white. The bureau’s middling and ineffective efforts to diversify over the years have focused almost entirely on recruiting rather than retention, ignoring how it treats the female and minority agents who successfully navigate the application process.
In September, the FBI agreed to a $22 million settlement in a 2019 class action lawsuit filed by 34 women who had been subjected to sexual harassment, discrimination, and unfair dismissals while undergoing training at the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia. Of course, the FBI won’t bear the cost of the $22 million; the U.S. taxpayer will. In 2021, a group of former Black agents wrote directly to Wray to complain of ongoing racial discrimination and demand more aggressive reforms. Muslim bureau employees have likewise reported bigoted FBI counterterrorism training materials and mistreatment based on religious and ethnic bias. This behavior isn’t indicative of an agency overly concerned with social justice.
There are similar holes in the claims of the FBI’s supposed political bias. An alarming investigative report issued by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) earlier this month documented how the FBI’s 2018 background investigation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was designed to more shield the conservative nominee from scrutiny than to probe the serious allegations against him.
During Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearings, two witnesses came forward with allegations that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted them while he was in high school and college. The Trump White House cabined the FBI’s supplemental investigation into these matters, however, despite then-President Trump’s public statements giving the bureau “free rein to do whatever they have to do.” Agents didn’t interview the accusers or the accused, for instance, nor respond to tips called into the FBI tip line. When the bureau’s inaction became clear, senators asked Director Wray to explain. He claimed to have spoken with bureau specialists in background investigations and said that the investigation followed “longstanding policies, practices, and procedures.” In fact, Whitehouse’s inquiries eventually revealed there were no written policies, practices, or procedures to follow.
After the Senate confirmed Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Court, with many of them citing the lack of corroborating evidence to support the assault allegations, Democratic senators sought more information about the FBI’s investigation. Over the next six years, across two administrations, the FBI stonewalled this investigation, providing misleading information and ignoring or slow-walking document requests. Wray’s failure to ensure a thorough investigation and his inaccurate Senate testimony deprived the Senate of the information necessary to vet Kavanaugh’s fitness for a lifetime appointment to our highest court. The FBI’s continuing refusal to provide timely and accurate responses to Senate oversight requests served no legitimate purpose but to protect Kavanaugh — like Wray, a member of the conservative Federalist Society — and the Trump administration from scrutiny.
That wasn’t the only time the FBI and Justice Department secretly colluded to suppress investigations into allegations of potential criminal activities by Republicans during the Trump administration, according to recent reporting. The Washington Post revealed in August that Trump’s top political appointees at the Justice Department, including Attorney General Bill Barr, intervened to prevent federal prosecutors and the FBI from fully investigating whether Trump or his campaign had received an illegal $10 million payment from the Egyptian government shortly before the 2016 election. Project 2025’s recommendations would grant Justice Department political appointees even stronger controls over the FBI.
It’s clear that political biases at the FBI played a role in the bureau’s failure to properly assess the threat Trump supporters, led by far-right militant groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, posed to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, despite a multitude of warnings from a variety of sources. Yet, the House January 6 committee’s efforts to examine the cause of this intelligence failure were cut short. Oversight investigations led by Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) into continuing deficiencies in the FBI’s response to white supremacist and far-right violence raise concerns that the bureau has not instituted the necessary reforms to prevent a recurrence of such an attack.
I’ve been warning about FBI mismanagement and abuses of its authorities since resigning from the bureau in 2004 after a 16-year career as a special agent. I have documented how the post-9/11 expansions of the FBI’s investigative and surveillance authorities have led to abuses. Inevitably, Republicans and other conservatives have been among those inappropriately targeted by overbroad intelligence activities, as I discussed here. Because the FBI routinely mistreats whistleblowers in violation of law and policy, it’s not surprising that agents and analysts identifying as conservative are also subjected to abuse. But using these examples to forward a false narrative about anti-conservative bias is not effective oversight, and further politicizing the FBI isn’t a remedy.
The only way to curb abuse at the FBI and Justice Department is to narrow the bureau’s focus to evidence of wrongdoing. Requiring a reasonable indication of criminal activity before intrusive investigative activities are authorized would direct agents to look for evidence rather than chase hunches based on bias, error, or intentional abuse. And giving FBI employees full whistleblower protections that are afforded to other federal employees, including access to federal courts when their rights are violated, will ensure that Congress and the American public have access to evidence of internal waste, fraud, abuse, and illegalities that threaten constitutional rights and undermine public safety.
