What if I told you that the FBI during the past decade was even more corrupt than you’d imagined?

Yeah, yeah, you’d probably reply, but where are the arrests? Where are the perp walks? Where are the pictures of Chris Wray in a neatly tailored orange jumpsuit?

And rightly so. These are good questions, and especially so in light of recent reporting by Just the News’s John Solomon and Jerry Dunleavy, who write, “President Donald Trump and his supporters were targeted by four consecutive FBI code-named counterintelligence investigations over the last decade that secretly subjected hundreds of innocent Americans to privacy-invading tactics and essentially treated the man twice elected president as a national security threat for most of the first nine years of his political career.”

Indeed, from the last months of Barack Obama’s presidency in the summer of 2016 until the last days of the Autopen presidency in January 2025 — with James Comey and then Andrew McCabe but mostly “Republican” Wray at the helm — it’s fair to say that the FBI was out of control.

By now, you’ve no doubt heard of the FBI operations code-named Crossfire Hurricane and, more recently, Arctic Frost. But Plasmic Echo? Round River? Probably not.

Imagine if instead of relentlessly targeting a thrice-elected twice-elected American president, even a smidgen of that time and energy were instead spent on, oh, say, getting to the bottom of the Biden Crime Family’s influence peddling in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere.

Instead, not only was the FBI targeting Donald Trump and sniffing around in the first lady’s underwear drawer during its Plasmic Echo op, it was also running an operation “to neutralize all negative information and allegations of Biden family corruption.” That’s what the aforementioned “Round River” op was all about: protecting the Big Guy at all costs.

It’s not as if the bureau’s seventh-floor Stasi were in the dark about Biden’s corruption. They knew. It’s just that they kept it to themselves. As Solomon and Dunleavy report, “Many of the investigative files were hidden from view, even from most FBI agents, because they were marked ‘prohibited access’ and controlled carefully by FBI leadership.”

Most of these files were even hidden from Director Kash Patel when he took office, labeled by Wray and his henchmen as “prohibited access files” in the bureau’s case management system, Sentinel.

When did the bureau become so “rotted at its core”? Apparently, it happened at a slow boil over the course of years. “Those who have seen the records [say] they chronicle how the FBI’s expanded counterterrorism and counterintelligence missions after [9/11] eventually became hijacked by politics and led agents to deploy tools meant for terrorists and spies against everyday Americans in a bid to find a way to bring criminal cases against Trump.”

According to a 57-page assessment by the Government Accountability Office, the victims of the FBI’s surveillance state include as many as 1,200 people who were targeted under “special circumstances” between 2018 and 2024, all during Wray’s tenure. It sounds to me like many of these people had their civil rights violated.

Maybe I missed it, but has Wray been hauled before Congress to answer for these revelations?

As for the FBI’s efforts to shield the Big Guy and his family from the Rule of Law under its Round River op, The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland rightly points out that this isn’t just about the Bidens anymore, “but about the FBI agents and DOJ employees responsible for conspiring to thwart the investigation into the former president and his family and to abridge the free speech rights of Americans.”

“There is growing evidence,” said one senior official, “that may support a case that the FBI engaged between 2016 and 2025 in a conspiracy to violate the civil rights of Trump and his supporters under the color of government power.”

Sadly, that sounds like Washingtonspeak for, These people are dirty, but it’s a rigged town, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

One administration official who did go on the record is Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who said, “The Department of Justice is at the heart of considering these issues right now, so I can’t really talk about the specifics, but in general terms, yes, the Civil Rights Division and the DOJ generally does have the tool of a criminal conspiracy statute for conspiracy against rights. And this dates back to the start of the Ku Klux Klan.”

Ending the FBI was always a pipe dream, but still. If ever an out-of-control federal agency was crying out for an exercise of limited government, the FBI of the past decade was it.