Does the FBI deserve a raise?

We ask because Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and 17 other Senate Republicans joined a unanimous caucus of Democrats yesterday to pass the $1.7 trillion 2023 omnibus obscenity. In that bill was a funding increase for the same FBI that’s been caught red-handed colluding with Democrats to sabotage the presidency of Donald Trump and colluding with Twitter and other Big Tech companies to interfere in the 2020 presidential election.

“The bill,” reports The Daily Caller, “designated $11.33 billion for the FBI ‘to investigate extremist violence and domestic terrorism,’ according to a summary of the bill by the House Appropriations Committee. The total is reportedly $569.6 million more than the enacted levels for the 2022 fiscal year and $524 million more than the president requested.”

The FBI has some 13,000 agents and, as our Mark Alexander has noted, the vast majority of them are professionals of impeccable character. But it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the whole bunch, especially when those bad apples — people like James Comey and Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok and Timothy Thibault and James Baker — are calling the shots from the seventh floor of the building named for J. Edgar Hoover.

Last week, amid Elon Musk’s ongoing Twitter transparency initiative, we found proof of what we’d long suspected. As our Nate Jackson wrote:

What we know from the Twitter Files releases of recent days is that Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, met weekly with the FBI, DHS, and the director of national intelligence about how to moderate censor disfavored information before the 2020 election. It was far more than COVID, as the White House has previously bragged about; it was about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the revelations of Joe Biden’s corruption.

Meanwhile, Jim Baker, Twitter’s former deputy general counsel, was a former general counsel for … the FBI. Twitter CEO Elon Musk fired Baker just last week after learning that Baker had filtered even the first Twitter Files release, among many other things, likely with a bent toward protecting the FBI.

There was more from the Twitter Files. The FBI reportedly paid Twitter $3.5 million for dutifully carrying out the bureau’s requests between October 2019 and February 2021 — requests that involved the suppression of users armed with information that ran counter to the Left’s established narratives, whether about Donald Trump or Hunter Biden or the events of January 6.

And still more: “Instead of chasing child sex predators or terrorists,” independent journalist Taibbi noted last week, “the FBI has agents — lots of them — analyzing and mass-flagging social media posts. Not as part of any criminal investigation, but as a permanent, end-in-itself surveillance operation. People should not be okay with this.”

We’re not. Which is why we want to see some accountability and some serious House Republican oversight come January 3. These are deeply serious First Amendment issues when the government colludes with private entities in the suppression of speech.

After biting their collective tongues but ultimately seeing the bureau’s reputation take one devastating hit after another, the FBI issued a statement:

The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.

Translation: Nothing to see here amid all these smoking guns. Also, “this is totally normal.”

The statement concluded: “It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

Ah, yes, “misinformation.” Where have we heard that term before?

Yes, yes, we heard it two weeks before the 2020 presidential election, when more than 50 former senior intelligence officials disgraced themselves and their offices by signing onto their own piece of Orwellian misinformation — a letter outlining their belief that the New York Post’s bombshell disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” and was likely “part of a smoke bomb of disinformation pushed by Russia.”

As for “conspiracy theorists,” the FBI evidently means the Twitter Files journalists who set about to release … FBI correspondence with and about Twitter.

“Think about everything we’re learning now that the FBI spent at Twitter, at Facebook, at Google,” said presumptive (but far from certain) House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. “Why would we increase any funding there until we can have our Church-style hearings to look at the FBI, to reform the FBI? … Accountability is a good thing.”

It’s a great question. And accountability is indeed a good thing.