Category: Weaponization
Trump promised ‘retribution.’ Congress keeps funding the machine.
Courts can block executive action, so Congress must cut funding. Yet Republicans refuse, leaving the Justice Department and FBI with the same tools Democrats will use again.
That gap between rhetoric and action now threatens to erase everything President Trump promised. In March 2023, he vowed, “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” and pledged to “obliterate the deep state” and fire the bureaucrats who turned federal law enforcement into a political weapon. Those words land with force. Appropriations decide whether they mean anything.
Trump’s ‘retribution’ pledge will collapse into another campaign slogan if Republicans keep funding the same Department of Justice and FBI they claim to oppose.
But if Trump relies on executive action alone, courts will block key moves and the next Democrat in the White House will reverse the rest. Only structural reforms written into law can stop the next round of weaponization.
That reality hits hardest at the Department of Justice and the FBI. A Congress that keeps funding these agencies under the Biden-era architecture keeps the weaponization machine intact.
Yet Republicans just pushed through a Justice funding bill that drew more Democrat support than conservative support.
That vote captures the GOP Congress since 2017. Leadership passes budget bills with less resistance from Democrats than from Republicans. Spending is the battlefield. Everything else fades fast. If your own side opposes your funding bills more than the other side, you are not changing the country. You are managing the status quo.
Here’s the brutal truth: Congress has not structurally defanged the Justice Department’s weaponization or taken a sledgehammer to the FBI’s open-ended mandate. The same deep-state actors who drove January 6 abuses, FACE Act prosecutions of pro-life activists, and FBI operations like Arctic Frost still collect paychecks.
Republicans had one last chance to shrink this machinery before Democrats likely regain the House. The final Justice Department appropriations bill should have cut off funding for the most abusive programs and permanently reduced the department’s ability to target Americans. Instead, Republicans passed a status quo bill that effectively codifies Biden’s DOJ.
The vote breakdown exposes the scam. All but six House Democrats supported the minibus package that included full-year DOJ funding. Meanwhile, 22 House conservatives opposed it.
The package included three appropriations bills: Commerce-Justice-Science; Energy and Water Development; and Interior and Environment. Freedom Caucus pressure forced leadership to hold a separate vote on the Commerce-Justice-Science portion first, and even then, it drew 40 Republican “no” votes. Leadership tried to quiet the revolt by swapping out a $1 million earmark for a Somali-led nonprofit after a welfare fraud scandal in that state. That move changed nothing about the bill’s core failures.
RELATED: The ‘blue-slip block’ is GOP cowardice masquerading as tradition
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Democrats voted for this bill despite calling Trump a dictator because the bill left the regime’s tools in place. On the issues that matter most, it stayed silent.
It did not:
- Bar funding for future January 6 prosecutions.
- Bar funding for FACE Act prosecutions of pro-life activists.
- Address the FBI’s Arctic Frost overreach.
- Defund sanctuary cities, even though sanctuary policies endanger federal agents and courts have repeatedly blocked Trump’s efforts to punish them. If Congress refuses to codify enforcement policy, courts will keep neutralizing it.
- Cut off grants to NGOs that help illegal aliens evade deportation. Other appropriations bills even fund refugee resettlement contractors.
- End incentives for blue states to implement red-flag laws. The bill keeps the $740 million slush fund that bribes states to expand them. It also fails to defund Biden’s pistol brace ban, the “engaged in the business” rule, and the Justice Department’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
- Fund an Election Integrity Office to implement Trump’s executive order on election integrity, even while the bill keeps money flowing to offices that persecute Americans.
- Rein in the Office of Inspector General, which receives $139 million despite lacking an appointed inspector general and operating under an acting career bureaucrat.
The FBI budget barely took a haircut from its record Biden-era levels. Keep the scale in mind: The bureau has more than 35,000 employees, yet only 138 have been fired so far.
Republicans also promised fiscal discipline. This minibus package totals roughly $180 billion and rejects steeper cuts conservatives proposed in committee. It includes nearly $5.6 billion in earmarks for 3,030 projects. Leadership found room for parochial spending while refusing to squeeze the agencies that turned federal power against the public.
Congress holds one real lever to change the regime without begging courts for permission: the power of the purse. If Republicans won’t pass transformative legislation, they must at least defund odious policies through appropriations.
Trump’s “retribution” pledge will collapse into another campaign slogan if Republicans keep funding the same Department of Justice and FBI they claim to oppose. When Democrats vote happily to fund the very departments that targeted Americans under Biden, the conclusion writes itself. Washington will not dismantle the machine. It will keep it humming until Democrats take power again and aim it at us with even fewer restraints.
‘Whack-a-mole’: FBI allegedly fires, rehires, then refires agents linked to Jack Smith’s anti-GOP Arctic Frost crusade
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) published damning documents last month detailing how the Biden FBI not only secretly obtained the private phone records of numerous Republican lawmakers but subpoenaed records for over 400 Republican individuals and entities as part of what the Iowa senator called a “fishing expedition.”
Grassley noted last week that Operation Arctic Frost, the “fishing expedition” in question, “was the vehicle by which partisan FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors could improperly investigate the entire Republican political apparatus.”
‘The road to reform is long.’
Amid the backlash over the latest insights into the Biden administration’s yearslong apparent campaign to criminalize its political opponents, the FBI began canning some of the agents involved in Arctic Frost whose names appeared in the newly released documents. While the bureau handed out numerous pink slips in recent days, it evidently had issues making them stick.
Last week, the FBI reportedly fired at least two agents who had worked on the Arctic Frost investigation.
CNN originally reported that Aaron Tapp, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Antonio office who previously had an oversight role on Arctic Frost, was among those fired, though it has since indicated that he was forced into retiring.
RELATED: Bondi exposes ‘UNPRECEDENTED’ Arctic Frost action against Trump by Biden admin
Jack Smith. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
On Monday, the bureau allegedly canned another four agents who worked on Smith’s team: Jeremy Desor; Blaire Toleman, a Chicago-based agent who once led a now-defunct public corruption squad; David Geist, a former assistant special agent in charge of the bureau’s Washington field office; and Jamie Garman, an agent who was placed on administrative leave early last month, reported Reuters.
“The public has a right to know how the government’s spending their hard-earned tax dollars, and if agents were engaged in wrongdoing they ought to be held accountable,” Sen. Grassley said in a statement. “Transparency brings accountability.”
Multiple sources told Reuters that at least two of the terminations — Toleman’s and Geist’s — were rescinded later in the day, along with a number of other terminations that allegedly took place on Monday.
Sources familiar with the matter told CNN that Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, had intervened on Monday to reverse the firings of least four fired FBI agents. One source said she weighed in on account of the agents’ involvement in the Trump administration’s crackdown on criminality in the national capital.
This last-minute rescue was, however, apparently as short-lived as the initial terminations. The FBI reportedly fired the agents again on Tuesday.
It’s presently unclear how many agents were officially canned.
The FBI and Pirro’s office did not immediately respond to Blaze News’ request for comment.
The FBI Agents Association complained in a statement on Tuesday that “the actions yesterday — in which FBI Special Agents were terminated and then reinstated shortly after — highlight the chaos that occurs when long-standing policies and processes are ignored. An Agent simply being assigned to an investigation and conducting it appropriately within the law should never be grounds for termination.”
“Director Patel has disregarded the law and launched a campaign of erratic and arbitrary retribution,” added the group.
Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project, told Blaze News, “Individual accountability for participation in or oversight of weaponized operations such as Arctic Frost should absolutely be imposed. I’m glad some have been fired for this, and I am sure they will sue and be well represented.”
“The personnel laws are very restrictive to accountability, which certainly makes accountability harder, especially when considering termination versus reassignment,” continued Howell. “That being said, you can’t have weaponized individuals still at the FBI, that just should not ever be an acceptable option. The road to reform is long.”
Howell added, “I’d like to see more thought given to systemic reform at the FBI so it can’t operate institutionally as it did during the Biden years especially. Whack-a-mole on weaponized individuals is tough work, but the FBI and government should also mitigate the potential for them to abuse power again.”
Editor’s note: Mike Howell is a contributor at Blaze News.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Liberal media remains DEAD SILENT on Biden FBI’s Arctic Frost operation against conservatives
Recent history suggests that the liberal media will go to great lengths to amplify a story if it appears beneficial to the left even if the story lacks any basis in fact.
Among the many cases that conform to this apparent pattern were liberal outlets’ hysterical coverage of the Russian collusion hoax, Joe Biden’s supposed competence as president, Jussie Smollett’s apparent hate hoax, the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, and Covington Catholic students’ harassment by radicals during the 2019 March for Life in the national capital.
On the flip side, factual stories that pose a political threat to the liberal powers that be tend to get little to no mainstream coverage. This is especially true of the latest revelations about the Biden FBI’s Arctic Frost operation.
According to recent analysis conducted by the media watchdog outfit NewsBusters, ABC, CBS, and NBC News avoided the story in their television broadcasts in recent days.
‘Not one single broadcast network aired one solitary second.’
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) published damning documents on Oct. 6 detailing how the Biden FBI sought private cellphone records from at least nine Republican lawmakers during Operation Arctic Frost — an operation that set the stage for at least one case brought against President Donald Trump by former Attorney General Merrick Garland’s dubiously appointed special counsel, Jack Smith.
Grassley released additional documents last week showing that Smith and his team subpoenaed records for over 400 Republican individuals and entities as part of what the Iowa senator called a “fishing expedition.”
Blaze News previously noted that as of midday Thursday, liberal news outfits such as ABC News, the Atlantic, CBS News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post had yet to cover the latest tranche of documents exposing how the Biden lawfare regime hounded American conservatives across the country in their print coverage.
RELATED: Damning new docs reveal who’s on Biden admin’s ‘enemies list,’ expose extent of FBI’s Arctic Frost
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The media blackout was apparently just as bad when it came to television coverage.
ABC, CBS, and NBC News not only neglected to cover the Arctic Frost bombshells on their flagship Wednesday night, Thursday morning, and Friday morning shows but apparently dodged over the weekend as well, reported NewsBusters.
“There was no discussion, at any time and on any of the Sunday shows, about the use of the extraordinary powers of federal law enforcement against those perceived to be in support of President Donald Trump ahead of a potential 2024 presidential run,” wrote NewsBusters analyst Jorge Bonilla.
“There was no discussion about the subpoenas, obtained in secret, against 197 individuals — including multiple Members of Congress. There was no mention of the slew of subpoenas against nonpartisan organizations perceived to be in support of the former president,” continued Bonilla. “There was no mention of the secretive nature of the subpoenas issued to banks and Big Tech organizations, which came with their own gag order, which may well constitute an impeachable offense for the judges that issued such orders.”
“Had any of this happened under a Trump administration, you’d have everyone across the dial howling bloody murder,” added Bonilla.
“Not one single broadcast network aired one solitary second,” Media Research Center President David Bozell noted on Friday. “Normally they’ll mention it in the most innocuous way so they can later say, ‘We covered it,’ but this time they didn’t even bother.”
Blaze News confirmed that, except for one sympathetic NBC News article about Jack Smith on Wednesday, news outlets ABC, CBS, and NBC did not report on the Arctic Frost allegations made last week.
Rather than address the historic weaponization of the FBI against sitting senators and conservative groups, talking heads on the liberal networks instead exhausted airtime yammering about the construction of the White House ballroom, the potential expiration of SNAP benefits, Prince Andrew’s loss of title, and talk of the weather.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
