Rep. Matt Gaetz said the FBI offers “cash payments” to incentivize key personnel to target conservative Americans who may share views the establishment does not like — ideas such as supporting building a wall on the southern border, advocating for the Second Amendment or even defending the Betsy Ross flag.
During a recent interview with Newsmax’s Eric Bolling, the Fort Walton Beach Republican said certain leaders within the FBI received financial bonuses for boosting “case volume.” Gaetz said he learned that from Steve Friend, one of the FBI whistleblowers who recently testified about the agency’s abuses of power.
“That’s really problematic because it’s about the quality of cases and keeping the American people safe and prosecuting crimes — not just indicating that you’re able to check the boxes on certain case volumes in certain categories that [FBI Director] Christopher Wray wants to talk about when he comes before the Congress,” said Gaetz.
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Bolling said it is analogous to a state trooper having a ticket quota. He also said it’s likely that the number of open FBI cases involving Donald Trump supporters is far greater than that of suspects who support liberal causes.
Gaetz noted that leftists in the media and in government are attacking the whistleblowers because they have “called into question the narrative that the FBI has tried to put out about our fellow Amercians: this belief that we’re all racists or we’re all extremists.”
Meanwhile, he added, it is the FBI that is sowing division among Americans and interfering in elections — all part of “becoming an enforcement wing of the political left.”
Gaetz argued that it is time for wholesale changes within federal law enforcement, a time to “redesign” that so it involves actually fighting crime.
But he suggested the actions of the FBI a part of a larger problem within America’s national security agencies.
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That was apparent not just from Special Counsel John Durham’s report or the recent testimony from FBI whistleblowers, he said. It was also evident when former acting CIA director Michael Morrell got 50 other intelligence officials to sign a letter in 2020 declaring that news reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal was a Russian disinformation campaign.
“The national security state in our country is the most significant election-interference operation in the world,” said Gaetz.
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