I'm an Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and "The F.B.I." baby.
Meaning as a kid, I patriotically gobbled up the weekly Quinn Martin Production show about the straight-laced, clean-cut, and meticulously honest FBI in the form of fictional Inspector Lewis Erskine as played by Zimbalist on TV.
Inspector Erskine was exceedingly careful to err on the side of protecting a suspect's constitutional rights, even as he collected the facts to lead his investigations wherever they may go.
Inspector Erskine never suppressed evidence. He never lied to Congress. He never asked news media and social media to silence political speech. He never set up a President's national security advisor. He never knowingly filed false papers with a secret court to launch a 3-year shill investigation into Russian collaboration that he knew never happened, and in fact put the fake sources on the FBI's payroll. He never allowed violations of the National Security Act by the sitting Secretary of State to go unprosecuted. He never ignored a President and his son's influence peddling to China, Ukraine, and Russia first as Vice President and then from the White House itself.
No. That's not the FBI we were sold.
But it is the FBI we have today.
It's time to de-fund, refund, un-fund, retire, criminally charge, and dig out FBI corruption root and branch. People need to go to prison for a long time.
Today's FBI - where my own father worked during college - is unrecognizably partisan.
It is barely competent at stopping actual federal crime anyway. 9-11 attacks? Massive fail. Boston Marathon bombers? Massive fail. BLM/Antifa Summer of Violence? Massive fail. Hillary's secret server leaks? Massive fail. ChiCom espionage in industry, university, and military? Massive fail.
The entire organization must be deloused or replaced or simply rolled up.
Directors Comey and Wray have been beyond bad. They have been deliberate co-conspirators with the FBI insurrectionists, not just ignoring the culture of politics but fostering its growth.
The San Francisco office of the FBI has been documented by Twitter to request shutting down accounts, restricting them, muting them, including truly dangerous icons of anti-Americanism like actor Billy Baldwin! Wasn't it Billy's brother Alec that actually used a gun to shoot two people, killing one? Huh, but ban Billy to make the FBI happy?
Did the FBI ask that ISIS', Taliban's, or Iran's malevolent mullahs' accounts be shadow-banned or suspended? Nope. That treatment was left for President Trump, Babylon Bee, Fauci's detractors within the scientific community, even a hearing into Russia Gate by a US Senate committee! Twitter cancelled all that and much much more.
And now comes irrefutable evidence that ex-FBI personel such as James Baker, Senior Legal Officer, trampled on the First Amendment by working directly at the direction of the FBI. They had weekly censorship and suppression conferences with Twitter's Yoel Roth, ostensibly the person in charge of making sure Americans got the "truth". He and FBI men, like Elvis Chan (real name), made sure Americans were lied to, were denied free speech, and were politically manipulated to alter election outcomes.
Inspector Erskine, you are needed, sir, in real life.
Read them their rights, and then clasp handcuffs on the First Amendment rats within the FBI.
I want to believe in my FBI heroes again. But it will be a long time until then. Or maybe it was always mostly fiction. If so, that would be the saddest FBI episode of all.
