The FBI enforces the LAW…
The head Republican Donald Trump has no use for it….
The party is gonna help Trump beat the Federal cops up…..
In what could become a political part of his defense against criminal charges….
‘Defund the FBI’?
GOP lawmakers are preparing a buffet of investigations aimed at touching every aspect of the agency’s decision-making, even floating a select committee to probe how the bureau handled the recovery of classified documents kept at Donald Trump’s Florida estate. That’s on top of talk of likely doomed-to-fail efforts by conservatives to dramatically curb the FBI’s reach and funding while other baked-in fights, like renewing the bureau’s surveillance permissions, wait in the wings.
The entire affair is likely to spotlight divisions between more traditional national security hawks and House Republicans who skew more libertarian-minded or Trump-centric.
“I think the FBI has gotten heavily, severely off track since 9/11. And we ought to do a deep dive into ensuring that the FBI is focused on organized crime, combating crime, and not witch-hunting Americans,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a member of the Judiciary Committee that will take the lead in FBI oversight, said in a brief interview.
The burgeoning one-sided feud is the latest sign of decay in a long-fraught relationship between the FBI and congressional Republicans, despite their claimed mantle of backing law enforcement and continued efforts to broadly paint Democrats as anti-police. Trump and his allies already spent years using the FBI and the Justice Department as go-to villains, with the August search of Mar-a-Lago and subsequent leaks only deepening distrust of the bureau among conservative lawmakers and their base voters.
Even so, the calls to “defund the FBI” still go too far for many House Republicans.
“Do I think we’re going to defund the FBI? No. Do I think that’s smart? No. If you’ve got concerns about the directions of the FBI, that’s what oversight hearings are for,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.).
Democrats are already eager to turn the anti-police moniker on their adversaries. Moderates on their side of the aisle have publicly and privately vented for years about getting stuck with the “defund the police” label, which some thought were to blame for the party’s unexpected 2020 losses.
“We support good policing. The other side is calling to defund the FBI,” said Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), who chairs House Democrats’ campaign arm….