Good Monday evening. This is Daniel Allott with The Hill's Top Opinions.
Should Major League Baseball be disbanded because a few of its players have tested positive for banned substances? Should the U.S. Army be defunded because one of its soldiers went on a murderous rampage?
Of course not. Most people understand that you shouldn't punish (must less destroy) an entire institution for the bad behavior of a few of its employees.
And yet, writes KEVIN BROCK, that's exactly what's happening with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an agency that employs some 35,000 people.
Lawmakers and media figures on both the left and right are disparaging the entire FBI for the actions of some of its employees. To take one example, Brock cites Sen. Chuck Grassley, who has labeled the FBI "corrupted at its core" because of "indications that two employees in the FBI's Washington field office may have hampered an investigation into Hunter Biden."
More recently, some on the right are criticizing the FBI's "decision to open an investigation into a former president for possessing presidential records and other documents that may have had classification markings."
We still don't know why the FBI executed the search warrant of Trump's home, or what it found. "What we do know to be true is that both political parties are using the FBI 'brand' to stir passion among their base supporters," Brock writes.
Brock is not a dispassionate observer. He is a former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI. But that background has given him an intimate knowledge of the agency and its employees.
That said, Brock believes the FBI has a big problem since half the country is convinced the agency is "in the bag for the Democratic Party."
"Fair or not," he writes, "that is a reality that FBI leadership must confront and fix. It is a direct threat to our democracy and an existential threat to the credibility and trustworthiness of the FBI."
Read Brock's piece here.
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