Fox News Guest Advocates for Getting Rid of the FBI and Accidentally Makes a Great Point
Last week, the New York Times reported that the FBI had actually investigated whether or not Donald Trump was working on behalf of the Russian government. The action was prompted by Trump's firing of James Comey and his subsequent admissions that he had done it to hamstring any investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
It's a shocking step for the FBI to take. And in response, Trump's staunchest defenders on Fox News went into battle mode. So far, the most delightfully insane reactions have been on Sean Hannity's show, where the host spent a good chunk of Monday's slot railing against the deep state and arguing that the FBI had violated Trump's rights. But one of his guests, attorney Gregg Jarrett, went even farther, calling for the FBI to be dissolved outright:
This is an all-powerful, out of control agency. Rogue agency. And frankly, it's time that it be halted in its tracks and reorganized and replaced with a new organization that has legal restraints imposed upon it and accountable to somebody. When the boss of the FBI Rod Rosenstein is in bed with his subordinates, inventing a counter-intelligence case against the President with no probable cause, no reasonable suspicion, no credible evidence. It is time that the FBI be halted.
The best part about this is it's not an awful idea! The FBI could use some serious reforming, especially when you look at its track record of criminalized political activity: infiltrating the U.S. Communist Party, trying to blackmail Martin Luther King into suicide, responding to the Black Lives Matter movement by inventing a new kind of terrorist. As recently as the end of 2017, they arrested a man and held him for five months just for, essentially, attending a protest and being distressed by the number of unarmed black men shot to death by police. And the FBI's counter-terrorism efforts have often relied on manufactured terror plots, paid informants, and pinning these yet-to-be-committed crimes on patsies foolish enough to let undercover agents talk them into it.
So, yes, Jarrett actually may be on to something, albeit completely by accident. But then again, most good things to come out of Fox News happen by accident.
