New FBI Director Kash Patel promised “a complete and total annihilation of the weaponization of justice and the politicization of intelligence” when he spoke at a law and order event at the Department of Justice Friday.
“We have a new FBI, and I’m humbled to be its leader,” he said.
A lot rests on Patel being able to make good on his promise to reform the bureau, and as a former public defender, national security prosecutor and counterterrorism official in the first Trump administration, there is nobody more qualified and clear-eyed about the challenge.
But his promise requires that the injustices of the past inside the FBI are remedied, or they will remain a festering sore.
Among the many honorable agents railroaded by the FBI during Joe Biden’s corrupt presidency is Zach Schoffstall.
The former Idaho senior FBI supervisory agent had his career destroyed after 16 years of exemplary service because he refused to do the political bidding of the Biden administration and sign off on unconstitutional search warrants in a trumped-up domestic-terrorism prosecution.
“I brought embarrassment to the bureau,” he says. So, he was demoted, suspended and finally fired last year.
Agency in disgrace
Schoffstall was a victim of the Biden administration’s perverse political agenda to classify “white supremacy” as the biggest terrorist threat to America.
With an eye on the 2024 election, Joe Biden’s aim was to demonize Donald Trump and his supporters as an existential threat to democracy by falsely characterizing the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot as a white supremacist domestic terrorism attack.
So, when a group of 31 young Patriot Front members were arrested in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, on June 11, 2022, en route to protest an LGBTQ parade, activist attorneys in the DOJ seized on the chance to prosecute a quintessential case of Trump-aligned extremism to bolster their narrative.
The only problem was that the Patriot Front guys had done nothing wrong. Two local FBI agents refused to sign a search warrant they believed was full of lies.
Now that the federal court in Idaho has unsealed the search warrant and affidavit written by Biden’s DOJ and the Idaho US Attorney’s Office, it’s obvious why Schoffstall and his agents refused to take part in the frame job. The documents are false, misleading and laughably hyperbolic.
The affidavit supporting the warrant gratuitously links the 31 men to the J6 “insurrection,” even though they weren’t there.
It goes into great detail about the murder of a woman at the 2017 Charlottesville rally, which none of them had anything to do with.
It calls them a “little army” and hyperventilates about mottos on their baseball caps like “Our Tradition is Revolution.”
Despite the herculean efforts of the DOJ and all the international media hype, the Patriot Front case came to virtually nothing — a few days in jail for a couple of members with marginal legal representation, and small fines — but it took a lot of court time and legal fees to get there.
Schoffstall was fired in February 2024 to cover up this disgrace. He never received due process.
He had to sue to get the warrant and affidavit unsealed after the FBI and DOJ refused to provide even a redacted copy in any of his administrative proceedings.
His case shows how corruptly politicized the DOJ and FBI became under Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray.
Suspended & homeless
Other upstanding former FBI agents, such as Steve Friend and Garrett O’Boyle, have told similar tales about how the bureau set out to destroy them just because they tried to live up to the standards of integrity the FBI professes to uphold.
The FBI suspended Friend without pay, revoked his security clearance and blocked him from other jobs after he raised concerns about the bureau’s politicization and overzealous tactics in J6 cases — like using SWAT teams for misdemeanor arrests of cooperative subjects.
O’Boyle was treated even more despicably after he lawfully blew the whistle on FBI misconduct, such as inflating domestic terrorism numbers and targeting pro-lifers. He sold his house and moved his young family cross-country only to turn up to work and find he was suspended and homeless with the FBI refusing to give him access to his belongings in storage.
Patel has only been in the job three weeks but unless he reinstates the good guys, makes amends for their ordeal, and purges their spineless tormenters, his promise of a “new FBI” will be just another hollow sound bite.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
