Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the new chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said dozens of whistleblowers from the FBI have come forward to the committee to reveal how the bureau has become politicized.
“This is crazy stuff. We had now dozens of whistleblowers from the FBI come to us, FBI agents, come to us and tell us just how political things are at that particular agency,” Jordan said in an interview with Fox Business on Wednesday.
After taking control of the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans voted to establish the “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.” The committee, which is formed under Jordan’s Judiciary Committee, has the role of investigating whether federal government agencies have been turned into tools to target political opponents.
As examples of the kinds of issues the subcommittee will investigate, Jordan listed off federal investigations of parents protesting at local school board meetings; the FBI paying Twitter more than $3.4 million while referring content for moderation and removal from the social media site; and the Department of Homeland Security’s short-lived effort to establish a panel to police disinformation, which critics decried as an effort to censor constitutionally protected free speech.
“The Department of Justice targeted parents and treated parents as domestic terrorists who simply showed up at school board meetings to advocate for their sons or daughters,” Jordan said. “The FBI paid Twitter $3 million, not one, not two, but $3 million to censor conservatives and of course, the Department of Homeland Security was trying to set up a disinformation governance board because they should be the arbiters of what can and can’t be said.”
Jordan further alleged that an apparent double standard in how some high-profile cases are being handled demonstrates the bias and potential weaponization of federal government agencies.
As an example of this alleged bias, Jordan referred to the FBI raid on President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home to collect potentially classified documents he was keeping, compared to the Department of Justice’s response to news that President Joe Biden had discovered potentially classified documents in his home and former office space. In response to the document discoveries from the Biden side, the DOJ has appointed a special counsel to investigate the incident, but has not sent an FBI team to raid Biden’s homes and offices in search of additional documents.
“We know it’s going on, and frankly, the American people have common sense. They can step back and see the double standard. Look at the most recent one. Look at how President Trump was treated with so-called classified documents being at his residence, is what we’ve been told, versus the classified documents that were found at the Biden center,” Jordan said. “I think the country can see it. This is why we need to get into this, because the government is not supposed to be picking winners and losers and functioning in a political fashion like that.”
