Inside the Biden FBI: Waste, Fraud, Abuse, and a Bureau Leadership in Decline
House Subcommittee on Responsiveness and Accountability to Oversight
2025-04-02
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Source: Congress.gov
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The subcommittee will come to order. Without objection, the chair is authorized to declare a recess at any time. We welcome everyone here today on this hearing on waste, fraud, and abuse at the FBI. I now recognize the gentleman from Missouri to lead us in the flag salute, and we will stay standing for a moment of silence. the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. We'll stay standing for a moment. I will now recognize myself for an opening statement. First of all, I want to welcome everyone to the second hearing of the Subcommittee on Oversight. Today, we are continuing the important work we began in our first hearing, exposing the weaponization and politicizing of federal law enforcement agency against the American public. This time, we'll be focusing squarely on the Federal Bureau of Investigation under the Biden administration. A bureau bloated by bureaucracy. A bureau that burned through billions, not millions, but billions of dollars in taxpayers' dollars to chase political enemies. A bureau that silenced dissent and trampled on our constitutional rights. all while real threats to our safety were ignored. This wasn't just a leadership failure, it was a betrayal of the American people and of the American trust.
This hearing is more than oversight. This is about restoring trust. This is about standing up for every American who believes that government should protect them, not target them. Let me be clear, the FBI should be a shield for the American people. Instead, under the Biden-Harris administration, it became a sword to use against them. Let's start with parents, parents who spoke up for their kids, parents who voiced concerns about radical school agendas. What did they get in return? A surveillance file, a federal investigation for just trying to be a good parent. That's not law enforcement. In my book and in most Americans' books, that's intimidation. Let's talk about people of faith. The Biden FBI branded certain Catholic Americans as, quote, radical traditionalists and potential domestic terrorists. They even discussed infiltrating churches by having parishioners spy on their own people by their own fellow parishioners. And it wasn't just Catholic churches. In 2021, the FBI raided a Hindu temple in the state of New Jersey, using overwhelming force, agents stormed sacred grounds, and listen to this, they held guns to the faces of the holy men. They disrupted religious life, all based on loose, untrue allegations, which are now thankfully unraveling in court. Our sacred places, our churches, our synagogues, our temples, our mosques, they should be sanctuaries, not scenes of government surveillance. Let's talk about free speech. The FBI knew Hunter Biden's laptop was real. They knew it. They colluded with big tech to frame it as Russian disinformation.
They tried to bury the story from the American people. That wasn't law enforcement. That was raw political election interference. And all of this, the worst part of all, it wasn't free. It came with a price tag in fiscal year 2024. And listen to this. the FBI spent over six billion, not million, billion dollars on intelligence, counterintelligence, and counterterrorism, all on American soil, more than half of its entire budget. But instead of using those billions to fight violent crime or keep our communities safe, the money was funneled into politically driven investigations and abuses of power. The waste did not stop there. $220,000 paid to Igor Denchenko, a key source behind the discredited Steele dossier, plus another $300,000 to that planned before the FBI can finally close him as a source. Up to $1 million offered to Christopher Steele to try and corroborate, which he couldn't do, his own baseless claims. 200 million more secured for a new FBI headquarters, a reward in Greenbelt, Maryland, despite widespread public distrust and concern and strong opposition from the Judiciary Committee. And that is only scratching the surface. The FBI couldn't give us enough real numbers, and we're going to continue to pursue that and just find out how much this really cost us.
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