A couple more interesting stories about the FBI today. First, the pro-life family that was pre-dawn raided by the FBI is suing the DOJ. Second, the FBI and DOJ refuse to label the Nashville school shooting as an anti-white hate crime, even after the manifesto emerged (against their wishes) showing exactly that. Are taxpayers getting good value by hiring the FBI to enforce the laws?

Here’s the first story, from The Federalist:

Pennsylvania family the FBI raided last September over the father’s pro-life advocacy filed two claims today for a total of $4.35 million in damages due to the FBI’s unconstitutional, “malicious,” and “corrupt” use of “excessive force.”

Mark Houck and Ryan-Marie Houck say in their legal filings obtained by The Federalist that their seven children continue to suffer as a result of the FBI raiding — with battering rams, ballistic shields, armor, and long rifles — the home of a nonviolent pro-lifer who didn’t own any guns and whose seven children were just waking for breakfast.

The Houcks “have lost three babies from miscarriages due to the stress of the FBI’s conduct and resulting prosecution” and subsequently been diagnosed with infertility, Ryan-Marie Houck’s filing says. She says she still cries for hours and the family’s high anxiety provoked by the raid has caused them to install security cameras and rarely leave home.

In the Sept. 23, 2022 raid, “Government agents aimed rifles and handguns at Mr. Houck from his porch and from behind vehicles in his yard and driveway,” Ryan-Marie Houcks’ complaint says. “They also aimed their weapons at Mrs. Houck, who slowly walked down a staircase to approach the Houcks’ front door. Mrs. Houck approached after Mr. Houck had already walked peacefully outside with his hands up. Any bullet that missed Mr. Houck could have struck Mrs. Houck or her children, who were stirring throughout the house and had gathered behind her on the staircase. The entire family was located directly downrange.”

The sunrise raid that included approximately 20 law enforcement officers was conducted after Mark Houck’s lawyer had informed the Department of Justice he would voluntarily turn himself in if requested. Mark Houck’s complaint says his 9-year-old daughter was terrified to find two officers dressed in black carrying rifles looking into their home through a back window.

The Houcks’ lawsuits say that, as a result of the “unnecessary” raid, “The children continually come to her [Ryan-Marie] crying and suffering from nightmares.” Ryan-Marie and their five oldest children, ages 7 to 13, now must take medication “to get a few hours of sleep” each night.

“Joshua was six years old at the time he saw his father taken away at gun point,” says Ryan-Marie’s complaint. “He cried the entire time and yelled to the FBI, ‘Please don’t take him he is my best friend.’ To this day, any time someone brings up the raid or tells the story, he starts to cry as if he is reliving the day all over again. He constantly worries that he will lose his father or mother.”

Their 4-year-old has started sleepwalking, the claims say. The entire family seizes up with anxiety any time they have an unannounced visitor. Once, a friend showing up unannounced gave Ryan-Marie a panic attack, her filing says.

The accused man was found not guilty by a jury.

A Pennsylvania jury acquitted Mark Houck in January on all charges the Department of Justice brought against him. The DOJ argued Houck had violated a federal law that prohibits physically obstructing abortion facilities. Houck and his son were 100 feet away from the facility when they were accosted by a pro-abortion escort.

The laws are not being enforced impartially:

Mark Houck’s complaint notes that, except for one single recent case, the DOJ has prosecuted only pro-lifers for alleged violations of the FACE Act used against him. The law is supposed to apply both to abortion supporters and pro-lifers, but the DOJ has almost exclusively used it against pro-lifers.

Was this FBI action political persecution of Biden’s enemies? I guess we’re going to find out.

Anyway, here’s another story of FBI failure, also reported in The Federalist:

On March 27, 2023, Audrey Hale, a woman masquerading as a man, shot and killed three children and three staff at a Christian grade school before local police took her out.

[…]Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake told reporters shortly after the massacre that it was a “targeted attack.” However, MNPD, along with the Tennesse Bureau of Investigation and the FBI, repeatedly refused to release the manifesto detailing Hale’s motives.

It was only this week, more than nearly eight months after the shooting, that conservative media personality Steven Crowder leaked three of the manifesto pages. The publicization of the bombshell writings put seven MNPD officers on administrative leave but exposed the reasons Hale decided to shoot up her former school.

[…]Hale claimed she planned to murder Covenant schoolchildren because she hated their white skin, light features, and “privilege.”

[…]When The Federalist asked the nation’s top federal law enforcement agencies, which had access to the notebook ever since March 27, if either had plans to classify the shooting as an anti-white hate crime or political violence spurred on by the proliferation of left-wing racism in schools and government, the DOJ ignored the request and the FBI claimed it did not have a comment.

The DOJ and FBI’s silence on the issue sharply contrasts how both department and agency have treated other race-based shootings.

When a gunman in Buffalo, New York, opened fire in a grocery store, killing 10 in 2022, the DOJ used the shooter’s racist social media posts as justification to deem the act “a hate crime and an act of racially-motivated violent extremism” worthy of several federal hate crime charges. The Justice Department extended the same treatment to Dylann Roof and the Texas mass shooter who killed 23 people at an El Paso Wal-Mart.

Yet when it comes to investigating the Nashville shooting, which was rooted in the shooter’s disdain for people based on their skin color, as a hate crime against white Christians, the DOJ and FBI refuse.

We can fix these problems with the FBI and DOJ when we have our next election. We just need to elect someone with integrity. I think Ron DeSantis would be able clean up these problems.

I read a couple of interesting news stories about the taxpayer-funded FBI. These are both by Kerry Picket, writing for the Washington Times. So far, the only response from the FBI has been to demand that she take the articles down. But she’s refusing to do it. These stories add to the other stories of FBI bias and corruption that I’ve blogged about before.

First one, from the Washington Times:

At least three FBI whistleblowers told lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that high-level senior officials at the bureau are revoking security clearances of personnel based on religious or politically conservative beliefs.

[…]The disclosure accuses FBI brass of violating the Security Executive Agent Directive 4 (SEAD 4), disseminated by the ODNI, which is its national security guideline for allowing intelligence community agencies to conduct security clearance adjudications.

“Specifically, SecD Section Chief Section Matthew Nagle, Deputy Assistant Director Lawerence Buckley, and Assistant Section Chief Dena Perkins have caused security clearance investigators to adjudicate security clearances in a manner that is contrary to the SEAD IV guidelines,” the disclosure said.

SecD is “intentionally misinterpreting the SEAD IV guidelines so that it can deny, suspend and revoke security clearances of FBI employees because of political affiliations and beliefs.”

The disclosure said these security division officials have been exaggerating single incidents of alleged misconduct to be substituted for multiple incidents of misconduct while using security clearance investigations to substitute for internal misconduct investigations.

When an internal investigation finds minor misconduct incidents, the penalty typically ranges from oral or written reprimands to performance counseling, according to the whistleblowers’ account.

“Nagle, Buckley, and Perkins have been expanding the scope of security investigations in a manner that violates ODNI’s rules and policies,”  the disclosure states. “The basis for security revocations are specifically enumerated by ODNI.”

A SecD employee said Ms. Perkins, who has been in her job since 2018, retaliated against an employee who reported her to the office of Attorney General Merrick Garland. The day after the complaint was filed, Ms. Perkins suspended the employee’s clearance.

Second one, also from Washington Times:

More whistleblowers have stepped forward to tell Congress that high-ranking FBI officials are targeting agents, specifically former military members, for their political beliefs and trying to force them out of the bureau.

A Marine and other military veterans at the FBI have been accused of disloyalty to the U.S. because they fit the profile of a supporter of former President Donald Trump, according to two disclosures sent to lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee.

The Washington Times obtained copies of the disclosures.

The whistleblowers said Jeffrey Veltri, deputy assistant director of the bureau’s security division, and Dena Perkins, assistant section chief, specifically pursued employees who served in the Marine Corps or other military branches.

They stripped the agents of security clearances, which sidelined them on the job and pushed them toward the exit, according to the disclosures.

The whistleblower disclosures say Mr. Veltri and Ms. Perkins either declared or attempted to declare the Marine and other veterans as “disloyal to the United States of America.”

“In these cases there was no indication that any of the individuals had any affiliation to a foreign power or held any belief against the United States,” it said.

Other signs that an employee was a “right-wing radical and disloyal to the United States,” according to Ms. Perkins and Mr. Veltri, were failure to wear a face mask, refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccination and participating in religious activities.

In another instance, Ms. Perkins attempted to revoke the security clearance of a bureau employee she knew was a Marine veteran, but information showed that the initial allegations against the employee were unfounded, the disclosure says.

This did not stop Ms. Perkins from ordering her investigators to canvass at least 10 police departments where the employee lived for any allegations or violations of law.

“During the process, Perkins was attempting to provide evidence so she could terminate this employee because he was ‘Disloyal to the United States,’” the disclosure states.

“An employee advised that at least two of the publicly known FBI whistleblowers were former members of the military, specifically … Kyle Seraphin and Garret[t] O’Boyle,” according to one of the disclosures.

Another FBI whistleblower disclosure sent to the Judiciary Committee included an accusation from a security division employee who said the security clearance investigation of Mr. Seraphin did not follow the policy guidelines of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Recently, many House Republicans voted to give the FBI a new $300 million headquarters that will be built on 61 acres. The Soviet Union’s Kremlin was 66 acres. Do you think that FBI leaders are people with integrity? Do you think that they are focused on the real threats that America is facing? Do you think they are too involved with the Democrat party? Are they doing a good job for their bosses, the American taxpayers?