Whistleblowers at the FBI have reached out to several members of Congress to complain that the FBI and DOJ have been politically compromised. This prompted Senator Chuck Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to send a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland seeking answers to allegations of,  “widespread violations of internal policies designed to ensure proper handling of the FBI’s most sensitive investigations.”

Specifically, Grassley claims that whistleblowers have named Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault of the Washington DC Field Office and Richard Pilger, Director of the Election Crimes Branch as having abused their authority to open investigations or suppress them on partisan grounds that favor the Democrat party. Whistleblowers claim that in one case that the evidence used to open an investigation that resulted in subpoenas to electors in the 2020 election was based mostly on a series of CNN news pieces based on the information given to them by a liberal political group called American Oversight. This has shades of the Russian Collusion investigation against the Trump campaign where substantial parts of the predicating evidence for FISA warrants were based on news reports about the Steele Dossier that may have been leaked to them by the FBI itself.

Agents are being told to “find” domestic terrorism cases to prosecute on a quota system for FBI field offices to satisfy demands made by their superiors. Whether these cases go forward and result in charges is less important than the FBI being able to say that a certain number of domestic terrorism investigations have been initiated.  This information released publically is then used to claim that a massive domestic terrorism problem exists in the US.

In September 2021, FBI Director Christopher Wray appeared before the Senate Homeland Security Committee testifying that he had been “forced” to drastically increase resources conducting domestic terrorism investigations in the past 18 months.  FBI agents investigating these cases were increased by 260% to handle a caseload that has gone from 1,000 ongoing investigations to 2,700 in just 18 months.  Wray stated that the number of cases from year to year in the past was pretty consistently around 1,000.