FBI Bias Training Elite law enforcers need to be instructed to remain impartial? James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fbi-bias-training-1529445819
At a Monday hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray assured lawmakers that he will implement anti-bias training to insure that his agents don’t allow their political views to influence their work. Mr. Wray’s “ Starbucks ” response to bureau scandals suggests that he too requires training.
On Thursday the Justice Department released its inspector general’s report detailing the bureau’s mishandling of the Clinton email investigation and the extreme bias against Donald Trump expressed by some FBI officials. That day Mr. Wray said that he took the report “very seriously,” and then lauded himself and his colleagues for their response. “We’ve already started taking the necessary steps to address” the issues raised in the report, said Mr. Wray. He added:
Because change starts at the top—including right here with me—we’re going to begin by requiring all our senior executives, from around the world, to convene for in-depth training on the lessons we should learn from today’s report. Then we’re going to train every single FBI employee—new hires and veterans alike—on what went wrong, so those mistakes will never be repeated… We’re going to make sure we have the policies, procedures, and training needed for everyone to understand and remember what’s expected of us.
That includes:
Drilling home the importance of objectivity—and of avoiding even the appearance of personal conflicts or political bias in our work…
Does the whole bureau really need to be taught such lessons? This column wonders how FBI field agents—who were clearly more eager than the Washington leadership to pursue the Clinton case—are now reacting to this message from their current director. Career attorney Christopher Wray is only the latest man to reach the top of the FBI without ever serving as an agent. And now he says agents need to be instructed to remain impartial as they conduct investigations. Pentagon officials who never served in uniform typically don’t announce plans to teach their troops about patriotism, but perhaps the FBI is a very different institution.
Even Mr. Wray seems confused about whether he’s dealing with a few rotten apples or a rotten culture. He writes in USA Today that the inspector general’s report “focused on a specific set of events in 2016, and on a narrow set of employees connected to those events. Nothing in the IG’s report impugns the integrity of our workforce as a whole, or the FBI as an institution.” If this is accurate then he doesn’t need to retrain everybody; he simply needs to terminate the wrongdoers mentioned in the report.
Given the enormous power the bureau wields, it is terrifying—and a bit surprising—to be told that the FBI’s rank and file require lessons in basic fairness. The FBI’s website tells candidates for employment that it is an “elite” organization with “a mentally and physically challenging process designed to find only the most capable applicants.” No one can become a special agent without passing various background checks, polygraph and drug tests, credit reviews, and a battery of examinations designed to evaluate judgment, reasoning and other personal characteristics. Applicants must also complete 21 weeks of training at the FBI Academy plus interviews with various FBI personnel. Every agent must have a Top Secret security clearance.
This obviously doesn’t guarantee integrity among each of the FBI’s 35,000 employees. The IG report addresses the infamous duo of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok:
…when one senior FBI official, Strzok, who was helping to lead the Russia investigation at the time, conveys in a text message to another senior FBI official, Page, that “we’ll stop” candidate Trump from being elected—after other extensive text messages between the two disparaging candidate Trump—it is not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects. This is antithetical to the core values of the FBI and the Department of Justice.
Ms. Page and Mr. Strzok weren’t the only bad apples. The inspector general found numerous text messages like the one from an FBI employee identified as “Agent 5” who refers to “trump and a bunch of his supporters like the ones from ohio that are retarded.”
There is a standard of integrity, fairness and good judgment that citizens have a right to expect in an elite law enforcement organization. FBI agents in need of anti-bias training also have another need—to be fired immediately.
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