After what we’ve seen happening over the last two decades in the intelligence agencies there’s no doubt in my mind that they need to be fundamentally altered. And I don’t think the word dismantle is an exaggeration of what needs to be done. It could be argued that there are functions that the FBI is uniquely suited to perform that need to be done. But I look at those functions as the exceptions.
I imagine that someone tasked with this dismantling would form a new “group within the bureau and reassign all the personnel and infrastructure critical for these useful functions to this new group. Once that is done, he could begin dismantling the rest of the agency without too much fear of meaningful disruption.
Fire all of the top echelon of management. Assign trusted personnel to take over and begin removing any functionality that has been abused in the past. Using internal rules block the access to FISA courts from anyone who isn’t appointed by the new management. Begin surveilling the use of federal resources by the FBI personnel to find anyone who is running counter-intelligence operations against the new management and the President. And continue to prune back the agency from the top down.
Look for hidden caches of information on powerful people and figure out what this has been used in the past to blackmail them into doing. Figure out how this information is best disposed of. In some cases, where real crime has occurred, exposing the information may make sense. In other cases, confronting the victim and forcing changes in the status quo may be possible.
And once power has been wrested from the FBI and other intelligence agencies then the laws that have allowed them to terrorize this nation need to be changed to prevent these abuses from recurring. The obvious one is the Patriot Act. The Supreme Court knows it is unconstitutional but during the supposed “War on Terror” it allowed the law to stand in order to allow unrestrained pursuit of Islamic terrorists hiding in the United States. I think we’ve learned that the law was meant to be used against all of us.
And other laws need to be changed. The definition of civil rights needs to be rationally defined to prevent the kind of outrageous overreach that was on display in the federal government’s interference in the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases. And we can’t allow actual domestic terrorists like Antifa and BLM and their confederates in the blue city governments to perpetrate outrages like the George Floyd riots against American citizens.
And who would be the right person for a Republican president to appoint Attorney General? I’m guessing it will require someone who has worked for the Justice Department. Maybe someone like Rudy Giuliani. He’s getting kind of old but he still might be the right guy. But whoever it is he can’t be like William Barr who just tiptoes around the edges of the FBI and lets the swamp creatures run the show. It has to be someone who is willing to perform radical surgery with a chain saw. Because that is exactly what is needed.
So, will this ever happen? If we ever want to get our country back it’s a necessity. But it’s going to take brains and guts. Where will we find those?