FBI: Into the Valley of J6 Rode the … 5,000?

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Five thousand? Er, no. It was actually more than 5,000.

Earlier today, we found out that the FBI had changed its mind about complying with a lawful order to provide the Department of Justice specifics about the personnel involved in the January 6 riot investigation. Leadership had threatened to refuse, some senior officials advised agents to be insubordinate, and the media lost their minds, as usual. And now we know why the FBI’s senior ranks might have wanted to keep it quiet.

It turns out that Christopher Wray and Merrick Garland committed 13% of the FBI to investigating the riot, emphasis mine:

FBI officials have complied with demands to provide the Justice Department with a list of thousands of employees who worked on investigations related to the January 6, 2021, US Capitol riot, according to people familiar with the situation.

The demand has caused consternation among FBI employees who fear it is meant to amass a list of personnel for possible termination by the Trump administration.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, in a Friday memo with the subject line “Terminations,” had given FBI officials a noon deadline Tuesday to submit the names of thousands of agents and analysts. Bove previously ordered the firing of eight senior FBI officials, including those who oversaw cyber, national security and criminal investigations.

More than 5,000 names were submitted, sources said. There are more than 13,000 agents and 38,000 total FBI employees.

The mind boggles at the concept that one-seventh of the FBI workforce went into investigating a riot at the Capitol, for any period of time. Was it worthy of investigation? Absolutely. Should violent protestors have been charged and prosecuted? Absolutely. Should every seventh employee of the only federal law enforcement and counter-intelligence agency have been dedicated to that purpose? Come on, man. 

What we really need are metrics to compare this to other investigations. When was the last time this percentage of the FBI worked on any one case? How many FBI employees worked on the investigations around the 9/11 attacks, or even the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that preceded it? How many got assigned to the insurrections in cities around the country in the summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd? What percentage of the FBI worked on the Unabomber case over the years? 

Wanna bet we’ll find out? That’s exactly why Emil Bove and the others now in charge at the DoJ demanded the details. They want to impose accountability for this absurdity, in part by demonstrated just how absurd it actually was. 

When FBI execs began suggesting obstruction and threatening lawsuits, it seemed likely that the number would be embarrassing to the brass and the previous administration. I assumed the number would be in the high three figures, or at most 1,000. Instead, Wray and Garland committed a brigade-level ‘troop’ commitment to chase down hundreds of perps, the vast majority of them non-violent even in this offense. 

And now we have to ask … at the expense of what? The massive commitment of resources to this investigation must have created large opportunity costs for fighting other crime and catching real hostile actions by foreign intel operatives. That doesn’t just apply to these outlays either, but also to other resources used by Wray and Garland to chase after pro-life protesters, rad-trad Catholics, and parents protesting radical-progressive curricula at school board meetings. 

I suspect we’ll find those answers too … hopefully not the hard way. But we at least have an answer as to why the FBI leadership didn’t want to provide answers at all to this basic personnel-management question.