The former FBI agent who ran the bureau’s warrantless spying program said this week that he personally witnessed the director and other senior officials recruiting agents based on political leanings, not qualifications, during Director James Comey’s tenure.
Bassem Youssef, a retired special agent who ran the FBI’s Communications Analysis Unit from late 2004 until his retirement in late 2014, also says he warned senior officials about the potential for civil liberties abuses in the surveillance program that he oversaw, but said neither Comey nor the White House took his warnings seriously.
The FBI’s surveillance practices have been back under a microscope in recent months. FBI records released by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, last year showed the bureau snooped on phone records of Republican elected officials as part of its investigation into Jan. 6.
Just the News also reported in February that the Government Accountability Office assessed that the FBI opened 1,200 probes related to politicians, journalists, religious leaders, academics and others tied to “sensitive investigative matters,” using a special investigative tool that required no factual predicate to launch. The vast majority of those probes were closed without accusations of wrongdoing or criminal charges against those targets being scrutinized.
Youssef told the Just the News, No Noise TV show on Tuesday that he believes the failure of the bureau to learn from past intelligence collection mistakes, like in the Trump-Russia probe whose underlying allegations were later discredited, is because FBI leadership had begun to hire employees based on political leanings rather than merit or capability.
“When I worked in the bureau, in field offices, and then eventually at FBI Headquarters, where I oversaw the Communications Analysis Unit that there was already a process where you could see that from the highest levels of the FBI, meaning the director's office and the executive assistant, directors that there is a soft recruitment of people of like mind that didn't necessarily meet the requirements for the job, but they were recruited because of their leaning, which was, in fact, very politically motivated,” Youssef said.
https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/ex-fbi-official-says-he-witness-politicization-bureau-warned-about
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