(RoyalPatriot.com )- On Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas wrote to Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Dick Durbin, requesting an oversight hearing on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) continual habit of breaching rules in sensitive investigations.
The letter came after The Washington Times received an audit that revealed FBI agents broke agency regulations at least 747 times over 18 months while investigating lawmakers, political candidates, religious groups, and the press media.
Cruz suggested that these are the sorts of sensitive investigations that should be subject to stringent compliance and supervision standards to ensure that the FBI does not abuse its vast powers to conduct politically motivated inquiries. He asserted that the amount and severity of the flaws found in the audit point to a troubling trend of mismanagement, malfeasance, and abuses inside the FBI.
Cruz wrote a letter that revealed that 79 percent of the 997 non-compliance mistakes were significant and about as extreme as it gets.
“I am concerned about Director [Christopher] Wray’s FBI and its pattern of stonewalling. For example, the FBI declined to provide responsive information regarding its 2016 probe of Concerned Women for America as requested by Chairman Grassley and similarly declined to provide simple answers in my recent questioning of Director Sanborne regarding the FBI’s degree of involvement on January 6th,” Cruz wrote.
Cruz argued that Inspector General Michael Horowitz and FBI Director Christopher Wray should speak directly to the Senate about the audit.
Cruz called on Dick Durbin, the Senate Democratic whip since 2005, to convene a full Committee hearing to ensure transparency and accountability.
According to the audit report published by the Washington Times, the FBI auditors only looked at a limited percentage of the agency’s portfolio. From January 1, 2018, to June 30, 2019, they looked at 353 instances involving sensitive investigation topics, less than half of the total number of such cases. They discovered regulations had been infringed 747 times.
“Sensitive investigative matters” are activities that might impact constitutional rights because they involve persons involved in politics, government, religious expression, and news reporting, among other things.
