The FBI, which is used to making headlines for nabbing crooks, has been grabbing the spotlight for unwanted reasons: fired leaders, texts between lovers and, most of all, attacks by President Trump. “I don’t care what channel it’s on,” says Tom O’Connor, who leads the FBI Agents Association. “All you hear is negative stuff about the FBI … It gets depressing,” reports Time. Many view Trump’s attacks as self-serving. As much as the bureau’s 14,000 agents might like to tune out the news, internal and external reports have found lapses throughout the agency, and longtime observers believe that something really is wrong at the FBI. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will soon release a much-anticipated assessment of Democratic and Republican charges that officials at the FBI interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign. That year-long probe is expected to come down particularly hard on former FBI director James Comey, who is currently on a high-profile book tour, for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email case.
There have been other failures: missed opportunities to prevent mass shootings that go beyond the much-publicized overlooked warnings in the Parkland, Fl., school killings; an anguishing delay in the sexual-molestation probe into Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar; and evidence of misconduct by agents in the aftermath of standoffs with armed militias in Nevada and Oregon. The widest-reaching failure of all: the FBI’s miss of the Russian influence operation against the 2016 election, which went largely undetected for more than two years. “We’ve seen ups and downs, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Robert Anderson, retired FBI senior official. The FBI’s crisis of credibility appears to have seeped into the jury room. The number of convictions in FBI-led investigations has declined in each of the last five years, dropping nearly 11 percent over that period, suggest data obtained from the Justice Department by researchers at Syracuse University.