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In a democracy, election integrity must be sacrosanct. Yet recent revelations highlight a dangerous double standard in how our top federal law enforcement agency — the FBI — chooses which threats to pursue and which to suppress.

In 2016, the FBI launched a full-scale counterintelligence investigation based on a vague, secondhand comment by Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos to an Australian diplomat. Papadopoulos didn’t allege wrongdoing by the campaign. He merely stated that Russia had obtained damaging information about Hillary Clinton — which later turned out to be true. The “dirt” was emails, leaked via WikiLeaks, that revealed internal DNC bias during the Democratic primary. Troubling? Yes. But it was information. Voters still chose. No ballots were altered, no identities faked.

Fast-forward to 2020. The FBI’s own Albany field office submitted a formal Intelligence Information Report (IIR) based on a confidential human source alleging a foreign plot involving fraudulent U.S. driver’s licenses. These IDs were allegedly being used to allow ineligible individuals to vote — specifically for Joe Biden. That is not information warfare — that is direct interference in the electoral process.

And yet, unlike in 2016, the FBI did not investigate. Instead, headquarters recalled the report — reportedly because it would contradict then-Director Wray’s public statements asserting there was no evidence of foreign interference helping Biden. Even after Albany agents re-interviewed the source and reconfirmed the intelligence, headquarters declined to republish the report. They later instituted a policy that all election-related intelligence must be cleared by HQ — further insulating central leadership from field-based accountability.

This is not about partisanship — it’s about principle.  The FBI pursued an investigation that began with political gossip because it fit the prevailing narrative. But when their own agents raised a red flag about a direct assault on the voting process, they buried it. The result is a dangerous precedent: threats that challenge official narratives are sidelined, while politically convenient suspicions are amplified.

If the Bureau will chase leads based on offhand conversation in a London wine bar, it should certainly investigate credible leads from its own field agents — especially when they suggest active attempts to subvert American votes.

This is not a critique of one political party. It is a warning about institutional drift: when truth becomes secondary to narrative, trust in law enforcement dies.  A functional democracy needs apolitical institutions that follow facts — even when they’re inconvenient.