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Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., said on Wednesday that he doubts any accountability will come for the FBI for the raid at former President Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago unless Republicans regain a majority in November’s midterm elections, adding that U.S. bureaucracy is at its “most dangerous point in the security state” as people feel the federal government “is out of their control.”
“I think the big overall picture in American government and I and I believe impressions that are given to me by people I talk to every time I’m out speaking to citizens in the district or anywhere is that they sense that their government is out of their control,” Bishop, a minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, told Fox News Digital. “We see an institutionalized bureaucracy at its most dangerous point in the security state that the FBI and Intel.”
“That bureaucracy believes that it is the ruler of the country. And we’re seeing how hostile it will get to people representing American citizens who desire to move in a different direction,” Bishop added.
Ranking member Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has called on U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI director Chris Wray to testify before the House Judiciary Committee as soon as Friday to offer an explanation for the grounds behind the unprecedented search warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago.
Bishop noted that Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, also sent a letter to Wray demanding an immediate briefing related to the Trump raid. But the congressman from North Carolina noted that Republicans as the minority party aren’t likely to hear back or receive any details on the warrant for months.
“I don’t think we’re not going to get an opportunity to ask them. And the DOJ is not going to give answers in Jerry Nadler’ is Judiciary Committee,” Bishop told Fox News Digital.
Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., speaks at a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 22, 2020. (Andrew Harnik/Pool via REUTERS)
“The Justice Department or any federal agency is not compelled by law to respond to inquiry by a minority member or even a minority ranking member,” he said. “They should have an attitude toward congressional oversight in which they readily do that. But, you know, I don’t know if I’ve ever had a letter answered by the Justice Department. And that’s another one of the things that must change, in my view.”
Perhaps more disturbing than the Trump raid, according to the congressman’s perspective, was the FBI seizing the cell phone of Trump ally Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., a day after the Mar-a-Lago search.
“Scott Perry’s telephone is maybe for me in even more extreme examples than President Trump, Bishop said. “They pick a member of Congress somewhat obscure, perhaps less famous than, say, Jim Jordan or Kevin McCarthy or Jim Banks. And they go and strip him of a cell phone under criminal process a day after they’ve conducted an unprecedented raid on the former president of the United States over, as far as anybody can tell, kind of week tea allegations or issue about the Presidential Records Act.”
As President Joe Biden, appearing via teleconference, looks on Attorney General Merrick Garland attends a meeting of the Task Force on Reproductive Healthcare Access during an event at the White House complex August 3, 2022. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Bishop made the case for the importance of Republicans to flip one or both houses of Congress.
“Asking the questions is important because it frames the issue for the American people so that they can continue to reflect on it as they make decisions,” he said. “I don’t think we’re going to see much in the way of success on oversight until we’ve got power to compel it. In the meantime, we just need to make sure that we’re describing for the American people what is happening in as much as clearly as we can.”
In his view, bureaucracy in Washington is increasingly out of touch with the Americans people.
“The people that I talk to are afraid. They are frightened of what the administration of justice has become,” Bishop said. “We’ve got to send people to Washington to understand how much of a crisis there is and who are willing to take the steps necessary to invoke Congress’s full power to bring these administrative agencies in line and to change the way the bureaucracy is built and maintained.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray, testifies during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation: the January 6 Insurrection, Domestic Terrorism, and Other Threats, in Hart Building on Tuesday, March 2, 2021. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“The very essence of the next Congress under Republican control must be about oversight, about compelling the bureaucracy to give us the information to frame the abuses they’re engaged in,” he added.
Two weeks ago, Bishop questioned Matthew Olsen, assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, during a House Judiciary Committee hearing regarding the FBI’s handling of the alleged kidnapping plot targeting Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
In April, a federal grand jury acquitted two defendants on the grounds of FBI entrapment, and a mistrial was declared for the remaining two men accused in the plot allegedly cooked up over Whitmer’s lockdown measures. With the re-trial about to begin in Michigan, Bishop alleged that the “FBI is asking the judge to modify the jury instructions on the issue of entrapment in order to make it easier for them to win.”
“There’s a unified theme through all that. The FBI is pushing the line as hard as it to go on prosecutorial misconduct, entrapment,” Bishop said. “Trying to come up with the finest of distinctions to be able to use that to deliberately in order to create politically charged prosecutions.”
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“Is this abuse the official policy?” he said, noting he did not receive many answers from Olsen during the congressional hearing. “I certainly hope justice is done in that retrial in Michigan. But the evidence is already clear enough for me to know that there is a gross culture of gross abuse at the Department of Justice.”
