#Today’s FBI of snitches often traps Americans into committing crimes

Back in 1935, tough guy James Cagney cemented the image of the incorruptible FBI agent in the movie “G Men.” The film played on Cagney’s outlaw image — honed in pictures like “The Public Enemy” and “Blonde Crazy” — but flipped the script and put his character, Brick Davis, on the side of the good guys. Same Cagney, cracking wise, firing guns and socking jaws, but this time from behind a badge. 

What a difference a new century makes. Leading up to the events of 9/11, there was probably no federal agency with a higher public stature than the FBI: a predominantly Irish-Catholic agency of armed lawyers recruited from Fordham and St. John’s (as opposed to the Ivy League-heavy, Protestant CIA). But today, after two decades of failure, embarrassment, mendacity, favoritism, political partisanship, incompetent leadership and exasperating sanctimony about a “higher loyalty,” the Bureau’s moral reputation lies in tatters. 

Whether it was former Director James Comey sanctimoniously dithering in public over Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016, to former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s misleading of investigators about his role in leaking confidential memos to the news media, to the illicit lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page cooing about an “insurance policy” against a Trump victory that year, the FBI has destroyed its squeaky-clean public image. 

But wait — there’s worse. It’s become an organization of snitches and spies, borderline entrapping the angry and the weak-minded into committing crimes. Nearly a decade ago, New York Times’ David K. Shipler listed a series of would-be terrorist plots thwarted by the FBI — only to find that the vast majority of them were facilitated by agents and informers posing as terrorists themselves. They even chauffeured some of the suspects to the would-be crime scenes themselves, only to foil the “plot” at the last minute. 

It’s unethical, immoral, shameful — but not illegal. And it’s still going on, with the conservatives right now in the crosshairs instead of lone-wolf Muslims and cranky survivalists.

Consider the Gretchen Whitmer “kidnapping” plot. Conveniently timed to break just a month before the 2020 election, the FBI announced it had disrupted a conspiracy to kidnap the dictatorial governor of Michigan. Fourteen alleged members of a right-wing militia called the Wolverine Watchmen were arrested, and six were charged in federal court. 

Problem was, the Gang that Couldn’t Scheme Straight was heavily infiltrated, if not actually entrapped, by a dozen or so undercover informants, to the extent that the G-men became more provocateurs than agents. According to reporting by Buzzfeed News, they went far beyond monitoring the group’s activities, instead covering hotel and travel expenses and otherwise egging them on in a crazy plan to grab the governor at her vacation home and somehow maroon her on a boat in Lake Michigan. 

The farce peaked last week when one of the lead FBI agents on the case, Richard Trask, was arrested and charged with smashing his wife’s head against a nightstand and choking her after a swingers’ party they had both attended. But the damage in the crucial swing state had been done: The implication that Trump supporters were dangerous white nationalists and domestic terrorists no doubt cost the former president’s votes in a state he lost by only 154,188 votes. 

A politicized Bureau with no moral compass is one of the lasting legacies of the rise of the national-security state, pioneered by a panicky George W. Bush in the aftermath of Sept. 11 and now seemingly with us forever. The G-men who once shot it out with bank robbers in Kansas City and rolled up Russian spy networks are now acting more like a domestic security service, enforcing the whims of the party in power. 

After 9/11, the nation was shocked to learn that the intelligence agencies had ample warning of al Qaeda’s malign intentions but somehow failed to “connect the dots.” Twenty years on, those dots are now being connected — and they’re pointing straight at the American people. 

Michael Walsh is an author and screenwriter. His next book, “Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost” (St. Martins), is out now.