Day: March 20, 2024

By the same token, public officials—whether they’re elected, appointed, or otherwise hired—who use their positions to enrich themselves also have a corrosive effect on people’s faith in government.

You’ve probably heard the maxim, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That was written more than a century ago by Lord Acton, a British historian. But you might not have heard what he wrote a few lines later: “There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

When someone decides the office they hold places them above the law, it’s often the Bureau’s job to make sure they’re held accountable. Now again, many public servants working at all levels of government are honest and dedicated people who strive to do the right thing for their constituents and their country.

Unfortunately, there are also public officials who are only concerned with serving a very specific constituency: themselves. That type of corruption strikes at the very heart of government. It eats away at public confidence and undermines the strength of our democracy. And public corruption is not limited to crooked politicians who get caught with their hands in the till. It can affect everything from how well our borders are secured and our neighborhoods are protected to how verdicts are handed down in courtrooms and how roads and schools are built. And it can take a significant toll on the public’s wallet by siphoning off tax dollars.  

In fact, estimates put the cost of public corruption to the U.S. government and the American public at billions of dollars every year. That’s why the FBI has made investigating public corruption a top criminal priority. Crimes involving public corruption are often the result of secret deals, sealed with whispered conversations, quick handshakes, and money paid under the table. Their secretive nature makes them difficult to detect—and even more difficult to prove.

Fortunately, the Bureau’s been working these kinds of crimes for a very long time now, and we’ve gotten pretty good at it. On any given day, we’re working about 35-hundred public corruption investigations with our federal, state, and local partners across the country. And our efforts pay off.

Over the past five years, we’ve disrupted nearly 2,000 criminal schemes and helped secure more than 3,000 convictions in this arena. Among those criminals we helped convict was Larry Householder. Now, you might not have heard of him here in Georgia, but the folks in Ohio sure have. He was Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, where he headed up the most elaborate and extensive corruption scandal that state has ever seen.

The scheme centered on House Bill 6, which was under consideration by the Ohio legislature. The bill included a billion-dollar bailout for two failing nuclear power plants owned by FirstEnergy, one of the nation’s largest investor-owned electric systems. Beginning in March 2017, FirstEnergy started making sizeable quarterly payments to Householder’s tax-exempt social welfare organization, Generation Now, which he and his team used to support the bill’s passage—and to defeat a subsequent ballot initiative to overturn the law. In exchange, millions of dollars went to Householder’s bid for speaker, to other state House candidates likely to support him, and to line his and his team’s own pockets. Householder spent more than half a million dollars to pay off his credit cards, repair his home in Florida, and settle a business lawsuit.

All in all, the FBI’s investigation found FirstEnergy paid upwards of 61 million dollars in bribes to bail out their plants, and to put and keep in office politicians like Householder who’d be loyal to the company over their constituents. Now, what he and his co-conspirators did not realize is that the Bureau had someone on the inside. And that insider cooperated with our agents, recorded incriminating phone calls and conversations, and shared text messages sent by members of the conspiracy. I’m pleased to report a jury found Householder guilty of serious racketeering charges.

And I’m even more pleased to report that last summer, he received the maximum sentence for his crimes—20 years in federal prison When announcing his sentence, the judge called Householder—and I quote—“a bully with a lust for power.” And rightly observed that his crimes were an “assault on democracy” and “a betrayal of everyone in Ohio.” 

The scope of Householder’s conspiracy was unprecedented, as was the damage he left in his wake. In terms of financial harm to the citizens he’d taken an oath to represent, and erosion of the Ohio public’s confidence in their elected officials. And as for FirstEnergy? They signed a deferred prosecution settlement and agreed to pay a 230-million-dollar penalty for conspiring to bribe elected officials and others.

The amount of time, talent, and resources the FBI and our partners put into that investigation shows how committed we are to pursuing corrupt officials who abuse their offices. And that’s just one case. At any given time, we’ve got hundreds of significant public corruption investigations all over the country.

I remember back in my days as a line prosecutor, working with phenomenal agents here in Georgia. Whether it was investigating a corrupt sheriff or city official—public corruption cases were among my most challenging and most meaningful. Now, in this job, I travel all over the world and meet with law enforcement counterparts from countries large and small. And I can tell you that the United States’ commitment to pursuing well-resourced, highly professional, independent investigations of our communities’ most powerful members when they break the law is unmatched anywhere. It’s one of the things that sets us apart—the level of our commitment to checks and balances and the rule of law.

That said, often, when following the facts means investigating some of our communities’ most powerful members—whether that’s mayors, judges, or sheriffs—the bullseye can end up on our backs, as well.

In our business, almost by definition, there’s no way we’re going to make everyone happy. Whether it’s the arrest we made—or the one we didn’t make—in almost every situation, someone ain’t happy. But, unfortunately, in today’s world, all too often people who are unhappy with the outcome start questioning the legitimacy of the institutions themselves.

Whether it’s a trial, a Supreme Court case, even an election—people’s standard these days for judging whether something was fair or objective is whether they like the result—whether their side won or lost.

But that’s not how independence and objectivity work. It’s bad enough when folks denounce a specific case or investigation as tainted or unfair just because their side lost. But it gets exponentially worse when that attack goes from this case or that to saying the whole institution is corrupt because they didn’t like a particular outcome. Baseless attacks like that on the very legitimacy of the institutions that make up our democracy are particularly pernicious and strike at the heart of the rule of law.

And, frankly, against that backdrop, it’s especially important to be able to show we did the right thing, the right way—to avoid even the perception of bias in everything we do. Because when the second-guessing and arm-chair quarterbacking starts, the way we defend our work is by showing we dotted every “i”, crossed every “t” and did things by the book—holding ourselves to the highest standards.

The FBI is entrusted with an awful lot of authority and power—both of which we need to effectively carry out our mission. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to pursue justice in the case of those six officers in Mississippi, or to send a corrupt politician to jail for spearheading a multimillion-dollar racketeering conspiracy.

But to quote another noted authority—not lofty figures like Paine, Hume, or Lord Acton, but someone more my speed—Uncle Ben from Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man is credited with saying that with great power comes great responsibility. So while that authority and power are necessary for the FBI to do our job, they also come with an enormous amount of responsibility—and in turn, close scrutiny. And that’s how it should be.

The work of the FBI is subject to a wide range of internal and external controls, all with the aim of holding our organization accountable for what we do. Within the Bureau itself, of course, we’ve got an Internal Affairs Section in our Inspection Division, as well as an Office of Professional Responsibility, our disciplinary arm. There’s another Office of Professional Responsibility within the Department of Justice, not to mention DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General.

In addition, there are the whistleblower protections afforded to all FBI employees, there’s judicial review of our investigative steps, and then there’s Congress and the good folks there who oversee our work. All of those components are in place to make sure people have avenues for reporting violations of the law, dangers to public health and safety, and gross waste, fraud, and abuse—and so those issues can be investigated and corrected.

That examination—that oversight—makes us stronger as an organization. And it makes the public safer as a result.

For the FBI to be the world’s leading law enforcement agency, and for the American public to continue placing their trust in us as an organization, people need to know we’re committed to doing the right thing in the right way. That’s something I’ve spoken about repeatedly—our folks might even say exhaustively—since my very first days as Director.

It’s essential that we follow our processes—rigorously—every time. That means protecting the American people without fear or favor; it means upholding the Constitution and the rule of law; it means following the facts, wherever they lead, no matter who it makes happy or unhappy. And trust me, there’s always somebody who’s not happy.

Process is what enables us to say, “You may not like the result we reached, but you cannot credibly say we didn’t do our work by the book.” And it’s what allows people to trust us in the long run—the people we do the work for, and the people we do the work with. 

Unfortunately, there have been times in the FBI’s history when we weren’t doing the right thing, and certainly weren’t doing it in the right way. We’re over 115 years old, and any institution that’s been around as long as the FBI is going to make mistakes. What’s important is that we learn from them.

I’m thinking in particular about the FBI’s interactions with Martin Luther King, Jr., during a time when we strayed from our core values. In October 1963, Director J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Robert Kennedy signed a request to wiretap Dr. King. The FBI’s wiretap application was just five sentences long and did not present a shred of evidence. The request simply said there was—and I quote—“a communist influence in the racial situation.” Our agency went on to wiretap Dr. King’s hotel rooms and later sent a reel of tape to his offices in Atlanta. After listening to it, he said of the FBI, “They are out to break me.”  

Dr. King’s words about the Bureau are painful to hear, but I do not think any organization can aspire to have an unbiased loyalty to process and truth if it’s not willing to turn the spotlight around and look at itself. So that’s something we work hard to do.

There’s another familiar Dr. King quote that I think fits us well: “The time is always right to do right.” And when the FBI falls short of the mark, we’re committed to holding ourselves accountable. That’s what the American people expect, and it’s what they deserve.

Our mission requires that we remain steadfast in preserving the constitutional rights of all citizens while protecting the safety of our communities. And we know that one need not—and must not—come at the expense of the other.

To reinforce the importance of this critical aspect of our mission, the curriculum for all our new agents and analysts includes those difficult historical lessons and how they relate to our core values: respect, compassion, fairness, integrity, accountability, leadership, diversity, and rigorous obedience to the Constitution.

Looking back on that dark chapter in our history reminds us what can happen when we become untethered from the rule of law, and from oversight and accountability for our actions. And I’m proud to be part of an organization that does not hide from its history, but learns from it instead.