Evidence, Interrupted

     Yes, friends, you guessed it: Christopher Wray has refused to surrender the “Biden bribery” FD-1023 after all:

     Rep. Anna Paulina Luna has said that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is afraid its informant who provided information about an alleged bribery scheme by the Biden family will be killed if their identity is exposed.
     The alleged $5 million bribery scheme occurred while Joe Biden was serving as Barack Obama’s vice president.
     “Just left meeting for House Oversight. The FBI is afraid their informant will be killed if unmasked, based on the info he has brought forward about the Biden family,” Luna tweeted on Monday.

     Of course, the two critical questions:

  • “Why?”
  • “By whose order would he be killed?”

     …have not been answered. I’m not sure they were asked. But I can easily imagine an exchange such as the following:

Rep. Comer: Why would he be killed? The accusation is now in the open. It wouldn’t vanish with his death.
Director Wray: Well, you see, this is a highly valued informant who’s provided us with a lot of other information vital to national security.
Rep. Comer: Such as?
Director Wray: Oh, I can’t tell you that! It would compromise one of our most prized sources!

     And following that exercise in futility, we would have this:

Rep. Comer: Well, could you tell us who would have the most to gain from killing him?
Director Wray: Sorry, I can’t do that.
Rep. Comer: Why not?
Director Wray: It would expose one of our methods for gathering national-security intelligence!

     I’ve ranted about this “national security” business before. It’s a canard, a con job. The circularity of it gives it away at once:

  • Considerations of national security override all other obligations of the intelligence community.
  • Only persons deemed utterly reliable are permitted access to national-security information.
  • The intelligence community decides what is and is not vital national-security information
  • The intelligence community decides who is and is not sufficiently reliable to view it.
  • Disclosing our criteria for making those decisions would compromise national security.

     There’s no way off that carousel. (Compare this to “compelling government interest,” another circularly-defended canard.)