Justin Walker
86 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1011
At a time when the President is under investigation, and in the wake of a controversial dismissal of the FBI Director, the need for an “independent” FBI has appeared to many to be more important than ever. Indeed, the Senate would not have confirmed the new FBI Director, Christopher Wray, if he had not promised to be independent of the President and the Attorney General. This Article argues that calls for an independent FBI are misguided and dangerous. The Article analogizes presidential control of the FBI to civilian control of the military by demonstrating that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the FBI and the military share the same purpose. It then explores in depth how the FBI has often infringed on civil liberties in the same way that the framers worried an out-of-control military might do so, and it explains why the independence that the FBI has often enjoyed was a cause of those violations. Finally, it concludes that if it is necessary to preserve the FBI’s investigative independence, the solution is to split the FBI to reflect the model of many western democracies—creating an independent agency to investigate crime (like Britain’s New Scotland Yard) and a separate agency to continue the FBI’s national security functions (like Britain’s MI5).
