FBI Echoes QAnon Pedophile Conspiracy

Democrats vow to give FBI a bigger budget

FBI Director Kash Patel

What began as a public relations exercise to highlight the FBI’s uncontroversial work investigating child predators has ended up in the dark alleyways of QAnon conspiracy.

The Bureau wants you to believe that shadowy pedophile cabals are behind a surge of crimes committed against children. If that isn’t strange enough, Democrats in Congress want to give the FBI more money to feed that frenzy.

This week as the FBI presented its budget to Congress, it also announced its coordinated mass arrest of 205 accused child predators in a nationwide sweep called “Operation Restore Justice.”

Part of the announcement includes a video set to ominous music and featuring FBI agents in tactical gear, at points depicted in night vision, deployed to major cities.

The announcement followed the FBI’s recent creation of a “Nihilistic Violent Extremist” designation focused on a pedophile crime ring known as “764.” The FBI has reportedly opened an eye-popping 250 investigations into the group. The group’s alleged crimes are stomach turning and, in my view, justify throwing those found guilty in a cold dungeon forever. But the FBI’s elevation of these crimes to the status of a national security threat to America (that they claim could “bring down society”) and even civilization is a panic characteristic of the QAnon movement — for which the FBI’s new Director has expressed sympathy.

“I agree with a lot of what that movement says,” FBI Director Kash Patel once said of QAnon, which emerged following the 2016 presidential campaign as the main purveyor of Hillary Clinton pedo ring stories.

What is even stranger is that the very same Democrats who spent years condemning the bizarre “Pizzagate”-inspired conspiracy theory are now falling all over themselves to shower the FBI with more funding.

When Director Patel went before Congress this week to defend his multi-billion dollar budget, it was to the spectacle of Democrats siding with him against the big, bad White House. Sounding like butlers, one Democrat after another asked Patel if he needed more money sir, what they could do to help, and so on in light of the president’s budget, which would cut the FBI’s $11.3 billion budget by some $545 million (a roughly five percent cut.)

To give you a sense of the vibe, Democratic congressman Glenn Ivey vowed that “we certainly will work with you to protect your budget.”

House Appropriations Ranking Democrat Rosa DeLauro opened her questioning of Kash Patel expressing shock at the prospect that the cuts “quite literally would defund law enforcement” (the horror!). 

“How is it possible they [the White House] cut more than half a billion dollars,” DeLauro asked Patel, “without impacting the law enforcement and national security related functions of the FBI?” 

Patel merely responded by agreeing with the supposed oversight official that restoring the five percent cut would bring the FBI back to health. “ I believe if we got back the number you stated, we would not have to cut more FBI,” he said.

“ So there would be no additional positions deleted from the FBI if you get that amount of money?” DeLauro asked.

“That’s correct,” Patel said.

The exchange was a bizarre moment of bipartisan chumminess made possible by the utter fealty by Congress to the national security state that it is supposed to actually oversee.

An even more surreal display took place in the Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, where its top Democrat, Senator Patty Murray, rattled off a list of all the terrible things she thought the FBI was doing under Trump before moving on to how alarmed she was by the possibility that funding might be cut to do those things.

It was like the old Woody Allen joke about restaurant’s food being terrible — and such small portions! 

Murray started by saying “the FBI has been weaponized,” remarking: 

“Under your leadership Director Patel, the FBI has been weaponized to go after Americans who disagree with the president, FBI resources have been diverted away from combating terrorism to focusing on immigration requests and all of this, the diverted missions, the fewer resources, fewer agents, heightened politicization is happening now under your watch. And it is, I believe, making Americans less safe. Now let me just start with the budget. ”

Saying that “budget cuts will reduce the FBI’s ability to counter threats of terrorism,” Murray then listed drugs, gangs, transnational organized crimes, firearm background checks amongst missions that needed protecting, with no mention of the investigation of campus protests against the war in Gaza, Tesla vandals, the new QAnon-style frenzy or any of the other partisan and politicized struggles the Bureau has waded into.

One after another, other committee Democrats joined in expressing opposition to any cuts to the FBI’s work:

• Sen. Chris Van Hollen: “My view is that those [cuts] will likely do a lot of harm to the FBI's overall mission.”

• Sen. Chris Coons: “ I'm very concerned about what the so-called skinny budget portends in terms of cuts to … FBI.”

• Rep. Glenn Ivey: “If you're saying you think you need more than what the skinny budget's giving, I strongly agree.  I was really concerned to see the $540 million plus cut to the FBI.”  

• Rep. Grace Meng: “ I was very disappointed to see that the fiscal year 2026 budget framework released Friday by the Trump administration appears to propose cutting the FBI's operating budget by more than half a billion dollars.”

Not a single Democrat expressed any kind of support for trimming the FBI’s budget — Congress’s main leverage over the executive branch! It’s a bizarre state of affairs, how almost universally the very people who question the Trump and Patel agenda want to shower them with more money. 

And what is all this critical work the FBI is doing that needs to be preserved? Sen. Jeanne Shaheen provided some insight during the hearing. “I was concerned when I heard about the decision to dismantle our efforts to combat disinformation and misinformation, including the FBI-run foreign influence task force,” Shaheen said.

This is what they want our tax dollars going toward? To fight dopey Russian Facebook memes and to build a censorship apparatus aimed at whatever the government considers to be “disinformation”? Patel was again ever so helpful in reassuring the outgoing New Hampshire senator that she shouldn’t worry. “To put it most simply,” Patel replied:

“ That mission set is something that multiple divisions in the FBI do 24/7 nonstop. That's been my experience since I got there. Because of the malign influence campaigns and because of the prioritization and the intelligence apparatus to collect against them, we have been … on that as a priority one, nonstop.  I see it every day in my briefings. I see it every day in the field and I see it in the cases and indictments we bring.” 

The FBI’s embrace of counter-“disinformation” (a popular mission with the Democrats) gives you a sense of why they and other federal law enforcement agencies love to tout their work on less politically fraught issues like countering child exploitation.

There’s been a full-court press this week by the Bureau to portray its work as merely protecting the children.

“If you harm our children, you will be given no sanctuary,” Patel vowed this week in a statement promoting Operation Restore Justice. “There is no place we will not come to hunt you down, there is no place we will not look for you, and there is no cage we will not put you in.”

The FBI’s Washington Field Office put it more simply in a recent post on X: “Protecting children is one of the FBI’s primary duties.”

Meanwhile, top FBI officials have been peppering the media with scary stories about the legions of child predators lurking online and how they’re holding the line:

• FBI Assistant Director David Scott, head of FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, commenting on the 764 group: “We see a lot of bad things, but this is one of the most disturbing things we're seeing … [their goal is to] sow chaos [and] bring down society.”

• FBI Acting Special Agent In Charge James Crowley of the Washington Field Office:“As horrific as these alleged crimes are, they are not rare … There are few situations more urgent than when a child is physically at risk, and as ‘Operation Restore Justice’ has shown, child predators come in many different forms.”

• FBI Special Agent in Charge Mehtab Syed of the Salt Lake City field office: “If your child has access to the Internet, he or she is likely to encounter a predator looking to entice or harm them. The FBI’s Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force combines the resources and expertise of our law enforcement partners to safeguard society’s most vulnerable.”

Not only does all of this echo the basic thrust of QAnon but it also appeals to the pretenses of Congress, that they are defending the Bureau because they Care About The Children. Of all the agencies to evade cuts, the FBI deserves a perfect score for its political acrobatics.

— Edited by William M. Arkin