"The FBI Is The KGB For Democrats"

Unions insist that teachers stay at home and still be paid.

Nooo, the US equivalent to the KGB is the CIA.

KGB is the FSB now.

Walter loves being technically correct.

Whether it pertains to the conversation or not.

Hours after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testified to Congress Wednesday that FBI special counsel Robert Mueller "is running [the Russia investigation] appropriately," a Fox News guest compared the FBI to the KGB, the notorious, Soviet-era secret police force.

Is it true? Let's see:

THE CLAIM

On Wednesday night, Tom Fitton, president of conservative organization Judicial Watch, took the rhetoric up a notch when he compared the FBI to the Soviet-era spy organization.

"I think the FBI has been compromised," Fitton said on Fox News @ Night. "Forget about shutting down Mr. Mueller. Do we need to shut down the FBI because it was turned into a KGB-type operation by the Obama administration?"

THE CONTEXT

As the investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Donald Trump campaign ratchets up, Republicans have taken every opportunity to portray the special counsel and his team as biased.

Recent reports of anti-Trump texts among the FBI team may even have lent a modicum of credibility to the bias claim.

Fitton's leading question follows a similar segment on the conservative network a week earlier, when Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett said "the FBI has become America's secret police" and compared the FBI to "the old KGB that comes for you in the dark of the night, banging through your door."

So what was the KGB?

As defined by the Cold War Museum, "The KGB was the world's largest spy and state-security machine, involved in all aspects of life of everyday people in the Soviet Union." The KGB was governed by a specific directive, but it was never published or made available to the public.

The KGB acted as a secret police force whose main goals were to keep dissenters quiet by any means necessary. Those who did not fall in line were murdered, tortured and sent to labor camps with conditions so brutal that many committed suicide.

The FBI, on the other hand, is governed by publicly known law. The organization's leaders are often called upon to testify in a public setting, and many FBI operations have been made public record. The organization does not torture American citizens for voicing opinions, no matter how far outside the mainstream or how potentially offensive they might be to the government.

THE BREAKDOWN

Simply speaking, Fitton is incorrect. President Barack Obama did not turn the FBI into the KGB.

Indeed, the fact that Fitton was permitted to voice this claim on cable television is proof itself that America does not have a secret police force trying to suppress dissent. Were Fitton living in Russia when the KGB was active, he would have found no platform to voice his claims and likely would have faced fatal consequences.

The Obama-era FBI certainly deserves criticism, specifically for its handling of investigations into Russian interference during the 2016 election and Hillary Clinton's emails. But there is no comparison between the FBI and KGB.

THE VERDICT

We rate the claim as false.

The CIA,The FBI and the KGB

The CIA, the FBI and the KGB argue about who’s the best at catching criminals.

The Secretary General of the UN decides to test them. He releases a rabbit into the woods and each of the divisions has to catch it.

The CIA goes in. They place animal informants throughout the forest. They question all plant and mineral witnesses. After three months of extensive investigations they conclude that rabbits don’t exist.

The FBI goes in next. After two weeks with no leads they burn the forest to the ground, killing everything in it, including the rabbit, and they make no apologies. That rabbit had it coming.

The KGB goes in last. They come out a few hours later with a badly beaten bear. The bear is screaming: "Okay! Okay! I'm a rabbit! I'm a rabbit!"

I don’t have the faith in the FBI I used to have.

I remember at the end of the Clinton administration of talk of liberal democrat operatives infiltrating the FBI and CIA. I didn’t put a lot of stock in the rumor at the time, but now I am not so sure.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said the foreign intelligence service was exceptionally important for protecting the country, in comments made soon after it was accused by some of being behind a major hack on U.S. government departments.

Speaking at an event commemorating 100 years since the founding of the SVR foreign intelligence service, Putin said the agency and other security services were a crucial guarantee of Russia’s “sovereign, democratic, independent development.”

Some international cyber researchers have suggested that Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service may have been behind an unprecedented attack on U.S. government computer systems first reported by Reuters last week.
[...]
Putin told attendees of the event, which also marked the Day of the Security Services Worker, that it was important to continue developing the work of counterintelligence agencies.

“I know what I’m talking about here,” Putin, a former KGB agent, said, in comments shared on the Kremlin website. “And I rate very highly the difficult professional operations that have been conducted.”
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It's just Newsweek, but still:
FACT CHECK: Did The FBI Become A 'KGB-Type Operation' Under Obama?