West Virginia’s attorney general called into question the FBI’s hiring practices in a letter sent to the associate deputy director Monday.
The FBI prioritizes diversity, equity and inclusion as the top priority in its hiring and promotion policies, which is a violation of non-discrimination laws, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey wrote.
“Let me be clear: however you look at it, discrimination is wrong and has no place in our society. Race-conscious recruitment, hiring and promotion practices in the FBI only foster division and stereotypes,” Morrisey said in a statement. “The FBI is the country’s top law enforcer, but it is no longer recruiting for the best and the brightest—recent revelations suggest the organization is abandoning its core principle of attracting the most-qualified candidates and instead hiring and advancing employees based on gender/sexual orientation and race.”
Morrisey cited a “Report on Alarming Trends in FBI Special Agent Recruitment and Selection” that was filed with the U.S. House Judiciary Committee and relied on anonymous FBI whistleblowers.
The report concluded there needs to be transparency on the FBI’s recruitment and selection process, acknowledgement of historical failures in the process and a bipartisan approach to fix those issues going forward.
“I write in the hope that you can provide answers to real questions that the Bureau’s actions have generated,” Morrisey wrote. “West Virginians—and the American people—deserve to know whether their government is following the laws it purports to enforce.”
