According to a New York Post report, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan and committee member Rep. Andy Biggs have written a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray asking for answers on why the Bureau quietly updated crime statistics for 2022 to hide that offenses rose rather than declined.
(The matter was hotly contested during the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in which moderator David Muir ultimately told Trump that crime was down.)
Jordan and Biggs note that the FBI didn’t officially publish updated data — but stealth-edited existing numbers to reflect crime was up.
“The FBI did not publicize its revision of 2022 violent crime data, and the only way to see this change is to download the FBI’s updated crime data and compare it to the previous year,” Jordan and Biggs wrote.
“That revision went unmentioned in a September press release,” NYP reports, “boasting about a 3.0% drop in violent crime nationally during the year 2023 compared to 2022. Significantly, that supposed decrease was predicated on the corrected statistics about violent crime spiking in 2022.”
“The initial 2022 data, before it was corrected, was heralded as ‘historic declines’ in the crime rate. Despite having the true data, the FBI never issued a clarification while the incorrect statistics were used to push a false narrative,” the lawmakers added in their letter to Wray.
“The FBI’s revision of violent crime data confirms what our oversight has shown: the Biden-Harris crime epidemic continues to escalate and far-left state and local policymakers place,” they added.
“The FBI’s failure to be transparent about violent crime data continues to erode the American people’s trust and raises questions about the agency’s procedures used to track and update the UCR [Uniform Crime Reporting data],” the Republican congressmen added.
“Americans have known all along what the FBI is now finally reporting—crime is continuing to escalate across the country and Americans do not feel safe in their communities.”
The bureau has until Nov. 21 to respond to the inquiry about why the stats were altered.
Meanwhile, Rep. Biggs shared the letter on X, saying “accountability is coming.”
