We’ve long known that the Department of Justice has been incredibly compromised during the Obama administration, with Eric Holder obstructing congressional oversight investigations at the top, and the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms running guns to drug cartels at the bottom.

Many had held out hope that the FBI hadn’t similarly been compromised. That was a mistake.

Last September the Obama administration produced an FBI report that said mass shooting attacks and deaths were up sharply—by an average annual rate of about 16% between 2000 and 2013. Moreover, the problem was worsening. “The findings establish an increasing frequency of incidents,” said the authors. “During the first 7 years included in the study, an average of 6.4 incidents occurred annually. In the last 7 years of the study, that average increased to 16.4 incidents annually.”

The White House could not possibly have been more pleased with the media reaction to these findings, which were prominently featured by the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, the Washington Post and other major outlets. The FBI report landed six weeks before the midterm elections, and the administration was hoping that the gun-control issue would help drive Democratic turnout.

Crime Prevention Research Center President John Lott says there is no evidence that crime is rising or that arrests are down nationwide. Photo credit: Getty Images.

But late last week, J. Pete Blair and M. Hunter Martaindale, two academics at Texas State University who co-authored the FBI report, acknowledged that “our data is imperfect.” They said that the news media “got it wrong” last year when they “mistakenly reported mass shootings were on the rise.”

Mind you, the authors did not issue this mea culpa in the major news outlets that supposedly misreported the original findings. Instead, the authors published it in ACJS Today, an academic journal published by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. “Because official data did not contain the information we needed, we had to develop our own,” wrote Messrs. Blair and Martaindale. “This required choices between various options with various strengths and weaknesses.” You don’t say.

Put bluntly, the study was rigged from the beginning, weighted to give a false and predetermined outcome that would hopefully generate higher Democrat voter turnout.

Once again, Obama failed, and the net result make have been an increase in firearms purchasing, while violent crime dropped… again.