President Joe Biden's remaining tenure as president can now be counted in days and his anointed successor got curb-stomped in the election, a beating so bad that it almost triggered the Violence Against Women Act. 

During Biden's time, there were a lot of questionable things happening, but the Department of Justice had a long history of doing questionable things, one that dated back to Trump's first presidency when FBI agents tried to undermine the man elected to office.

Now, it seems the DOJ has a rather extensive history of also playing with the homicide numbers.

We've talked about that a bit in the past, but it seems there's a bit more of a problem than we might have originally believed.

As the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics explains, “The United States uses two national data collection systems to track detailed information on homicides.” These consist of:

1. death certificates collected by the states and compiled by the CDC.
2. reports by local law enforcement agencies compiled by the states and aggregated by the FBI, which also generates estimates for agencies that don’t report.

Death certificates have always provided broader and more accurate data than the FBI’s figures, but the gap between them has grown sharply under the Biden administration. This may indicate that local law enforcement agencies, states, and/or the FBI are undercounting murders.

Furthermore, the Biden administration FBI inexplicably revised its pre-Biden murder data all the way back to 2003, elevating the counts in certain years by up to 7%. The FBI made these unprecedented alterations without so much as a footnote to inform the public.

As a result of those factors and others, the gap between murders reported by the FBI and the number of homicides recorded on death certificates has grown from a low of 16 killings in 2003 to an average of 3,711 killings per year during Biden’s presidency:

Now, there's always likely to be some discrepancy here and there. In some years, such as 2003, the numbers are very close, but as you can see, the difference is much larger through most of the years, but note the last three years shown here, for a moment.

Those are way outside the normal trends, especially 2021, but really, all three years.

Which just happened to coincide with Biden's time in office.

Now, there have been other instances when the CDC's homicide count contradicted the FBI's by a significant margin. The prime example is 2001 when the FBI didn't count those killed on 9/11 as murder victims. I can see both sides of the debate on whether to include them or not, so I'm not going to judge one way or another.

But 9/11 was a black swan event. It was unprecedented in how many were killed and it also would skew perceptions of how more pedestrian forms of violent crime were going. It would look like a lot more murders were happening as most people think of them than there actually were.

Additionally, self-defense shootings often show up in the CDC's data but aren't counted in the FBI's homicide numbers because they're not the result of a crime occurring.

Some officer-involved shootings are counted as well, though they properly belong in a different category.

Now, revisions aren't unheard of. Typically, though, the FBI just revises the previous year's data. This time, they went back a ways, then seemingly tried to hide that they'd ever done anything.

To determine if there was a legitimate basis for the FBI’s revisions, Just Facts filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI on June 7. More than five months later, the FBI has not replied.

Just Facts also emailed the FBI’s National Press Office on November 15 and is awaiting a response.

Beyond the unmarked murder revisions in 2023, the FBI has been burying its crime data since the first year of the Biden administration. Prior to this, the FBI published its annual “Crime in the United States” report with a simple overview page that provided links to webpages with clear summaries and datasets for different categories of crimes.

Since 2021, however, Biden’s FBI has buried these datasets in a fragmented manner under a maze of vaguely worded dropdown menus and acronyms with expiring hyperlinks.

That convoluted system has led to some massive underreports of violent crime. For a prime example, NewsNation reported in 2022 that 14,677 murders occurred in 2021 based on the FBI’s convoluted presentation of its data. This was 8,000 fewer murders than the FBI’s actual estimate of 22,900 murders that year.

All of this seems like small potatoes until you remember that Biden and his allies have been crowing about how violent crime wasn't really increasing under his presidency. They used the FBI data to sell that to the American people that violent crime isn't a problem, which likely impacted the midterm elections in 2022 and were probably intended to impact the 2024 elections.

It didn't, but likely because the economy is so bad that they couldn't hide that from anyone.

My hope is that Trump cleans house when he takes office. I'm still not sure Matt Gaetz can be confirmed, but I suspect that if he is, he'll be thrilled to gut the Department of Justice and the FBI of the turdnuggets who would manipulate crime data in such a way just to benefit one side versus the other. It might be different it it was always to benefit the sitting president--still wrong, but at least would suggest a hint of neutrality about it--but it's not and we know it.