d expanding public concern about the federal government's actions against the Branch Davidians were negatively affecting the public's trust in federal law enforcement. However, the inquiry was framed from the first as an investigation into the use of excessive force by federal law enforcement rather than an attempt to learn what went wrong in Waco and how federal law enforcement could be educated to prevent a repeat occurrence.
In keeping with the Committee's stated intent to investigate the entire Waco incident, the investigative reach of the inquiry was broad. The Committee did not focus on the specific incidents that led to the death of four ATF agents and eighty-five Branch Davidians, namely, the ATF's bungled serving of the warrants and the FBI's decision to force the end of the siege. Rather, it chose to investigate every communication between every federal agency involved in the incident, from the initiation of the investigation into the Branch Davidians up to the end of the siege. The Committee demanded thousands of pages of documents from the White House and the Justice, Treasury and Defense departments describing their involvement in the raids. This structure of the inquiry and its decisively suspicious nature clearly established the Committee's belief that it was pulling back the veil on the federal government and seeking to assign blame.
This broad approach also cemented in the public's mind the impression that corruption was indeed rampant throughout the federal government. The public would have been better served had the Committee made an attempt to focus its attention on the specific acts by federal law enforcement that led to the tragedy at Waco. Specifically, rather than a sweeping indictment of federal law enforcement that only further eroded public confidence, the Committee should have clearly focused on why federal law enforcement took such an aggressive stance against a cult group in Texas that resul...