George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 21 March 2018.]

Today many thoughtful people on both sides of our wide political spectrum ask, ‘whatever happened to our FBI?’  Almost everyone has an opinion, along with news stories to back it up, about how our premier domestic law enforcement agency entered politics and attempted to impact, or actually did impact the 2016 presidential election.

There are today media reports, congressional committee findings, Justice Department pronouncements, and even, most damning, FBI’s own internal Inspector General reports of politically and criminally motivated wrongdoings at the highest levels of the Bureau.  We read messages from deputy directors and top agents openly promoting one candidate over the other.  We witnessed news conferences where the Director himself publicly exonerates one candidate whose email activities and servers clearly violated the law; the unprecedented exoneration itself usurps a function reserved for the Department of Justice of which the FBI is a managed division.  We heard the Director again making unwarranted pronouncements of what and who is under investigation one week before the election.  And now it becomes clear that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA court, established to counter foreign intelligence activities and agents on US soil, was fraudulently petitioned with a definite political motive to spy on an American citizen in order to attack one candidate.

All of these activities represent the agency’s departure from enforcing existing laws, to becoming a new onshore intelligence agency like the CIA.  This transition of purpose and operations has caused much disquiet and unreported grief within the rank and file of the FBI’s cadre of professionally trained agents to fight crime – they have now found themselves to be weaponized investigative tools of their managing directorate pursuing blatant political agendas.

A cri de coeur recounting of this recent and still ongoing chapter of the Bureau is told by Thomas Baker, a 30+ year veteran special agent and legal attache of the FBI.  Recently retired, he has witnessed the change and maintains contacts with his former colleagues whose distress he reports in a 20mar18 WSJ commentary titled ‘What Went Wrong at the FBI’.  In it special agent Baker paints the large contours of the changed landscape for us.

The high hard one from Baker is that “after 9/11 the bureau lost its law-enforcement ethos as it tried to become more of an intelligence agency. … The FBI’s culture had been rooted in law enforcement. A law-enforcement agency deals in facts, to which agents may have to swear in court. That is why ‘lack of candor’ has always been a firing offense. An intelligence agency deals in estimates and best guesses. Guesses are not allowed in court. Intelligence agencies often bend a rule, or shade the truth, to please their political masters. In the FBI, as a result, there now is politicization, polarization, and no sense of the bright line that separates the legal from the extralegal.”

Over the past decade the FBI appears to have evolved more and more into a political tool of the Department of Justice, to the extent that it even unquestioningly acted as the DoJ’s prosecutorial mouthpiece on 5 July 2016 to take the political heat off then Attorney General Loretta Lynch.  And its fraudulent application to the FISA court did more than “shade the truth”.  As Baker reminds us, “FISA was never intended as a tool to pursue Americans. It was to be used to gather intelligence about agents of a foreign power operating in the U.S. … If an American is suspected of operating as an agent of a foreign power, that individual should be pursued under the Espionage Act, a criminal statute. The fruits of (FISA) monitoring could then be used in court for a prosecution. The use of FISA to target a U.S. citizen is the most egregious abuse uncovered so far.”

The FBI’s recovery from the dark side is not yet over.  The agency is still stonewalling and hiding from Congress secrets of its recent politically directed wrongdoings.  Baker calls for “a renewal of the FBI’s culture. When the smoke clears from the current controversies, Director Christopher Wray must help the bureau turn the page on this intelligence chapter and get the bureau back to the law-enforcement culture of fact-finding and truth-telling that once made us all so proud.”

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.