Judging Freedom - Has the FBI become a partisan agency with Victor Davis Hanson

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

Victor Davis Hanson is an author, professor, farmer, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Today he joins Judge Napolitano on this brand new episode of Judging Freedom. In addition, to talk about the FBI, the gentlemen discuss Victor's latest article, "Third Worldizing America." You can read at PJ Media. What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws? by Judge Andrew Napolitano A common denominator to recent controversies at the Justice Department, CIA, FBI, and Pentagon is that all these agencies under dubious pretexts have investigated American citizens with little or no justification — after demonizing their targets as “treasonous,” “domestic terrorists,” “white supremacists,” or “racists.” Americans live under a governmental regime that openly breaks its own laws. The government not only believes it can do whatever it can get away with politically, not only believes that it can torture its foreign foes and claim the torture is a state secret, not only can bribe and coerce witnesses into saying what the government wants to hear, but it also can authorize criminals to commit crimes. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to Judging Freedom. Judge Andrew Napolitano here, my relatively new podcast where I get to think as I wish and say what I think and talk to some very interesting people. Today, one of the smartest people that I know, Professor Victor Davis Hanson, who has a long and stellar academic career, but is also a noted and noteworthy commentator on the craziness that goes on in the world today. He is currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, one of the greatest think tanks in the country and an institute with which I am familiar. And I'm familiar with his work there and I admire his work. Professor Hanson, it's a pleasure. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. You recently wrote a fascinating piece called Third Worldizing America, in which you were critical of the FBI, as I have been, of its pursuing people in the United States

just because they express political opinions or engage in behavior that's a little different, but without really any articulable suspicion as to criminality. Can you tell us about this? Yes. It was in a larger landscape, and i've written about it before that traditional or conservative america was usually the bastion of support for the intelligence investigatory agencies as well as the pentagon but we've seen what uh there's been some abuses in the pentagon we've seen what the intelligence communities have done. And now we're looking at the FBI. I mean, James Comey, under 240, 245 occasions under oath, said he could not remember or didn't know.

And he, whether one likes Donald Trump or not, it's not sustainable for the FBI director to have a private conversation with the president, memorialize it on an FBI apparatus, then leak it to the media, and then explain, according to him, that he was not under investigation when he was under investigation. Or it's not sustainable for the acting FBI director to say on four occasions to a federal investigator that he was not the source of a leak to the Wall Street Journal when he knew he was. And he admitted that he had lied under oath to investigators. Whether that under oath is literal or figurative, I'm not sure. It's not sustainable for Kevin Clinesmith, an FBI lawyer, to forge a document as part of a FISA request.

A FISA request, which is based on a dossier, which I think the FBI had plenty of information, was not reliable. It's not sustainable for the acting FBI director to get in cahoots with the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenthal, and discuss wearing a wire to entrap the President of the United States. What is the FBI doing now under the direction of Attorney General Merrick Garland, formerly a highly respected appellate judge,

and before that, a highly respected official of the department of justice but what is attorney general garland having the fbi do now which is shocking to me involving local boards of education and parents that want to speak their minds i don't know what he's doing but he's denied that he's doing it even though the facts contravene that and so he's apparently feels that the FBI now under his aegis is sort of uh I don't know a crusader a woke crusader agency and he's going to be at the spear tip of social justice causes and so whatever one's politics are you cannot weaponize the FBI like it's been weaponized. We haven't really seen this in generations. And I don't know anything about James O'Keefe. Really, I've met him once. I don't

know anything. I've never met Roger Stone. But the idea that the FBI sends a veritable SWAT team, unarmed, almost as if they're going into battle into the citizens of these, to serve a subpoena against people who have no history of violence. And then beforehand, either in one case, CNN and the other, the New York Times just tipped off as if it's some kind of show extravaganza. It's not becoming, it's not sustainable for the FBI to do that. They're losing, I guess what I'm saying is they're losing support for the FBI in the very areas where it had been the strongest. You know, you're right.

And it is intriguing that conservative Republicans who have generally supported the FBI and the intelligence apparatus entities in the federal government are now feeling its sting. I did some reporting on the Stone case, and Roger Stone's been a friend of mine for many years. They sent 29 FBI agents, including a helicopter and a gunboat in a canal behind Stone's house and a battering ram, all while they were negotiating with Stone's lawyer. And they could very well have said, by the way, we're going to indict your client tomorrow. It's got 48 hours in which to appear. Instead, they engaged in an invasion with an armada at 530 in the morning with CNN in tow. I have some reports, and I suspect you have as well, about FBI making inquiries of parents who have shown up at local school boards to say, I don't want my children to be taught about LGBTQ. I'll teach them about sex at home.

I don't want them to be taught about Project 1619 from the New York Times, which teaches that the country is still basically racist. I don't want them taught about Black Lives Matter, which teaches that racism is so endemic in our culture that only violence can get it out. And I don't think you should be teaching them that. No, a parent makes a statement like that at a school board meeting. Perfectly protected, absolutely normal free speech and the fbi investigates yeah i i think i agree with you but then again this is the fbi you remember during the robert muller case where we had two principal fbi one investigator peter struck and one lisa page that were obviously biased and using their f FBI cell phones to communicate in a way that would reveal that bias. And then when they were let go, Robert Mueller deliberately staggered their departures, not to suggest that there was anything on toward or connection between them. And then under subpoena, the FBI claimed that it could not find numerous cell phones in its possession. And then when they were produced, their records were wiped clean.

So I don't know what the alternative is, whether the investigatory roles should be divided up among the various agencies or they should be relocated to Kansas City or something. But there is something toxic about its prominent location and consolidation of power right in Washington, D.C. And we're seeing it at its most disturbing manifestation. And then last week, we learned in a report by Michael Horowitz, the inspector general of the Department of Justice, which candidly looked at other entities in the DOJ besides the FBI, but zeroing in on the FBI, as you and I are in this conversation, that the FBI spent $300 million to bribe and pay its informants in a period of eight years, on top of that, $42 million a year for their expenses.

And this is the biggest head-scratcher. This number blew me away professor they authorized their informants many of whom are criminals themselves and have an indictment against them and are only working with the fbi because the fbi promised them if you help us entrap so and so we'll ask the prosecutors to go easy on you you might even walk they authorized these people to commit 22,500 crimes in a four-year period many of which were state crimes so the FBI had to go to a state prosecutor and say that guy you just arrested for robbing a bank he's working for us so you got to let him off the hook well this is mind-boggling that the FBI decides what laws should be enforced and what

laws can be broken. I know, and I think that's why even sort of moderate commentators, I think I remember a column maybe a month ago by Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal, he called for the abolishment of the FBI as we know it. And remember during the crowds, the email scandal on the run-up to the 2016 election. Whatever one's politics were about Clinton or Trump, it didn't do anybody of any party persuasion for the FBI director to have these performance art press conferences that there is new information, there's not information. And then when the hard drives were targeted for investigation, for some reason, James Comey allowed a former top FBI security expert in this new company, CrowdStrike, to have electronic possession of the hard drives. And the FBI took them at their word, even though they were employed by people in the Perkins Coie DNC circuit that were also working for Hillary Clinton.

So they're incestuous. And I think that it comes from this very dangerous culture that we've developed the last 30 years in Washington. You put your finger on it, Professor. It's a culture. It's a culture in federal law enforcement that they themselves are above the law, that they can decide what laws will be enforced and what laws won't be enforced. The president can't authorize crimes, theoretically. The Congress can't authorize crimes. It could rewrite a law, but it can't authorize somebody to break a law that's already been enacted. The courts can't authorize crimes, but the FBI thinks that it can authorize crimes. So what are the dangers to our society when the government breaks its own laws?

Well, it's kind of acting as if it's a legislature and making or choosing to follow the law it prefers. And then it's also an executive branch by enforcing what it wants to enforce and it's also a judicial branch by uh calibrating its enforcement in a punitive fashion and so they they've combined sort of in western terms judge jury and executioner and they're not accountable and it's not just the we talked about the invest the intelligence but when you look at distinguished people in the intelligence committee and i can remember james clapper being asked under oath does the nsa spy on private individuals he said no when he when he was caught lying he said i gave the least

untruthful answer right john brennan did the same should have been indicted he should have been indicted for perjury that was one of the more scandalous uh public crimes let's switch gears a little bit professor to another area of interest to those watching us now and to you and me, and that is the weaponize. This is mainly done also by the executive branch, but not by law enforcement. The weaponizing of vaccinations and the demonizing of those who exercise their conscience, whether it's for religious or bodily integrity reasons, not to be vaccinated. Where is this going to take us? I don't know, but we are suspending really the practical protections of the Bill of Rights.

And it's all under the cloak of science, but it's pseudoscience. If you're in Europe today and somebody has got COVID in the past and has an antibody titer, I think it's four or five hundred, then that is equivalent of a vaccination. We don't even allow that in the United States. So I've talked to a person not long ago and he does not want to be vaccinated because he got a bad case of COVID. He was told by his doctor, if you get a Moderna or Pfizer, you will have a higher chance of a reaction because you have such a high, and he can't go to a restaurant in some places in New York. He's traveling to New York. He can't get a, he doesn't have a car. Dr. Fauci, but he was at one point adjudicating whether a rental agreement between a landlord

and tenant would be enforceable or not on his recommendation of the severity of the crisis. And, you know, when we're asking four and a half million soldiers together with federal employees that they have to be vaccinated, and then we have two million people coming across the southern border when we're not asking anything of them. And they're foreign nationals. It's almost as if the resident or the foreign national has more exemption from the law. What has really goaded me, and thank you for that gloomy but accurate picture that you painted, is that these vaccination mandates aren't even the law. They're executive decrees either issued by the president through OSHA, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration in the Department of Labor.

That's been stayed by two federal judges or they're issued by governors or mayors. There's no statute enacted by Congress saying you have to be vaccinated. There's no statute enacted by a state legislature or even a city council requiring it this is a profound violation of the separation of powers when the executive branch can craft a rule call it a law and then use the police to enforce it as if it were legislation enacted by the uh the legislative branch it's just a destruction of the core of the constitution we could see that i could see what the practical effects were as early as march 2020 and these small rural communities you if you went in to a florist shop to a shoe store to a family-owned

cleaner they were shut down and the people were put out of business but you could go to the local walmart and target and you could go to the flower section you could go to the shoe section you could go to the cleaning section and i never understood why it was safer to put a lot of people in one big room than these small mom and pop where you might be the only person in the store you knew the person so there was no scientific rationale and it really distorted, really has distorted the U.S. economy in the last two years. It's really made very rich people who are already very rich. In that list of mom and pop stores that were closed and suffered, at least in New York and New Jersey, there was not liquor stores. So you could have 500 people in a liquor store, cheek by jowl, waiting for their turn to buy alcohol, and the government doesn't care.

But you want to put 25 or 30 people in a church or a mosque or a synagogue, or as you say, a shoe store or a florist shop, and the government said no. Before I let you go, tell me about your farm because we are both political legal commentators but we're both also farmers well i'm on a i was in 180 acre tree and vine farm plums peaches almonds raisins fresh grapes uh what my great great grandmother founded and i'm sitting in a house that's 150 years old that I'm the fifth generation to live in. But during the turmoil of the millennium and marriages, everybody sort of moved away from California, or they left the farm, and I'm left with the

original house and 40 acres, and I have almonds now. But then I drive, you know, about 180 miles once a week to Stanford, but I prefer, it's much nicer, I think, living out here for a while. I grew up here. I'm living in the same house when I was a little boy. So we grow apples, pears, corn, and green leafy vegetables, but our highest and best product is maple syrup. We tap about 350 sugar maple trees you probably don't think of new jersey and maple syrup it's actually a big industry out here are those natural or

cultivated maple trees they're natural the um one of the people that was surveying the property said to me judge these are virgin forests they have never actually been touched. And it's as natural a product as there is. You just boil the sap down until it gets thick enough and sweet enough, and then it's syrup. It's great stuff. I will somehow get a bottle of it to you if you get me some of your

almonds. Okay, I will do that. Professor Victor Davis Hanson, one of the smartest people I know, and it's a joy to be with you. I hope you can come back to judging freedom again. Thank you for joining us, sir. Thank you for having me.