Judging Freedom - Ronald Kessler - The FBI, What_s Wrong_

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

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Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. A little doggy. Today is Thursday, October 20, 2022. It's about 5 after 2 in the afternoon. My guest today is the formidable researcher and journalist Ron Kessler, with whom I was pleased to work many times in my career at Fox News. Ron is an expert on, among other things, the Secret Service and the FBI, two topics that are very much in the news today. Ron, it's a pleasure. Welcome to the show. What is the core problem with the FBI today? I love that question because it lets me, you know, give the truth in my opinion. And that is, it's not, as some conservatives have said, Mueller, who emphasized intelligence, it was just the opposite.

That was a very important ingredient to rolling up terrorists. In the past, the FBI had done one investigation, for example, of the First World Trade Center bombing and then rolled it up and that was the end. Now they focus on developing sources long range to stop attacks. And that's why we have not had a successful terrorist attack since 9-11. Obviously, Mueller screwed up as general counsel. And it's not a problem now. I think the so-called raid or search of Mar-a-Lago was totally justified. Obviously, Trump was engaging in obstruction. These documents were so highly classified that they could have very well included, for example, options for retaliating against Russia in the event of a nuclear attack, names of spies that we recruited overseas, penetrations of Putin's

inner circle, incredibly, incredibly valuable, sensitive information. And I think, you know, Trump just took it as trophies, you know, it made him feel important. But clearly, under Comey, the FBI became totally corrupt at the top levels, not on the level where they go after the mafia and they find kidnappers. And everybody who deals with them is always impressed with the agents themselves. But Comey set an atmosphere that allowed these abuses to occur. He himself did not indict, even though it wasn't his role to indict Hillary, when very clearly she did violate the Espionage Act, just as I believe Trump did with his documents.

Let me stop you for just a minute, because I agree with something you just said, and I want to bore into it a little bit. And my experience with the FBI is when they testified in my courtroom, and obviously there may be some interaction outside the courtroom as well. And I've always been deeply impressed with their professionalism and their courtesy, their intellect, their education, and their training. My beef with the FBI is management. It's not the guys in the field that catch the bank robbers or stop the terrorists or infiltrate the mob. It's their bosses. So in one of John Durham's trials, the case against Michael Sussman, Hillary's former lawyer, who was indicted for lying to the FBI, Mr. Sussman's lawyers got the FBI agents on the witness stand to admit to the fact that they

lie to people they interrogate. We know that, and there's Supreme Court case law that says they can do it. But he also got them to admit that they lie to each other and that they lie to their bosses and that bosses lie to them. And it took the jury about 30 minutes to acquit Mr. Sussman because they didn't know whether to believe anything that came out of the FBI agent's mouths. So from whence comes the culture of lying, bilateral across the board and up and down. As I said, it was a corrupt culture at the leadership level. And of course, that included agents working on these cases sometimes because of the direction they got or they were prevented from following leads that they should have followed. But here are the two main outrageous items that occurred. One, when the FBI opened

an investigation into whether there was corruption from Russia, collusion, that was based on this papadopoulos, this low-level aide meeting with an ambassador in London and saying that the Russians have information that could be damaging to Hillary or Trump and that they would be willing to offer it. Well, that showed no culpability on the part of Trump. He didn't even hear about this, let alone accept this information. And yet they opened an investigation based on that. I mean, they could have just interviewed Papadopoulos, but instead it was this wide-ranging investigation into the whole issue of collusion with Russia. And then, and this is something that

I wrote about in the Washington Examiner, no one's picked it up. It's even more damaging than the first investigation. And that is, after Trump fired Comey as FBI director, Andrew McCabe, the deputy, became FBI director. And what did he do? He opened an investigation specifically targeting Trump, whereas before there was no specific targeting of Trump. And what did he base that on? He said in his book, and this is just unbelievable, he said that Trump appeared on Lester Holt NBC and Trump said, when I fired Comey, I thought about this Russia thing. But then he went on to say, but I knew that by firing Comey, I was prolonging the investigation and I wanted it to be done properly. Where did that appear in Andrew McCabe's book? Nowhere. He omitted that. He

totally misconstrued, misrepresented what Trump had said. And yet, based on this misrepresentation, he opened an investigation into Trump. He also recommended the appointment of a special counsel. amongst the senior management of the FBI that it was their duty to prevent Trump from becoming president or frustrate him or drive him out of office? I mean, was there a political animus against Trump? I'm pretty sure the answer to this is yes, but you're the expert. Was there a political animus against Trump or a personal animus against Trump on the part of senior FBI management? Well, we certainly saw that on the part of Peter Strzok who was in charge of the investigation

and had day-to-day, you know, gave day-to-day directions. And he said, we're gonna get Trump, we're gonna get Trump. But what created that atmosphere and allowed it to fester and allowed a situation where Strezic could actually voice those opinions to another agent, all that came under Comey and the culture that he created. So it all goes back to Comey. It's not some endemic problem in the FBI. It's something that happened under Comey. Totally outrageous, totally unforgivable. Switching to the Secret Service, whose text messages on January 5th and January 6th, 2021, mysteriously have disappeared. Is there a level of corruption there? Was there an animosity toward Trump there? Is there a level of incompetence there that the

public needs to know about? I think it's incompetence. You know, they have never been very good at their own internal computer systems. I know it's hard to believe that this could happen. And yet I think it did happen that way, through incompetence. And in fact, you know, the agents love Trump, and he loved them back. I interviewed Trump once at Mar-a-Lago overlooking the pool. And I said, How do you how do you like being protected by the Secret Service? And he said, it's great, you know, I'll be playing playing golf and there'll be 20 agents all around me. And they're all looking in different directions. So they never see when I miss a ball.

Trump does have a great sense of humor. Yes. But what's the story with the mysterious disappearance of their text messages? It's got to be intentional. They couldn't just all have disappeared on their own. Well, it's hard to imagine, but I don't see any motive for getting rid of the messages at all. You know, the Secret Service performed well overall.

They weren't covering up, which they certainly used to do under Obama, especially whenever there was a penetration of the White House. well overall. They weren't covering up, which they certainly used to do under Obama, especially whenever there was a penetration of the White House. It was because of the Secret Service screwing up. Actually, after Trump appointed his own Secret Service directors, there have been no intrusions at the White House, no screw-ups, nothing embarrassing. But of course, you'll never see that in the press. And in fact, you'll see some implication that it's the opposite. Has the culture of, let's go back to the FBI, has the culture of the FBI under Chris Wray, the current director, continued? The Comey lawlessness, the Comey bravado, the Comey starting criminal investigations without even articulable suspicion, the legal standard, about the person who is the subject

of the investigation, or have things changed? Things have changed. Ray issued various instructions and indications of what's going to befall agents if they do anything along those lines that occurred under Comey. And there haven't been any problems. There simply have not been, you know, which is pretty unusual. I know there's a lot of fulminating on the right about this. And then there's agents from the old days saying, oh oh things should go back to the way they were when when i was an agent a lot of times agents are more interested in how they were treated uh what their comfort level was than in the actual facts and one example is louis free louis free was one of the worst uh directors and yet agents loved him because he would go jogging with him and he was a former agent and yet there was one scandal after another under him directly attributable to his instructions

such as uh the winho lee scandal and uh laboratory scandals and others why isn't anybody in the fbi ever prosecuted for these scandals and then maybe one or two serious serious espionage prosecutions i think the guy's name was miller but and then there's robert hansen but all of the corner cutting and commencing of criminal investigations without articulable suspicion nobody gets in trouble for it yeah no the only person was person was a lawyer who fabricated a email. Kevin Clinesmith, some 27-year-old, went behind the years right out of law school, a kid. They threw him out of the bus.

Nobody else got in trouble for all the FBI did to Trump. Yeah. Now, well, some of these decisions are not necessarily criminal. You know, if Andrew McCabe decides to open an investigation without any real basis, you know, it can be an iffy kind of prosecution. But it still could happen under Durham, I think, if anybody's going to do what he will. Okay. Ron Kessler, always a pleasure. I hope you come back and join us again soon. Love to. Thank you. Judge Napolitler, always a pleasure. I hope you come back and join us again soon. Love to. Thank you.

Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.