Morning Wire - Catastrophic Failure of FBI | 5.21.23

Episode Date: May 21, 2023

The extensive report released this week by Special Counsel John Durham on the FBI’s targeting of the Trump campaign has prompted demands for accountability within the FBI – but also attempts to downplay the findings by Biden officials and the legacy media, alike. We speak to Real Clear Investigations senior writer Mark Hemingway about the troubling revelations and sweeping implications of the Special Counsel report. Get the facts first on Morning Wire.   Genucel: Premier Skincare Partner of The Daily Wire 70% off Most Popular Package + Free Shipping Genucel.com/WIRE   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The extensive report released this week by special counsel John Durham on the FBI's targeting of the Trump campaign has prompted demands for accountability within the Bureau, but also attempts to downplay the findings by Biden officials and the legacy media alike. In this episode, we talk with Real Clear Investigations Senior Writer and Federalist editor Mark Hemingway about the troubling revelations and sweeping implications

of the special counsel report. I'm Daily Wire, editor-in-chief John Bickley, with Georgia Howl. It's Sunday, May 21st, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire. Joining us now is Mark Hemingway, senior writer at Real Clear Investigations and editor over at the Federalist. Hi, Mark. So the long-awaited Durham report was released on Monday. It took nearly three years and is over 300 pages. What were the most important things we learned from the Special Counsel Report?

Well, there's a lot of things that could be said specifically about the Trump, Russia investigation, and how that was handled. But the most important takeaway here is that the FBI basically violated reams of established policy and procedures to pursue this investigation. They knew very quickly that it was baseless, and yet they seemed to continue to pursue this investigation incredibly aggressively in a way that was totally unprecedented and flew in the face of all kinds of contrary evidence that they had in their possession about it. I mean, that's sort of the main takeaway. Durham calls this failure of professionalism, quote, sobering. But I think it's actually far worse than even that sounds. It really was just a catastrophic failure across the board of people that are supposed to be serious and supposed to take civil rights violations and respect for democracy and all these other things very seriously.

And they did absolutely none of that. And they very clearly appeared to have been motivated by some kind of political animus and bias. And who are some of the big names? Who are some of the key players that really stood out over the pages of this report? Well, it's hard to even know where to begin with. that question, but I'll just start with one person, and that is Igor Danchenko. For those people that were familiar with the supposed dossier on Trump, that included the tale of him getting, you know, micterated on by Russian prostitutes and all of that nonsense.

It turns out that, according to his own estimation, 50 to 80 percent of that dossier was sourced to a single man named Igor Danchenko, who was a flunky at the Brookings institution, a big think tank in Washington, D.C., and, you know, a Russian, obviously. And so much of what Danchenko said was just like completely made up and or sourced to other people that wasn't revealed. So you were getting like, you know, thirdhand sources of information. And they were taking these things very credibly when they had no reason to. A good example of that is Danchenko got the story about the Russian prostitutes, not directly, but from a lawyer that worked literally for the DNC. And he supposedly sourced that story.

And it's really just sort of shocking that they ran with all of this information coming from the man and knowing where it came from. Further, another sort of crazy fact is that after the FBI knew that Danchenko had provided bad information, they paid him an additional $300,000 and kept him on the payroll basically as a confidential human source. Basically because doing that meant that they could decline to say whether or not he was working with them and they could kind of keep him under arrest. They wouldn't have to admit that they were taken by this guy. I mean, it's just an absolute travesty and miscarriage of justice in that regard. So that's a situation where we have the federal government paying somebody that they know is, in fact, a misinformer. Yes.

Well, and not only there was a misinformer, what was interesting about Denchenko was that, I want to say, circa 2010 or 2011, the FBI actually did a counterintelligence investigation into him to figure out whether or not he was a Russian agent. And they never did make any conclusive judgments about that. So, you know, the FBI knew that this guy could be potentially a Russian agent and potentially injecting Russian disinformation directly into our political process. And yet they kept this fact underwrapped and used his information to get warrants to spy on the president. I mean, it's just absolute madness that they would pick and choose information from an unreliable source like that. They knew full well or believed could well have been a Russian agent.

Durham highlights evidence that the Russian collusion narrative was drummed up specifically by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Yet in August of 2016, some of our highest ranking officials, CIA director John Brennan, President Obama, Vice President Biden, A.G. Loretta Lynch and FBI director James Comey, they were all involved in briefings on this manufactured narrative. How could that happen that the highest ranking officials in the land were involved in this? Well, the absolute kindest explanation would be that these people were so committed to their partisan objectives that they simply refused to believe any sort of countervailing facts that someone as atypical Donald Trump was anything but malicious, particularly because he represented a populist validation of a rejection of the agenda that they'd been working on so hard. I mean, that's about the kindest explanation for it. And that kind of requires them to be malicious idiots and to ignore so many other facts. The truth, I think, is probably some mixture of, well, yes, they had their own, you know, partisan motivations that made them blind to certain things.

But I think it had to be certainly more conscious than that in terms of them having a very partisan objective to, on some level, basically undermine and possibly even overthrow a democratically elected president and install someone else, simply because they viewed him as a threat to their sort of established cultural and political order. That clearly, you know, whatever you want to say about Donald Trump, his election was a loud signal from the American populace that they were very tired of the established center-left order when it came to issues like immigration and foreign policy, and they just couldn't handle that. The report also looks at the media's role to some degree in that some media outlets, such as the New York Times, the leading news source in the nation, particularly on the left, we're just willing to go along with a lot of these false claims of collusion,

despite a glaring lack of evidence. Should there be some form of accountability for these media outlets who promoted false claims? Well, first off, there should be accountability across the board for everyone involved in this. I have very little faith that that will actually happen. But in the report, I mean, it actually talks about how the New York Times published actual fake news. And it has Peter Strach, you know, the man who was involved in some of the most malicious FBI efforts to get Trump. Trump himself admitting he doesn't know what the heck the New York Times was doing and that they'd published a whole bunch of fake news on this topic that was just flat out wrong. And Strach was a man

who was, you know, on record as being incredibly hostile to Trump. And when he's saying it, I mean, that's how far gone the New York Times was. But, you know, the New York Times and the Washington Post both won Pulitzer's for their Russia Gate reporting. And the Pulitzer Committee, of course, conducted a review last year of that reporting and concluded, no, no, the Pulitzer's should stand. and then, you know, that's just fine. I mean, look, I don't know how anyone could conclude that these people should ever be trusted again on this topic, let alone almost anything else without having to do some sort of, you know, giant mea culpa for what they did. I mean, everything about what they did in terms of, you know, narrative framing to, you know, a lot of actual facts was just flat out wrong. And they misled the American people greatly for years at a time. This was the dominant story of the entire Trump presidency. And it was completely predicated. on nothing or was worse than nothing. It was predicated on partisan activists who made up a bunch of stuff to deliberately stymie, you know, an elected president. I mean, it's, it boggles the mind that half the country can go along with that. We've mentioned that the White House was briefed early on

about this plan to smear Trump as a Russian colluder. Is this worse than Watergate? First off, as a political cachet goes, I mean, everything's worse than Watergate. I mean, it was a third-rate burglary. Yes, it did unravel a presidency. But what I think is really telling about Watergate and it's important to understand in the context of what is happening now and why we're having so many problems where, you know, we have this unelected deep state actors going about using their power to destroy things was prior to Watergate, we had a situation in this country where sort of the general legal understanding was that the president was the top law enforcement officer in the United States. And basically, famous quote from Nixon, if the president does it, it's legal. It sounds horrible to hear Nixon say it, but it was kind of the default understanding. I mean, remember for decades, we had Jay Agra Hoover and the FBI running around breaking into everyone's offices whenever they felt like it because they felt that they had carte blanche as the executive law enforcement agency to go and do whatever they want. Civil rights violations be darned. And Watergate really flipped the balance of power on that. Now we have a situation here where Justice Department, if they decide that they want to, can completely override the bitches of a president and just go completely, you know, to the wall investigating people for no good reason. whatsoever, even if it's just furthering their own naked political goals and ambition to take someone down.

And I think that ought to be very, very concerning to people that this is the place where we've arrived. Like, you know, maybe it was bad before when the president was, you know, personally ordering burglaries. But what's happening now is so, so much worse than that. You know, never mind the fact that we've had several presidential scandals since then, like Benghazi, you know, things that had actual body counts attached. But everything's worse than Watergate in that sense. The FBI has responded to this report and they've carried. characterize what happened leading up to Operation Crossfire Hurricane in the following months as missteps. That's their language. They've also said that they've implemented some new rules,

dozens of new policies that they say have fully addressed all the issues that are highlighted in this report. Is the FBI fixed? Absolutely not. I mean, clearly we have a completely toxic internal culture from the top down at the place. And Durham makes this point in the report. He basically doesn't make any huge recommendations for policy fixing stuff at the FBI because he's says the real problem is that people inside the FBI acted with no integrity and no regard for established procedure anyway. So like you can pass new laws and you can pass new guidelines for how the FBI should do things. But until the FBI actually has people of integrity that are willing to commit to doing the things that they should have already been doing, none of this really matters.

For instance, one of the big things that came out of the FBI Trump-Russian investigation was they showed up at Trump National Security Advisers' House, Michael Flynn, on a weekend, and they interviewed him about a bunch of stuff related to Trump, Russia, and they ended up charging him with lying to the FBI in this sort of, you know, ambush interview. Flynn eventually got pardoning, and the whole thing just, you know, completely unraveled. But what was really remarkable about that interview is the FBI has a longstanding policy that you do not interview anyone at the White House unless you get prior permission from the White House counsel's office and clear this. precisely because, you know, we're trying to avoid conflicts like this. Anytime you're interviewed by the FBI, you know, normally would have a lawyer president, and Flynn was just sort of far too trusting. I mean, they came into that interview with a complete agenda to ambush the guy,

asking questions about a scandal that they knew was largely substanceless, and they charged him with a crime anyway. And he spent so much on legal fees that he had to sell his house, and eventually he pleaded guilty for no other reason he was just beaten down until he got pardoned. I mean, that is not how law enforcement in this country is supposed to work. The FBI is supposed to have integrity. They're supposed to follow procedures. They're supposed to make careful judgments about political matters. Nobody elected the FBI. Donald Trump was elected by 80 million Americans or whatever it was in 2016. And he has the right, given that Democratic

mandate to go and pick who he wants to serve in his White House. And the FBI doesn't get to go and charge them with crimes for no other reason than they don't like the president. Final question. Can we fix the FBI? What could be done to address these issues with the Bureau? What can be done to FBI would be to raise the Hoover Building and salt the earth where it stood. I'm dead serious about that. I mean, I think it is beyond fixing at this point in time. The FBI has been at the center of about a million screw-ups over the last 30 years, from the branch to being compound at Waco to the crazy politically motivated investigation of Ted Stevens up in Alaska. They screwed up the anthrax investigation after 9-11.

I mean, there's very few Ws that are on the board for the FBI in the last 30 years, and something needs to be fixed. Well, a truly remarkable report that lays out some very troubling actions and patterns in our federal government. Mark, thank you so much for joining us. That was real clear investigations and the federalist Mark Hemingway, and this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.