The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW "The Fall of the FBI": FBI Veteran Says "Threat to Democracy"

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

Thomas J. Baker, with 33 years of experience as an FBI Special Agent is the author of "The Fall of the FBI: How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy," which offers the roadmap for reforming the FBI and restoring the culture by restoring the confidence of the general public. Should Congress reauthorize Section 702? How has the mission of FBI changed since 9/11? What needs to be done?Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Joining us now is Thomas J. Baker. He's an FBI agent with 33 years of experience as a special agent at the FBI. And he wrote a book that was released as recently as December. The Fall of the FBI, How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy. And I think that's the way many of us see it at this point with the recent developments. And so I want to talk to him about what is happening with the Christopher Wray issues, as well as the Durham issues, the hearings that we just had in the last week or so. Thank you for joining us, Mr. Baker. Good to be with you, David. Thank you. Tell us a

little bit about, first of all, when you saw these hearings with Christopher Wray, give us your opinion, your take on this. Well, the hearing with Christopher Wray about a week and a half ago now was quite frankly, in my opinion, a missed opportunity. He could have come forward and said he recognized the cultural problems in the FBI, that he was going to reform it. It was a missed opportunity for him because he didn't say that. He again hid behind the chant that they come out with all the time about the good, hardworking 38,000 people in the FBI. Nobody's disputing that. It's like the old saying

people used to say about certain ethnic or racial groups, you know, some of my best friends are. That's how this this chance has become. So he missed an opportunity to clear the air. And I must say, unfortunately, the Congress, the House committee missed an opportunity. I don't want to be too harsh on them. Jim Jordan is doing the best he can. He has a lot of Democrats that for the the most part, don't want to face the issues with the FBI. They want to lambast Trump again. But it could have been more focused,

and they could have... Now, I understand they're going to have him back. Yeah, there's a lot of stonewalling there. And of course, one of the other things that's coming up is the reauthorization of Section 702, which you talk about in your book. You talk about how we need to have FISA reform. It seems to me like Section 702 was essentially a way to just get rid of FISA or basically to turn it inside out. It was supposed to stop them from surveilling American citizens without a search warrant, which was being done by the CIA and the NSA from their inception. That's one of the reasons why they had the FISA hearings. And they were supposed to even have a search warrant if it was American citizens abroad.

So really, they were only supposed to be able to spy on foreign citizens abroad, and yet they have turned this around to spy on Mr. and Mrs. Verizon, as Rand Paul once said. What do you think about this? Is that really where they should start? I mean, just to not reauthorize and re-up this Section 702? I mean, there's other issues as well as funding and things like that, but what about just stopping Section 702? David, you summed that up pretty well. In fact, this is one specific area where the Congress can enact reform. Most of the other reforms are going to have to come internally from the FBI and DOJ. But Pfizer, as you started to say, was created, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed and put into practice in 1978. And it was to provide a lawful, a structured means to gather intelligence on foreign agents in this country.

And they set up a separate court, the FISA court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and principally the FBI, but to a very little extent other agencies, could go there, get a judicial warrant, and surveil foreign agents for intelligence purposes to provide this intelligence to the national decision makers. What happened after September 11th, like with so many things, it was perverted, and they amended fines so that American citizens, U.S. persons could be surveilled. And since September 11th, it's been amended and adjusted numerous times. And now it's widely used, the Inspector General has told us, to surveil Americans. That is an abuse, and that can be stopped by congressional legislation. And you point out in your book that really September 11th, as you were working there at the FBI, you saw a real sea change in the FBI. Tell us a little bit, of course, the 702 thing, but what else did you see that happened in the wake of 9-11?

Well, it's the contention of my book that the current problems of the FBI all result from a change in culture from a law enforcement agency to an intelligence agency. And that all happened, and if I can just tell you this one specific incident, Bob Mueller of special prosecutor fame became the FBI director just a few days

before the September 11th attacks, which happened on a Tuesday. On Saturday morning, September 15th, Mueller was summoned to the president's retreat, Camp David in the mountains of Maryland, and he gave his report on the FBI investigation. Now, only three and a half days effectively had elapsed between the Tuesday attack and that Saturday morning. And yet in that time, the FBI had done what it does best, investigate. And in that short window of time, they identified all 19 hijackers, their financing, their travel, their associates, everything you could imagine of that nature. And at the end of his presentation, Mueller, and he's told us this several times, Mueller was expecting praise and thanks. And instead, George W. Bush looked at him and said, I don't care about that.

I just want to know how you're going to prevent the next one. Mueller left that meeting bound and determined to change the culture of the FBI. And that's the word he used. And that, unfortunately, had a lot of unintended and a lot of bad consequences. So you contend from being there that it went kind of from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the Federal Bureau of Intelligence, I guess, right? Yes, and that culture affects people's mindset

and how they look at their work. Let me say this. In a law enforcement agency, Yes, and that culture affects people's mindset and how they look at their work. Let me say this. In a law enforcement agency, people spend every day of their life working towards the day when they're going to have to stand up in court, raise their right hand, and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, to a set of facts. So help you God. That's very, very different than an intelligence agency that deals every day in deceit and deception and whose product at the end of the day is an estimate. Some would call it a best guess. Guesses aren't allowed in the courtroom. That change in mindset affects everything and affects the people's behavior. I certainly agree with you that it became an intelligence organization.

It almost beggars belief, doesn't it, that they could solve 9-11 and do that in just three days. They've got five years in terms of the Hunter Biden laptop and they can't find a handle on that thing. It is amazing. I mean, you know, he really came in and went right straight to work on the investigation, didn't he? But it is, when we look at what has become of the FBI, I think people are more concerned that it has become an agency, and maybe this is part of their seeing themselves as an intelligence agency. They've become instigators of a lot of things, you know, creating, essentially going out and getting some, you know, stooges who can barely, you know, put two words together and kind of using them, you know, helping them through a plot. We've seen this over and over again with the FBI grabbing some mentally deficient people, setting them up for some kind of a

supposed terrorist attack. They say, we're going to supply everything. And all they did was they use the people as kind of patsies to make the agency look good. Is that part of what happened to the FBI after 9-11? Well, yes, that's part and parcel of it. And you're referring most specifically, I believe, to the Governor Whitmer kidnapping fiasco. Well, that's one of the most recent ones. Of course, Judge Napolitano years ago just went through a whole litany of things like that

that had been happening. But yeah, that's probably the most recent one. And then the fact that the guy who was running that went from there to January the 6th after that. It was very suspicious in terms of the connections, I think. Well, and I go into this in some detail in the book, the FBI has reinvented itself and kept its and tried to keep its skirts clean over the decades. After the abscam investigation, which you're probably familiar with and a lot of your listeners aren't, but that touched on other branches of government,

on the Congress. A lot of rules were put in effect to avoid any suspicion of entrapment. And FBI agents, we were trained very strictly about not to entrap, not to involve, not to entice people who were that quote unquote not otherwise disposed to commit a certain crime. And the training on that for decades was rigorous. The Governor Whitmer case was the first time that the defense of entrapment was raised with any plausibility. And that's a shame. We had the situation in the Whitmer case where three agents got in trouble. I believe two of them were dismissed or let go eventually because of that. But they had more informants in the case than they had subjects at the end of the

day. And it's like the joke about the FBI, I say joke, criticism of the FBI back in the 50s, that at some of the meetings of the Communist Party USA, there were more informants at each cell meeting than there were communists, committed communists. And as a result, it was that the dues of these informants, which was U.S. federal government money, was the only thing that was keeping the Communist Party domestically alive in the United States for so long. That's sad, and that's in the distant past.

We have more current problems. Yeah, yeah. It's very much like what we saw Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka, and the Stalinist Russia doing with creating these organizations and financing them so he could entrap the anti-Bolsheviks. That seems to be basically what's happening. It's just that the politics tend to change. It seems like part of the switch with the FBI is that they've gone from a conservative standpoint to a liberal standpoint in terms of the people that they're targeting with this. But let's talk about some of the things that you point out in your book, uh,

right now, the, you know, to reform the FBI, we do things like, uh, not view citizens as adversaries, uh, to, to pay attention to constitutional rights, uh, to make sure that we don't use SWAT team tactics on people who are nonviolent. Of course, we've seen this with so many people with January the 6th. It truly is amazing to see that. I talked to Mr. Friend, who has refused to do that as an FBI agent down in Florida. And of course, you know, what happened to him as a whistleblower when he, when he talked about that, that that's a big problem. Uh, what do you see as, as the solution for this type of thing? How do we get these types of reforms in? As you point out that the Congress

could refuse to reauthorize section 702, but in terms of this other stuff, I mean, how do you get the FBI to reform itself? Well, that's the answer. Reform itself. And the first thing in changing the culture of an organization, you have to recognize that there's a problem. And, of course, there's actually books written about this for the corporate world and how you change culture. The first thing is you have to recognize there's a problem. I do think, because I'm in touch with them, there are people in the FBI who recognize there is this problem. Publicly, Director Wray has not recognized this. Every time he's asked, including his testimony a week and a half ago, he falls back on the mantra

that, well, those people are not with us anymore. This goes back to the Russian collusion fiasco. And of course, Comey and Strzok and McCabe, they were all fired. And then in the Governor Whitmer thing, at least two agents were fired. And in the Nassner-Jim case, at least two agents were fired or let go. And so on and so forth up to last December, an ASAC, that's the assistant agent in charge, in the Washington field office was let go for having attempted to bury the Hunter Biden laptop investigation. And every time this happens, including in response to the Durham report, which is 300 pages of fact-filled documentation, Ray's official responses well those people aren't with us anymore uh i think he has to get beyond that and look at it's not just a few bad apples

there's a cultural problem and the culture has to be changed and you change the culture by making it a law enforcement organization again and the primacy in a law enforcement organization again. And the primacy in a law enforcement organization, at least the way the FBI used to be, was the Constitution. And agents used to be trained that the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, was not an obstacle to us, but it was something that we had a role in enforcing for the American people. Yeah, it seems to me like, you know, and it's not just the FBI, it seems to be pretty much a common thing throughout government,

and I would say not even just the federal government, but government workers not see themselves as servants of the people. They don't see themselves as stewards, temporary stewards of the Constitution that they've sworn to uphold just like they would swear to loyalty to a king or something. That seems to be pervasive in our society. And then when you look at the politics behind this, it appears that Christopher Wray is doing exactly what the Attorney General wants to do. And so that's a key part of the issue. How do you separate out this partisanship that begins really at the top of the Department of Justice?

The FBI is one level down, but that really is the head of the snake, isn't it? Well, frankly, perhaps these changes won't happen until a year and a half from now. And we have a change in administration and we get a new attorney general and a new director of the FBI. But internally, and a lot of people in the FBI realize this. So let me just tell you this, David. The last three or four months, of course, promoting my book, which is the title, The Fall of the FBI, I've been in Barnes & noble and other bookstores i have people walk up to me and introduce themselves as current fbi employees as people

agents who've resigned or retired from the fbi in the past few months and i've had spouses of current fbi employees come up to me and they all say to me, Tom, you got it right. Keep up what you're doing. And here's the most chilling of all. They say it's worse than you imagine. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. As a matter of fact, you know, Steve friend was there giving testimony along with some other people from the FBI. I'm not, you know, there's good people in any organization. There's going to be bad people in any organization. And that was what, um, uh, Frank Serpico said, you know, and he's talked about police corruption and that type of thing. He says, the test is whether or not the organization is going to protect the bad people or purge them out. And, and, and so, you know, these people stayed within the organization,

got purged out as Christopher Ray is saying, it's the last result. But of course, um, you know, they, they went on for a very long time and it seems to me like the people getting purged out more often than not are the good people who are blowing the whistle, who said, you know, we don't want to have a politicized national police force. And so I guess, you know, my question when I look at it, and I want to get into some of the other things that you've seen here before we start talking about the bigger issues here. You know, when you talk about phishing and looking for people's personal records, as we saw happen in the wake of January the 6th, the new things that have been brought in, technology that allows them to do geofencing warrants and that type of stuff, or just to talk

to Bank of America and say, hey, we'd like to have all the information if you'd like to turn it over to us. This goes back to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and what they were operating with at that time. They had the ability that was given to them by the courts to say for the phone company, well, these customer records are owned by you, AT&T, and if you'd like to turn them over to us, that's fine. It seems to me that's a real fundamental flaw in all of this that allows, just like the Section 702, allows them to get around any requirements for search warrants and things like that to say that your data doesn't belong to you, but if the social media company's got it, or Google's got it, or the phone company's got it, or the company's got it or the bank's got it

they can just hand that information over to you what do you think about that is that something okay well that gets where we both of us david are really getting into the weeds here now but it is important uh to step back and look at this the pfizer and similar processes that you described being used against American citizens, that's the abuse of whether or not it's legal or illegal. That's an abuse because Pfizer, as I said earlier, was created to be used only against foreigners. Now, and it has a lower standard of probable cause, if you will, to get a FISA warrant and to pursue it, because it's the kind of thing it's not intended to be used as evidence in court. It's just to gather intelligence. It should never be used against a U.S. person, period.

Now, what you alluded to as the original genesis of some of this other stuff goes back to the criminal law and the criminal law sets a higher standard and with probable cause you can go in and it used to be done routinely in criminal cases go in with a subpoena and subpoena the business records of a telephone company and that would simply show you on their business records their billings that a particular person in new york was for example calling a particular person in new jersey and the duration of the phone call and that was it but to do that you did that through the criminal process and what what's very specific about the criminal process is that eventually becomes public. The person whose records you subpoenaed, they will be advised of this after an appropriate period of time, 30 or 90 days.

So it's a whole different, it was a whole different ballgame. And the other thing a lot of people, including your very well-informed listeners, may not understand is the intrusiveness of the FISA warrant. It's not what is commonly intrusiveness of the Pfizer warrant. It's not what is commonly thought. It's not just what is commonly thought of as wiretapping, listening in on a phone call. It's a collection of all your data now in the air. So what we all use commonly now, emails, text, instant messaging, all of that is collected and vacuumed up in Pfizer or can be yeah including physical entry as they used to do about foreigners in this country they can go into your house make a surreptitious entry entry into your house and view and copy your business records and your

personal records that's all allowed under Pfizer. Pfizer was originally, I'm going to say this again, never designed to be used against U.S. persons, which covers even more than U.S. citizens. It covers legal resident aliens, and it covers U.S. corporations. They all deserve the protection of the Fourth Amendment to be secure in their place against unreasonable search and seizure. And Pfizer has suspended the Fourth Amendment, and it's being abused now, and it's being repeatedly abused. And that's something the Congress can and should address.

If they got rid of the Section 702, would that fix the flaws in Pfizer, or would it still be flawed, in your opinion? No, 702, as I understand it, is a whole other subset of information. It really goes beyond the Pfizer Act. 702 is information that principally the National Security Agency, NSA, and to a lesser extent the CIA, has gathered literally out of the air all around the world. So they're initially, and they're authorized, the NSA and the CIA, to gather information on foreigners overseas.

They're not supposed to be operational in the U.S. But of course, in gathering all this information, they pick up a lot of information on U.S. persons who are in communication all around the world with these foreigners. So their names and other data then be retained by the NSA. And what this section has allowed the FBI, the FBI analysts principally, when they're on a matter to go search through that gigantic database we don't know how gigantic but i imagine it's millions and millions and millions of facts it's not just your name and your phone number it's your social security number your email address

etc etc so what people have been saying and and in congress by the way people on both uh the democrats as well as the republicans have been saying that they need it they should have some kind of warrant some kind of procedure to get in and get out of this information um that section was put in effect once again in the panic and i'll use that word but understandable panic in the crisis after September 11. If that ability is taken away, I don't see it as a big problem because then just through the judicial process, the FBI could pursue the same or very similar intelligence. Then we get the argument back, by the way, and this is what Ray and others, the Attorney General and Ray and others have been saying in Congress. Well, it's a very useful tool. It will make it harder for us to do our job.

And the answer to that is yes, it will. But the fact is the Bill of Rights and the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendment makes it hard for law enforcement, including the cop on the beat on your corner, to do his job. But we've all adjusted to it and we all know how to work within the constitution and that's what needs to be restored. Yes, that's right. Yeah, it's paramount that our God-given rights be protected, not that we make it somebody's job easier for them. That is absolutely true. And you know, when we look at this, I've interviewed in the past, William Binney, who was a whistleblower of the NSA. He'd been global technical head. And when he talked about what

they're scooping up, you know, when you got the, the NSA is, is tapped in at, you know, the top of the internet, if you want to think of it that way, and they can extract all these emails and scan through them. And then they look at something foreign supposedly, but then they can go several different hops away from it. So they keep changing in the number of skips that they can do. So it's kind of like, you know, six degrees of separation of Kevin Bacon type of thing, except it's fewer degrees of separation from somebody that they might be interested in. And that's really, it's these types of things that, you know, they can always prevaricate around this. I think it's important that we have to have some kind of a, you know, the system is not self-policing and the system won't work if we've got corrupt individuals there.

And I think that's really the issue is what has happened. That is the issue. And what it is, most of it is an abuse. There is some illegality too, perhaps, but most of it is an abuse of authority. And what you described is what they call incidental collection. And once again, not to repeat myself, the NSA and the CIA are forbidden to be operational in the United States. Everybody agrees with that. Now, what happens, they're monitoring, you know, in the air or in the communications across Europe and Africa and elsewhere, they're monitoring certain foreign agents. And of course, what happens, it's going to happen every day, they pick up communications or information about an American who might be innocently or otherwise in communication with some foreigners.

So they pick that up incidentally. And when they pick up incidentally, if it indicates either criminal or national security interests, they're supposed, on the American citizen, they're supposed to furnish it to the FBI. And that's how the system works. Well, John Brennan, the former director of the CIA, admitted, in fact, I think we could say he bragged during the Russian collusion investigation that they engaged in, and he kind of said they routinely do this, the CIA engages in reverse targeting. And that's a clear abuse. And he explained that they're interested in a particular American, but of course, they're forbidden to investigate or to spy on, surveil that American. So what they do, the CIA, according to John a Brit or a Canadian or a Mexican. They target the foreigner with the intent to collect data on the American who

this foreigner does business with or his friends with or whatever. That's an abuse. It's not illegal, but it's an abuse and that has to be stopped and there should be sanctions put in place for that. I mentioned that in my book too, and that's something that Congress can and should do. Yeah, that's important. And again, my problem is I just don't see Congress doing anything other than holding these hearings

because they get a lot of press out of it, and it just becomes a show hearing. I don't know that it was even brought up in the hearings. I didn't see all the hearings, but I don't know that it was even brought up to get rid of Section 702 and not reauthorize it, let alone to do something about the abuse, as you just pointed out, of the reverse search, using that to target people. And then, of course yes. Yeah. And then of course we've got social media and we look at what happened with that. Now the former general counsel who is a James A. Baker, uh, no relation. Uh, he was, but he was a former general counsel of the FBI. He went to work for Twitter as a deputy general counsel. He was dismissed in December by Musk, but you know,

we have this type of situation where social media seems to me that is a whole nother category of surveillance and a police state to control. And, you know, again, we see this type of attitude that, well, you know, that it's private companies and they can do whatever they want. And when people put that information out there on social media, you know, it's public information and everybody can look at it. Everybody can scrape it. I mean, what do we do about that type of abuse that is out there? Of course, you know, somebody's going to write letters to the editor, you know, threatening

mass murder, the Unabomber or something like that. That's legitimate to get that. But it really has been abused in terms of targeting people on social media. What do we do to pull that in, in your opinion? Well, that specifically is something that I must say Congress and specifically Congressman Jordan's Judiciary Committee has started to look at. And once again, that's something that occasionally you get one or two Democrats on the committee expressing some concern about it as well.

Now, what happened with the Twitter files, it was clearly documented that the FBI was giving direction to Twitter and other social media companies to ban, to censor, to take down certain postings from U.S. citizens. And that's the most frustrating thing of all. When Christopher Wray testified a week and a half ago, he more or less tried to deny that. And the documentation for that is just overwhelming. So that's a problem that, and the congressman got back at him with specificity on that in several instances, which you probably recall. So that's something where Congress is aware.

Some of these other things we've talked about here today are so complex that not only doesn't the general public understand it, but, and I mean this with all respect, sometimes even the Congress doesn't completely understand it, and one thing that we're told repeatedly is very valuable, in addition to being told how valuable the various sections of Pfizer are, is this relationship with Britain, which goes beyond that, the five eyes. It's a secret, a lot of code words in government. But it's five nations, the United States and Britain, and also Canada and Australia

and New Zealand. It had its origins at the end of World War II in the close and personal relationship or the special relationship, I should say, between Britain and the U.S. and has been expanded. It's codified. There's several treaties about it. There's several secret agreements and understandings about it. And I think, agreements and understandings about it. And I think you know I was assigned abroad twice in the FBI. I'm very familiar with the five I's. And basically what the five I's say is two things. Number one, it's supposedly an ironclad guarantee that we will never spy on one another. And second, it's a promise that we will share our intelligence with each other.

And this is ongoing and has been ongoing. So Britain has a very powerful organization, the Government Communications Headquarters organization, in addition to the MI5 and MI6, their version of the CIA and the FBI. They have this agency that's very powerful, almost on an equal footing with the NSA, gathering up information all over the world. Okay, here's the point that's missing that a lot of people, even in Congress, don't comprehend. And let me tell you this, David, because this is something that really is an abuse. There are laws in Britain, very similar to the laws in the United States, which forbid the NSA to spy on American citizens. They have similar laws in Britain forbidding their government to spy on British subjects. Okay.

But through the Five Eyes Agreement, if we in the U.S. This happens every day. Pick up information on a British subject. The NSA can disseminate it to Britain. Information about their citizens, their subjects. And the same happens in reverse. And recently it came to light very briefly and was never pursued much by the press.

The American personality commentator, news person, Tucker Carlson, he was picked up by British. His data or voice communications, and I don't think we even know which, and that was then disseminated to the CIA and to the FBI by the Brits. It came out after Princess Diana, which I have a big section in my book about this, after Princess Diana's death, through Freedom of Information Act requests, it came out the NSA answered Freedom of Information Act requests and admitted that they had thousands of pages of transcripts

of her conversations over the years up till the day she was killed the the the us government has acknowledged that but they didn't go the next step further in the freedom of information act and and make any of that available to to the requesters when that happened in britain there was again a periodic thunderstorm in the British themselves couldn't do. And it's the exact same situation over here. That's a real abuse. That's a real danger. And I don't to be once again, to be very respectful.

I don't even think most of our congressmen understand that phenomenon. They have so many other immediate issues on their plate. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's a, that's a really good point. How they, they help each other. They're not allowed to immediate issues on their plate. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a really good point, how they help each other. They're not allowed to spy on their own citizens, but they can spy on the other country citizens and then turn it over to that country.

That's a very convenient way to work around this. And it's going on every day. Yeah, yeah. Let me ask you a little bit about what is happening. You talked about how culture and everything changed with 9-11. And, of course, you know, we've now got the FBI as an intelligence agency, essentially, instead of necessarily investigation, police work. Their focus is on that.

It seems to me like there's a great deal of overlap and competition between the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI. How is that working out? And, you know, what, what is, you've been there, what is it like when you've got these different bureaucracies, all bureaucracies are trying to create turf for themselves and, you know, areas where they're in control and grow their organization and everything. What, what are the dynamics that you've seen in terms of the competition between NSA, CIA, FBI? How does that work out? Well, you mentioned the dynamics. There is a lot of cooperation. Let me preface it by saying that.

But sometimes it becomes very difficult from the FBI point of view. And as I explained in the book, I was with what the FBI calls a legal attache and a couple of posts overseas. So I worked every day with my counterparts in these other agencies. And we have to work together. And at that time, and I assume it's similar today, the instructions to the legats from FBI headquarters repeated was that inside the embassy, we should do everything we can to cooperate with the agency and the NSA or the NSA counterparts or representatives who are there. And that's necessary for the protection of our nation. But in the FBI, we were cautioned to keep our distance from the agency outside the embassy, because in most countries, even allied countries, the CIA is viewed, appropriately so, as spies. And they're not held in as warm a number of countries, but my experience in dealing with other organizations and with other league ads over the years,

in almost all cases, the people, the law enforcement agencies and similar in these other countries. Go ahead. You can get that. That's fine. No, they want to work with the FBI. They want to help us, but they also want our help. And that's the most common phenomenon. The challenge is the CIA, you know, I mentioned them with specificity, because of their culture,

they sometimes, and some of them will admit this to you, they fall into this habit of what they call operating. And operating is what most of us in the rest of society would call lying. They're so used to operating on a daily basis, they sometimes can't stop it. And they recognize this is a problem for themselves. Some of them even talk about, and they've been counseled about this, that they go home and they continue to lie to their family, to to their spouse so it's a problem so i have run into and i documented in the book the fall of the fbi this difficulty in working with the agency even when it's some wonderful people they just fall in this thing

where they can't tell you the whole story and they can't tell you the truth and they won't tell you the whole story and we've caught them and not me, but dozens of other league heads have caught them not only lying to us, but lying to the ambassador. And the ambassador we were trained and taught is the personal representative of the president of the United States. And that's somebody you're not supposed to lie to. I've talked to John Kiriakou a number of times as a CIA whistleblower. And he said the culture in the CIA where he

worked, he said, they're looking for sociopaths. They want people who tend towards that. And so that kind of bears, uh, uh, the, the same kind of perspective as you're pointing out there. You know, when I look at all of this and of course, you know, let's talk also about nine 11. Okay. So the idea behind nine 11 was, uh,'ve got these agencies that weren't cooperating sufficiently with each other. We got to create this new thing called Homeland Security. So what did that kind of institutional thing do to the FBI and all these other agencies there? You know, how is that part of the culture change? Well, I think you're an extraordinarily well-read person. I think if you step back and look at history, this is not an unusual phenomenon that when there is a crisis, when there is a significant threat to the homeland, that measures are

put in place that when they're looked at then through the longer lens of history, we're not very wise. We're an abuse and some of it should be undone. We had that back in the beginning of World War II with the internment of Japanese citizens. That was an abuse. I think everybody agrees with that now. That shouldn't have happened. There were other things that happened that shouldn't have happened. Even going back to the American Civil War, a great man, I think he's one of the greatest presidents we ever had. I think most people agree. But even Abraham Lincoln did things, the suspension of habeas corpus and stuff like that, that were questionable, but it was in a reaction to a crisis. And unfortunately, that's what happened again in September 11th. You had Pfizer

being broadened to include American citizens, U.S. persons. You had other things being put in through the Patriot Act that people now question. And some of them have been rolled back, but some of them have just been made worse. I mean, the number of Pfizer warrants from 1978 when Pfizer started, and by the way, these statistics get published, but, you know, a year or two delay, but they get published, was about 200 a year. And it stayed in the low hundreds for several decades until after September 11. And all of a sudden you see thousands of Pfizer warrants a year, and now it's up to four or 5,000 a year, the Inspector General tells us. And a lot of them are on US persons, American citizens.

In connection with that, what also happened was initially that the Pfizer, that first Pfizer before September 11th, every Pfizer warrant, every single one had to be signed off by the director of the FBI and by the attorney general. So in the FBI, when it started under Judge William Webster, and I recall this personally, he had a, in addition to what the agents did in preparing it, then he had a crew of law clerks right in his office read every line and make sure everything was sufficient before he, a former judge, put his signature to it. Well, after September 11th, it was broadened and broadened so much that now it's not just the Attorney General and the FBI, but their authority has been delegated first to their

deputies, the Deputy Attorney General of the DAG and the Deputy Director of the FBI, but now a broader circle of people. So now there's, last I knew about it, or we could read about it in the Inspector General thing, there's a dozen people in each agency who can sign off on a FISA warrant. And we learned that one of the three FISA warrants against Carter Page was not even signed by the director of the FBI. So because it's such a quotidian entity thing, it doesn't get the attention or the seriousness that it used to get. And that, in turn, has led to more abuses. 11 years ago, I covered a case of a guy who was on the no fly list.

And, um, he'd been vetted by, uh, both, um, the FAA, cause he's working at airports and, uh, he had recently, uh, gotten some firearms and he had a concealed carry permit and all the rest of this stuff. He was going to visit his wife. Who's in the military and Japan, and he was flying concealed carry permit and all the rest of this stuff. He was going to visit his wife who's in the military in Japan, and he was flying on a military flight, and he gets to Hawaii, and as that plane is about to take off for Japan on the last leg of his flight, people come on and pull him off because he's on the no-fly list they just discovered. He couldn't figure out and couldn't get any information about how he had gotten on that list. And of course, it's a star chamber process. They won't tell you anything

other than you're on the list. They won't allow you to defend yourself or anything else like that. Now, that is also a fallout, isn't it, from FISA, the no-fly list? Is that calculated via FISA? Who puts that together specifically? Well, the no-fly list. Is that calculated via FISA? Who puts that together specifically? Well, the no-fly list was another thing created after September 11th. Yeah. And it really is separate from FISA.

And it was compiled from a lot of databases from several agencies, not just the FBI, but other agencies contributed to the no-fly list. And there were a lot of mistakes from several agencies, not just the FBI, but other agencies contributed to the no-fly list. And there were a lot of mistakes and abuses in it. And you mentioned your one friend. We actually have a family friend, a woman, very dear. In fact, she's a very liberal Democrat. I've always still friends with her. And she has a name, and I won't say her name, but it's an Irish name. And she was she was not allowed on flights she couldn't get on flights she was pulled off flights just the way your your friend was for a couple of years and

she used to travel a lot because she has adult children scattered all over the country and for that matter now scattered all over the world and this this happened out for several years and she did eventually and I don't know how she did it um she had a private attorney she eventually found out why she was on the no-fly list and she was granted a document there was a um ira uh terrorist type person female who had shared the exact same name she did similar similar date of birth, similar physical description. And that's who they were trying to keep off the... That's who should have been on a no-fly list, but instead it was this quite innocent mother of six children.

And I've always wondered, you know, where is the star chamber that puts people on the no-fly list and, you know, where you can't find out about it. That's the whole reason why. We have so many of the protections that are in the bill of rights was because people had seen this kind of, this is not new, the technology is new and things like that, but we had, you know, the star chamber that would, um, accuse people and, uh, in absentia and would try them in absentia and you wouldn't know what was going on until you got punished and you aren't allowed to find out i don't know how we get things like this uh in america as you point out it's a reaction to 9-11 and um or perhaps as many of us as i i feel like it was uh you know

essentially uh what they wanted with with 9-11 but when you look at at this this type of thing uh that's one of the key things. And that's when I, when we look at, uh, Christopher Ray before the Congress, that's just a small part and it's the most public part of it. Uh, but there's just so many things that have been put in. And as you point out, the justification is always, well, it's an emergency and we don't have time to do this properly. And we've got to grease the skids and there's a ticking time bomb somewhere, that type of stuff.

Everything has to be done quickly. There's no time for a solution. We got to, whether you're talking about the pandemic or you're talking about climate change, we don't have time to work out this stuff. We just got to wipe the slate clean here and go with our approach. And that's the only one that's going to be allowed and it gets to i think people are getting very suspicious and cynical about the motivations behind these types of things when there is always a rush and there's never uh any alternative other than the one they seem to already have in in mind uh let's talk a little bit about if you will since you you you were there at the fbi for 33 years you saw it as a police agency before everything got transformed,

as we've seen now with the 21st century is now everything is, you know, in terms of expediting the pragmatism of what they want to get done. But going back to the police thing, would the answer be to split up the FBI? Because every state has got a state bureau of investigation. Is the problem the fact that it's so centralized? Because the founders of this country were always concerned about centralization and the subsequent abuse of power when you centralize things. Should we have even the investigative powers of this centralized, in your opinion?

I would not advocate that traditionally how investigations will run in the fbi was uh from field office management we had the system the office of origin system one field office ran the case when other field officers got leads in that case they were called the auxiliary office a a field agent had the case he He was the case agent. He had a field supervisor looking over his shoulder. Ultimately, the special agent in charge of that office looked over him, and only then it went to headquarters. Mueller changed that for the first time and ran the response to September 11th attacks, which the FBI code named Pent Bomb for Pentagon, Pennsylvania bombings, ran that from headquarters. In opposition, all the bureau executives told him

this is not the way to do things, but he wouldn't listen. That was followed again by Comey, his handpicked successor, in the Hillary Clinton email and then the Russian collusion investigation. That led to a lot of the errors and mistakes that were made because you had the same people making the decisions in the case as actually carrying out the investigation. So you had this Peter Strzok who opened the case, wrote the opening communication on a Sunday, approved it, signed it out himself, and on Monday left, went to London to conduct the first interview in that investigation. That was bound to end badly. There were no layers of supervision. I am told by FBI executives today that they have recognized that problem and they've corrected that,

and they're going to run things through the traditional field office model. Well, and so, you know, again, your history is of the FBI. You know, we're there for 33 years. You talk about kidnappings and bank robberies and things like that. But, you know, what is the, again, make a case for why we need to have a federal Bureau of investigation because prior to, you know, the early 20th century, the Palmer raids, uh, you know, as, as we're getting into world war one, Jager Hoover ran the Palmer raids. And then subsequent to that, they created the FBI, uh, prior to that though, law enforcement had been essentially local. You know a few things like the Secret Service that would look at counterfeit operations and things like that.

But for the most part, law enforcement was done at the local level, even with sheriffs who were elected and accountable, and in many cases would work with the people of the community as a posse if you had a bank robbery. But now the bank robbery is an FBI thing, and it's done within their jurisdiction, and it's a federal crime that they investigate. But why do we need to do it that way? Would it be better for us to... I make this argument when we talk about education.

Everybody says, well, we can't close the schools as they are. And I say, well, you would still need the teachers. You're still going to need detectives who are out there. You're still going to need law enforcement people. It's just that you would change the structure of this, and the teachers might be working directly for the parents or a group of parents rather than working for a large bureaucracy. What would make the case against why that would not be what we would want to do with law enforcement?

Well, you touched on the history, and a lot of this goes back to history. And law enforcement in the United States has always been a state and local matter, still is primarily. Most policing, most law enforcement in the United States is still done at the state and local level. The Department of Justice in the early part of the 20th century, there were only a few federal criminal charges. And what you all pointed out, most of them were tax matters and things like that, crimes against the federal government. What happened in the 30s, the 20s, the 30s, and into the 40s, we had the advent of highways, not quite interstate highways, but highways. You had the advent of the automobile, people traveling interstate. So you had the gangster era. People were robbing a bank in

one state and fleeing to another state. They were stealing cars and taking them to another state. So using the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution, and once again, everything goes back to the Constitution, a series of federal laws over the decades have been created. First one, of course, making interstate transportation of stolen motor vehicles a federal crime. Interstate transportation of stolen property a federal crime. Theft from interstate shipment. The railroads were very important at one time. And all of this jurisdiction was given to the FBI.

So the FBI still was and still is a very limited organization. There's about maybe now 11,000 or 12,000 FBI agents, and they focus on just those few federal crimes. Bank robberies were made a federal crime because the banks were federally chartered. And of course, there was a plague of bank robberies. In most instances around the country, the FBI criminal investigations are most often connected in collaboration with the state and local police. So I would suggest that we keep that model. Yeah, it's interesting. When we go back and we look at it, it's, as you pointed out, we've now had things that are crossing across state lines. It's just that, you know, as we've been talking about the FBI,

it seems like they've crossed the lines of the Constitution in so many different ways that you almost feel like when we've got state bureaus of investigation, clearly, you know, people could be doing a lot of this same type of stuff there and coordinating. You know, we had, I think part of the problem is really Congress, because as Harvey Silverglate and other people have pointed out, you know, a felony a day, you know, so many people are, there were so, so many federal laws that are out there, uh, that it's pretty hard to, uh, go through a day without knowingly, uh, or unknowingly committing a felony, uh, because there's so many thousands of them out there. And, and part of that

is again, it's, it's the Congress that has done that and doing it because I think the American public demands it. You and I, when we were kids, we used to have jokes. We'll don't make a federal case out of it. Well, they've made a federal case out of pretty much everything now. And, uh, they think there ought to be a law to control every type of behavior and it ought to be a federal law. And so I think that's one of the reasons why we have seen this kind of metastasizing of these, these agencies that are there.

And I think, you know, when you start to get all this, this power and everything concentrated in one place, it seems like that also invites the kind of corruption that we've seen. But it certainly has been interesting talking to you. And you do have a handle on what needs to be done in terms of reform of the FBI. It's just, you know, I'm just pessimistic that we're going to see anything done by the Congress, that we're going to see the FBI just do any kind of self-reform. I think it's going to have to come from the outside. I just I don't see it happening within the federal government. It seems like everybody's pretty happy with the way the system is. I know. But you're a little bit more optimistic that maybe something will happen with what with Congress in terms of changing things. I have to be optimistic. I fear you may

be correct, David, but I have to be optimistic and I will continue to keep urging reform. Well, it's important that we understand what the problems are because we don't understand that we never will solve the problem at any level. I think that's the key thing. And so thank you so much for pointing out the problems and showing what has been happening, as many of us have seen, with Mueller and Comey, Strzok, and all the rest of these people. It's just amazing to see what has happened, and it is amazing to see how they have taken the FISA law

that was meant to restrict these types of activities and used it to actually enable them. And that's one of the most, every time I see it, I just shake my head and just have to laugh at the audacity of this, that they can take these structures that were supposed to control them and use it as a get out of jail free card when they violate search warrants and everything else. It truly is amazing. But thank you so much. And again, the book is, let me get back to the title here, The Fall of the FBI, Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy. Thank you so much. Thomas J. Baker is the author, and you can find this at Amazon, or do you have a website where people can buy this directly? Yes, of course, most people use Amazon, but it's in many Barnes and Noble. And it's also, you can go to my website, thomasjbakerbook.com.

Okay. And that'll lead you to other places to get it. Good. thomasjbakerbook.com. Thank you so much, Mr. Baker. I appreciate that. Thank you so much, David. Well, that's it for today's broadcast. And I cannot thank all of you enough for your contributions. Thank you so much for supporting the show. And again, you will be in good hands with Gard and with Tony for this next week as we travel to Texas for a family wedding. Thank you. Have a good week. See you when we get back.