The Eric Metaxas Show - Thomas Baker

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

Thomas Baker gets us caught up on the behind-the-scenes of our out-of-control alphabet agencies with his book, "The Fall of the FBI: How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy."

Folks, welcome to the Eric Metaxus show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Metaxis show. It's the show featuring Go-Go-Go the chimp. Nothing like a chimp to liven up the radio show. Easy there. Go-go, go, go. Go-go. No, go-go. No. Hey there, folks. Happy Flag Day.

Did you know it was Flag Day? Shame on you. Flag Day, I've known it was Flag Day since 1973, when it was Flag Day, 1973. I wrote about it in my book. If you can keep it, the Forgotten Promise of American Liberty. And it has always had this magical appeal to me. If you're signed up for my newsletter at Eric Mataxis. I sent out an excerpt today, the excerpt from my book.

So if you don't want to buy the book, if you can keep it, and shame on you for that. But if you don't want to, you can read all about what I say about Flag Day in today's email newsletter. It's a very moving memory in my life when I learned in 1973 about Flag Day. And so I memorialize it in my book, if you can keep it. And also in my book, Fish Out of Water, which is my memoir. And I ought to mention, well, I want to mention many things. Number one, I want to say that in hour two today, we have our friend Chris Reed, the prophetic Chris Reed, the amazing Chris Reed from Morningstar Ministries for the whole hour in hour two.

You really don't want to miss that at all. Believe me, because we already did the interview yesterday, and I promise you. you don't want to miss it. In our one today, I'll be talking to Thomas J. Baker. That's the author's name in real life. He goes by Tom. But I'm going to be talking to Thomas J. Baker about a book we've discussed on this program, which unfortunately is ripped out of the headlines. It's called the fall of the FBI, how a once great agency became a threat to democracy. But I do want to say again that it is Flag Day. And it is also bizarrely, I mean, bizarrely, it is also the birthday of President Trump. Some of you saw last night his remarks at the Bedminster Club that's

kind of like Moralago North following what happened in Miami yesterday, which is so scandalous and so hard for me to process as an American. And I say this to anybody, meaning like, Look, you could hate Trump, but if you aren't bothered by the weaponization of what we used to call our government agencies, you're not paying attention because, you know, this is going to come for you and for me. It doesn't matter where we are. So yesterday was just such an extraordinary day in American history. So I'm glad to think that today, it's Flag Day. I'd like to think that President Trump's birthday today would be better than the day he had yesterday, which would be very easy. In any event, lots more to say.

Before we get to our guest, let me remind you, we have a film that we're promoting at SalemNow.com. Some of you know of it. It's nefarious. It's kind of like screw tape letters meets what, I don't know, meets Silence of the Lambs. but that sounds way darker than the film. But it's nefarious. It is based on the book by Steve Dase, who's been on the program many times talking about it.

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with Chris Reed. of Morningstar. But right now, I have the joy of speaking again with Tom, well, Thomas J. Baker, the author of The Fall of the FBI, how a once-grade agency became a threat to democracy. Tom, welcome back. Thank you for having me, Eric. Listen, you know, when people say something's ripped out of the headlines, it becomes a cliche, except you and I have spoken about your book on this program before, and it was such an important conversation. I said, if you're local, if you're New Yorka, you've got to come back

because this is not something that is, you know, a small thing. This is a monster thing. This is at the center of the narrative through which we are living as Americans. So, you know, I want you to help my audience understand the big picture, as you did the last time we were together in the book. but I also want you to talk about what happened yesterday, what has been happening, seems to use the cliche, surreal.

You think I've always known that there was corruption. I've always known that there are bad actors, you know, there's bad cops, there's all kinds, that we've always had sin and human frailty. But it seems to have gone to a level

that most of us wouldn't think it could have in in in America and so I I I just before we get into the book uh in detail the fall of the FBI just any any initial thoughts on on you know what what happened yesterday or what's been happening recently well what happened yesterday and you're referring specifically to the the pleading of Trump after his indictment it's it's a tragic day in a hit in a history everybody says that it sounds like a cliche um what makes it difficult, from my perspective where I was trying to examine and point out what's gone wrong with the FBI specifically and more broadly the whole system of justice, what makes it difficult

is, frankly, Trump himself, some of this stuff he walked into. Yeah. But having said that, there's always been, there's several things wrong with the current situation. There's always been what we call in the United States of America, the justice system, prosecutorial discretion. That means the prosecutors don't always have to come down with a big hammer. Lesser things happen. With this particular whole episode of these documents, and as I said, Trump sometimes makes it difficult to defend him. Right. It's, it still baffles me why he had the documents there and why he behaved as he did with them. Having said that, the initial action of the FBI was definitely an overreach, definitely an abuse. And I'm talking about executing a search warrant at his residence and searching

it in that fashion. They should have continued negotiations. They, the government, should have continued negotiations. They could have used a subpoena. They could have used less intrusive means than a search warrant. That was the first thing that bothered me about this. It turns out now what some of us suspected all along. The agent in charge of Washington Field Office at that time, who had the investigation, it was being run out of the Washington Field Office, objected to the idea of a search warrant. He asked questions and got very bad answers.

He testified to this last Friday in the House of Representatives. He asked, who's the assistant attorney in the Southern District of Florida that we should be coordinating with? He was told, we're not involving the Southern District of Florida. We're not involving the Miami office of the FBI. This is all being run out of Maine DOJ. And as he said to Congress on Friday, they didn't learn the lessons of the crossfire hurricane investigation.

That's the investigation of the Trump campaign, where one of the main errors operationally was it was all run from headquarters without input from the field. That's the first thing that bothered me about this. Well, when you say from headquarters, that's, to my mind, that's the narrative, is that you've got folks at the top who have politicized things, because you hear this over and over.

Well, you know what? The agents on the ground, the agents in the field, they're the same as they ever were. But somehow the folks at the top have gotten so politicized that they aren't interested in the facts from the field or whatever. They have a narrative and they want to get it done and they're going to do what they need to do, which to most Americans is a scary thing.

It's an accrual of power. Yes. And I make this point in the book, and I'll make this point to you now. A lot of these things that happened in the last few days go back to the original error, the original point of the Bureau getting off track under Bob Mueller, when he was Bob Mueller of Special Counsel Fame, when he was director, he pulled in the September 11th investigations into headquarters, ran it out of headquarters, even though the veteran agents were telling him this is not the way we do things.

then his handpicked successor, James Comey, probably the worst director of the FBI ever had. Also a bum, because I want to be technical. Go ahead. Okay. He continued in the Hillary Clinton email investigation and then Crossfire Hurricane, the Russian collusion investigation, to run it from headquarters. What that did, it's very significant. Traditionally in the FBI, and Mueller wouldn't buy this. You know what? I always love cutting people off in the middle of a sentence. I am so sorry. Thomas J. Baker's.

My guest will let him finish that sentence on the other side of the break. The book is the fall of the FBI. Every day, the parallel economy grows bigger and bigger. It's powered by everyday Americans who are sick and tired of all the woke propaganda being jammed into every product they consume. Big mobile companies are no different. For years, they've been dumping millions into leftist causes, and we had to take it because you needed a cell phone,

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Talking to Thomas J. Baker, author of the fall of the FBI, how a once-grade agency became a threatened democracy. You were just in the middle of a vital sentence, and we had to go to a break. Please forgive me for interrupting and please continue saying what you were just saying. Okay, traditionally in the FBI,

cases will run out of the field. And a particular field office, let us say New York City, was designated the Office of Origin in a case. They would send out leads to other offices, designated the auxiliary office AO. A case agent in the field would run that case and be responsible for it. He had looking over his shoulder,

a field supervisor in that field office. Then you had the agent in charge of that field office looking over them. Only then did it go to headquarters where there was separate, cool, cold, calculating oversight. What Mueller did, and then, Tommy continued in Crossfire Hurricane was to eliminate all those layers of review and independent judgment. It was bound to end badly, and it did. All right. I want to remind my audience with whom I'm talking.

Thomas J. Baker has over 33 years of investigative management experience as an FBI special agent. And it goes on from there. you were the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI Washington Field Office, one of the first agents on the scene. When Reagan was shot, holy cow, that's a couple of years ago. Seems like yesterday in some ways. This is now 42 years ago, 41 years ago. I can't believe it.

Right outside the Washington Hilton, I've been there many, many times. So were you based in D.C. at that point? Yes, I was in the Washington Field Office. was the assistant agent in charge in the Washington field office at that time. And through circumstance, I happened to be out and about in my car that day, not far from the Washington Hilton. When I heard it happen, I reported to the scene. Turns out I was the first FBI agent on the scene. The FBI is responsible for investigating assaults on the president. I knew from that instant it was a historic case and we had to do it right. It was a very stressful situation in those first minutes, as you can

imagine? Well, yes, I can imagine. There's a lot that goes through my head when I think about the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. I mean, it's an extraordinary thing because when we think about how I would say God used him in history, the idea that he might have been murdered in cold blood before he got a chance to do anything is chilling. But I believe in Providence with the capital P. And I think that it is amazing to look back at what might have been had he not had the opportunity to do what he did. I write in my most recent book about, you know, him bringing down the, you know, him ending the Cold War, winning the Cold War. It's, it's really hard to believe sometimes that things like this happen. But the idea that you were literally the first FBI agent on the

seen. You were obviously a very young man at the time. Yes. I mean, that must have been chilling to you. Well, it was. And I explained in the book, and this is all now on the historical record, but it wasn't at the time, is we had just been told in just in the preceding 48 hours in the Washington Field Office that there was a heightened sense of alert. The national decision makers, i.e. the White House, knew that Russia was gearing up to crush the Polish Solidarity movement. And there was a great deal of concern about that, that there might actually be a military invasion of Poland. And also at what I didn't know until days later, what people in the White

House knew is within that preceding 24 hours, the Russians had moved what they call their picket line of ballistic missile submarines that they keep on both our coasts. They stayed a certain distance away in the past, and they had just moved in closer. This is. is what had people like Alexander Hague and others in a heightened sense of alarm. So we knew there was heightened sense of tension with Russia. And when the president was shot, that's the first things we started to think about. Now, we all know today that Hinkley was a deranged young man, a sad case, basically. Yeah. But in those first hours, we didn't know that. We didn't know if someone else was going to be shot. We didn't know what was going to happen. So we responded to

as if it were a crises. And what made it a little more complicated is the agent in charge of Washington field office and the director of the FBI were both out of town at an offside at a retreat. So I was literally in charge all by myself for hours. And the president of the United States, of course, had just been shot. The vice president was out of touch. George H.W. Bush was in check. But what does it matter? Because Al Hague is in charge.

We forgot. We forgot who was in charge. Most people, you know, many people listening to the program are too young to get the reference, but this is like such a famous moment when Al Haig, I mean, a lot of people don't even remember who that is, but a gigantic figure in American politics and history over those decades sort of arrogates to himself this role of I'm in charge here. What was he, the attorney general? I can't even remember.

He was the Secretary of State at that moment. Of course. Of course. Secretary of State, he's like, all right, I'm in charge. charge here, which became kind of a joke over the years. But this is an international crisis. It is. It was. It truly was. And so he steps up to say, you know, according to the Constitution, I'm here. Yeah. Secretary of State. A good thing that day we learned. We had been trained in our training as agents, and it turns out the Secret Service had been as well about the Kennedy

assassination, which in the end turned out to be, quite frankly, a law enforcement fiasco. The FBI, the Secret Service, the Dallas police, the sheriffs, they were all fighting with each other. Nobody knew who was in charge. And in fact, at that point, it wasn't a crime to assault, a federal crime, to assault the President of the United States. That had all changed. So I knew now the FBI was going to have to run this investigation.

and I was afraid in that two or three minutes before I got to the scene when I heard it on the radio, I was afraid that I'd run into some kind of a turf war. It didn't happen at all. The head of the Secret Service, the head of the homicide section of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department were there. They ran up to me. They said, you're in charge now. And I looked around, and I had separately in the past, shown up. but crime scenes, normally bank robberies in D.C.,

and there was always a half-dozen agents there ahead of me that I could give instructions to. Turned out, I looked around. I was the only agent there. I've got to ask you, how old were you? Oh, I was still in my 20s. I was only 27 or 28 at the time. This is unbelievable. You're a kid.

Exactly. I realize that now. And I realize now, being my age, you're a kid. And you show up and you're the number one and only guy there with the agency. in charge of the investigation? One by one agents showed up. We gave assignments. There's a lot of, it's a rather long chapter in the book,

and people will actually enjoy and learn a lot from reading it. Eric, what I tried to do in that book, a sub-theme of it is the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I tried to show the good of the FBI in the past. I didn't want the whole book to be a downer. Yeah. And there was echoes of what was about to happen in the last three or four years. And then I look back at it how it had been.

There were so many things, even in that case, that were... One thing I'll tell you right now, at the end of that case, our agents were writing up their investigation on this form FD302, which has been in the news lately. And they're writing up their reports of their investigation. And a friend of mine who was a high-ranking individual in the U.S. Secret Service came to me because we were furnishing them copies of our rights. reports in an effort to be cooperative. And he said, you're going to have to change some of these.

They make the agents, they make the service look bad. And I said to him, we just don't do that. And that was the answer to him at the time. And that echoed in my head when later crossfire hurricane happened. And we learned that these two individuals who went over and interviewed General Flynn in the White House, that they had people back in FBI headquarters editing their FD302, their report of the interview. That is like unthinkable to us. Because we haven't lived in the former Soviet Union. That's the only problem or in East Germany.

Look, anybody who loves America, you don't even have to be an American, you would find these things to be despicable, totally despicable. And anyone who would oversee these things or look the other way in not overseeing them, is similarly despicable and needs to be denounced. This is the end of America, unless you deal with these things, because we the people depend on people following at least these rules. So the idea that that could have happened, I think many Americans are waking up to this,

that it's day by day. There are people, you know, some of them are going to read your book, The Fall of the FBI, and that'll be part of their process, that you put these things together and you think how, you know, your book is the fall of the FBI, how once great agency became a threat to democracy, the arc of this, how we allowed this to happen and how if we don't get serious about it yesterday, it's over. This is very important. I have the privilege of speaking to Thomas Jay Baker.

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Legacy pm investments.com. Check it out. You don't want to miss what we have coming up in hour two. Trust me on that one. But right now, we're an hour one. And you're not missing this because you're listening to my voice right now. This is the show. I'm talking to Thomas J. Baker, the author of an extraordinary book, a very important book,

The Fall of the FBI, how a once great agency became a threat to democracy. You are, in my mind, the face of the FBI to most Americans through the decades, a loyal, patriotic American doing very difficult, often dangerous work. So I think that it hurts you more than it hurts us to see this agency, which it was always flawed. But the point is it was usually doing really good, important work to see it become what it's become. When you mentioned Comey, it's a stunning thing to me that. somebody could be so magnificently arrogant as to do what he did. I mean, it's one thing to badmouth Hoover. But my goodness, did we learn no lessons over the decades? The idea that James Comey,

who still thinks very highly of himself, would be able in the modern era to politicize something that is so much bigger than him, that affects everything. Can you speculate on how folks like this could have allowed things to get out of hand, could have allowed themselves to participate in things like this, what you just described with Crossfire Hurricane? You used the word arrogance, and that certainly is part of it. And you made the comparison, or you made the reference to Jaya Gah Hoover. Comey was, in my assessment, the worst director,

the FBI ever had, and he did the most damage to the FBI and its reputation, far greater to Jay Agahouva. Jayahouva had almost half a century to commit some errors. Komi did his damage in a couple of years, and his damage was fundamental. He set a standard. Example, when he stood up, usurped the role of the United States attorney or the attorney general, either one, stood up and pardoned effectively Hillary Clinton in an email investigation. Now, maybe at the end of the day, she should not have been prosecuted. But it wasn't his role to do that, and he stood up and did that in his arrogance. He set a lot of bad standards.

He was a very arrogant person. One little telling thing in there, which is not as bad as the things you're referencing, or I'm referencing now about him that I learned from several people at the meeting, when Bob Mueller, the outgoing director, was at a meeting of the senior executive conference of the FBI, which is like the 12 or 14 assistant directors sitting around the table together. And he told them that Colmy's definitely going to be the guy. And then he told them, jokingly, in a jocular fashion, that Colmy had some initial hesitation.

Because at the time, remember, Colmy was the Deputy Attorney General. And Colmy said to Muller, I'd love to run the Bureau, but it would be a step down for me from Deputy Attorney General. And Comey explained to the executive conference, No, I drew on a napkin for him that the director of the FBI reports directly to the Attorney General bypassing the DAG, the Deputy Attorney General. And only when he saw that napkin did he say, oh, yeah, I'll take the job. And of course, Mueller laughed and the people around the room laughed. But that shows you the arrogance of the guy.

You can show the arrogance on a napkin. You can just a quick diagram to illustrate arrogance. Arrogance is a scary thing. it's pride, ladies and gentlemen, in case you want another shorter version of the word, pride, arrogance, hubris. That is what the founders tried to create in giving us a government with checks and balances, because they knew that human nature is to do that. And you can understand how somebody like Hoover who creates something and then oversees it for 40 years, how he would slowly become arrogant or some sort of something.

somehow power hungry, whatever you want to say. But the idea that Mueller would have been there so quickly and still carries himself with an air of superciliousness, it looks like to me. I want to read a quote. Molly Hemingway, as a friend, has been on the program many times. And she wrote an endorsement of the book I'm holding in my hand as I speak to the author Thomas Baker, the fall of the FBI. Molly Hemingway says the failures and political corruption of the FBI have become undeniable in recent years. The incredible insight from Thomas Baker's 33-year career at the Bureau and his eye-opening reporting make the fall of the FBI a book only he could have written its essential reading for the rest of us who want to know what went wrong and wonder if the FBI can be saved. on my Twitter account, I routinely put hashtag defund the FBI, not merely to be provocative,

but sometimes I'm just so astonished at what has happened to some of these agencies that I think you've got to start from the beginning to drain the swamp. You've got to drain the swamp. And I hope and pray that Trump has been used and abused enough that if he gets back in, which I think he will, he would take this seriously because I don't know how you. move forward at this moment? Well, it's a fantastic, a tremendous challenge. I have asserted, and I assert in the book, that the culture has to be changed. The damage Mueller did and Comey in deliberately, deliberately changing the FBI culture.

The FBI had always had a culture of a law enforcement, a law enforcement mentality. And when you're in law enforcement, if you're doing things right, you live every day for the day that, when the day comes that you have to stand up in court, raise your right hand and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That's very different than an intelligence culture, which is how Mueller changed the FBI. We're going to talk more about this. The book is The Fall of the FBI. Thomas J. Baker.

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Take advantage of this amazing offer. Go to MyPillow.com and click on the radio podcast Square and use promo code Metaxus at checkout. You can also find deep discounts in all My Pillo products, including the My Pillar 2.0 mattress topper and MyPillow. towel sets. Don't wait any longer to get the best sleep of your life. Take advantage of this amazing offer. Go to mypillow.com and click on the radio podcast square and use promo code Eric at checkout. Don't wait any longer to get the best sleep of your life. Call 800-978-3057 or go to mypillow.com now and use promo code Eric. Welcome back talking to Thomas. Jay Baker. The book is the fall of the FBI. You were just talking about how the culture of the FBI was once.

what it was, but then it became infected by the intelligence agency culture. How did that happen? Who oversaw that? It was started with Mueller. Mulla was made the FBI, Bob Mueller of Special Counsel fame, was made the FBI director only a few days before the September 11th attacks, which happened on a Tuesday. That Saturday morning, he was summoned to Camp David by President George W. Bush to, he thought, to give a report of the FBI's investigation. So essentially, there were about three and a half days between that Tuesday attack and that Saturday morning. Mueller gave the report, and the report was absolutely outstanding. In these three and a half days, the FBI had done what it does best, investigate,

and they had identified all 19 hijackers, their financing, their travel, their associates, their connections back to al-Qaeda. And when he was finished with this report, he expected to, And he's told us this. He expected praise and thanks. Instead, George W. Bush looked at him and said, I don't care about that. I only want to know how you're going to prevent the next one. Later that morning, George Tenant of the CIA presented a plan of action going forward.

Bush, when he was done talking, Bush said, that's great. He turned and faced Comey and said. Comey. Excuse me. He turned and faced Mueller. I misspoke. He turned and faced Bob Mueller. and he said, that's what I want to hear.

Mueller said he left that meeting, bound and determined to change the FBI's culture, and that's a word he used, from that of a law enforcement agency to the culture of intelligence. Now, some people could make an argument after September 11th. There might have been a need for some of that. But it had bad consequences, terribly bad consequences that bad evil fruit down the road. Well, this is always the way it works, right? In other words, when you have a crisis, that's the opportunity for everybody to go, throw all the rules out.

But usually that ends poorly because the reason you have the rules is for when there's a crisis, say, well, this is the book that we follow. We've got to be very careful. We can't change the Constitution. We can't change. This is why we have these rules. And when somebody becomes consumed with fear or with their own legacy or with their own, whatever it was, whatever a deadly cocktail that got George Bush out over his skis. That's what leads to this kind of thing. But it is extraordinary because you can understand, well, there's some wisdom in this idea that

we need to be investigating. We need to be involved in this kind of stuff. But it somehow raises the specter of al-Qaeda and this threat. It just wipes everything else out. And that's where you get the Patriot Act. That's what you get all kinds of things because you say, well, we're in an emergency. It just like happened with COVID. It's like we're going to throw rules out. The government's going to have way more power than they ought to have. And it will never, it never goes well. Eric, you're exactly right.

And that's a good, you're exactly right. One of the things that I believe has to happen is the culture of the FBI has to be restored. Unfortunately, each time one of these bad things comes to light, whether it's the actions of the people in Crossfire Hurricane, Comey, McCabe, struck, other incidents since then, the gymnast case, the deep-sixing of the Hunter Biden investigation, all of these things. The current management of the FBI, Director Ray, he says, well, we got rid of those people. They were fired or they were allowed to walk out the door. and they're refusing to look at that there's a cultural problem. It's not just a few rotten apples.

The FBI and any human organization in corporate government, whatever, always has a few rotten apples. But that's not the case now with the FBI. It's beyond rotten apples. It's a rotten culture, and the culture has to be converted. Well, yeah. I mean, Ray should be forced to walk the plank, preferably 10 times. I cannot imagine how folks like this.

I mean, when you talk about the overlooking of the Hunter Biden laptop, it doesn't get bigger than that. Whenever people compare corruption to Watergate, I think Watergate is a joke. Watergate is a molehill compared to these mountains. There's nothing to compare with this level of corruption and power, frankly, the power to take something that big and to bury it or to say we're effectively going to bury it. Eric, you're absolutely right. And even before we get to the Hunter Biden and all the Biden matters, the recent, it's recently, only about four weeks ago now, a report from John Durham, the special prosecutor, his report, when anybody takes the time to read that 300 plus page report, you realize that Russian collusion investigation, the sham that it was, was bigger than Watergate. There was absolutely no reason to begin that investigation. Dureham makes that clear. And that certainly alone was bigger than Watergate. Now you have deliberate, and they let one guy walk out the door in Washington Field over this,

deliberate deep-sixing of the Hunter. We'll call it Hunter Biden at this point the information from the laptop. But now we know there's more information, thanks to the House of Representatives, there's more information about the Biden's coming forward, tangible information about well over 100 suspicious activity reports, money transfers between banks, ending up in a number of the members of the Biden family. And yet that is getting so little attention, not only by the FBI, but even by the general press. Well, again, you're talking about things that this is why even to mention Watergate, Watergate is the common cold. compared to the bubonic plague that we're talking about.

This is so much more dramatic. And I think that there's a time you realize that people have just gone nuts. In other words, the media, generally speaking, the culture of Washington, these people are somehow so convinced that Donald Trump is evil and a threat to democracy that they will do anything. Every rule has been thrown out the window. They don't care how they win. All they care about is winning.

And that is the end of America. You cannot have the United States of America on the founder's vision. If you do not care about the founding principles, and these folks, if they're familiar with the founding principles, they've thrown them away. And we are, we're at a moment

like we've never been in before. We'll be right back. We're talking to Thomas Baker about his book, The Fall of the FBI. Welcome back. Final segment with my guest, Thomas J. Baker, the book, very important. The fall of the FBI, how a once great agency became a threat to democracy. So what else? Well, you mentioned first principles, Eric, in the last segment. And that's what the FBI has to get back to. And to me, that means the U.S. Constitution.

And in our training years ago as special agents, that had primacy. That was central. When we went through new agents training, all of our classroom work was around the Constitution. We went out to the field to Quantigo for firearms training and things like that. But in the classroom, for almost three months, it was the Constitution. We had wonderful agent instructors, agent attorneys who were our instructors. And they taught us the bill of the bill of, rights and they taught us specifically the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. And they said to us,

and some people find this shocking, I've had defense attorneys, can't believe it when I tell them this, that a law enforcement agency trained like this. These instructors told us that the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, we should not view as an obstacle to getting our job done. We should embrace them. And later, when we finished, they gave each of us a pocket copy of the Constitution. And this one instructor I remember, he said, and he called us boys, because we're all men then, he said, keep the pocket copy of the Constitution in your breast pocket. And when you're out there interviewing a citizen or searching somebody's home, if the Constitution is in your pocket, it's very unlikely that you'll ever go off the rails,

that you'll ever do something out of order. Now, that sounds corny to some people today, but that's how we were trained, and that's how most of us behave. Hey, if it sounds corny to you, you're part of the problem, ladies and gentlemen, because that's how far we've come when you had that kind of respect for this thing we call law, the Constitution. Yes. I mean, I got to tell you, I get choked up listening to you tell that story. Well, and that is why I wrote this book, but I feel heartbroken thinking about what's become of the FBI today.

Well, you know, you're talking about the late 70s. You're talking about an era where we had already seen the denigration of the Constitution through a Supreme Court that had already drifted from originalism. So, you know, the seeds of these things have been there, there for a long time. It's taken a long, long time. But we know that when you were a young man, the FBI still understood the primacy, that we're a nation of laws, and we take that extremely seriously

because we understand we have nothing else. We're sawing the branch that we're sitting on if we don't take that seriously. But the idea that he would tell you to keep the Constitution in your pocket, that is amazing. Do you do tell that story in the book? Absolutely, that's key.

Just got a minute left. Thomas Baker, final thoughts? Final thoughts is, this is not a problem of a few bad individuals, bad apples. The culture of the FBI has to change. That has to come from within the FBI. There is a role for Congress. They do have the threat of a budget. They also have a, they're re-uping, and they will have opportunities again to re-up parts of the Pfizer Act. The Pfizer Act was abused in this whole story, and that's something that can be changed, restoring Pfizer to its original purpose

of surveilling foreign agents, not U.S. citizens. That's key to. Yeah, that's pretty key. Well, just so glad to have had this hour with you. I hope people will get the book. The fall of the FBI, how once great agency became a threat to democracy. We all need to educate ourselves, folks. We all need to be part of the solution in holding our representatives' collective feet to the fire so that we can be a nation of integrity and laws. Thomas J. Baker, congratulations. Congratulations on the book, The Fall of the FBI. And thank you for your time. Thank you, Eric, and thank for all the good you do.