The Megyn Kelly Show - Ronald Reagan Assassination Attempt: History Week on The Megyn Kelly Show | Ep. 456

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

It's History Week on The Megyn Kelly Show! Today, Megyn Kelly is joined by Tom Baker, FBI special agent of 30 years, to talk about the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, the shooter John Hinckley Jr, Baker's position and response to the event with the FBI, Hinckley’s obsession with actress Jodie Foster, the trial of John Hinckley Jr., the demeanor of President Ronald Reagan, Reagan forgiving Hinckley, Hinckley’s release from an institution, the changing culture n the FBI, how the FBI can get back on the right path, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. It's History Week on this program where we are bringing you a week of deep dives on important events throughout American and world history. I'm so excited for this. Today, we are looking at the 1981 attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan had been president less than 70 days when he was shot while leaving the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. The gunman, John Hinckley Jr., was just feet away, and the president was wounded when one of the bullets ricocheted off the limousine and struck him under the left armpit. Three others were also injured that day,

including Press Secretary James Brady. After 12 days in the hospital, President Reagan was able to return to the White House, but the investigation into the shooter John Hinkley Jr. had just begun. Our guest today, Thomas Baker, was the first FBI agent on the scene of the attempted assassination in 1981. He's an international law enforcement consultant who served as a special agent in the FBI for more than 30 years. And he is author of the new book, The Fall of the FBI and also gives us an inside look on what transpired that day to the impact it had for years to come and right up to the FBI today. Tom, welcome to the show. Glad to be with you. The pleasure's all mine. I'm really looking forward to this discussion.

So I remember this event that we're going to kick this interview off with because I was a 10-year-old girl living in upstate New York and I remember exactly event that we're going to kick this interview off with because I was a 10 year old girl living in upstate New York. And I remember exactly where I was, even as a young girl, when the news hit that President Reagan had been shot. And it was such a huge deal. This is back in, of course, 1981, before we all had cell phones. People were running out on their their front porches and yelling it to each other down the road. Like President Reagan's been shot. President Reagan's been shot, which is how I learned about it. It was a very scary time. You were much, much closer to it than that. So let's just start with where you were that day and how things unfolded for you. And then we'll get

into Hinckley and his background. At the moment when the shooting happened, I had been at a meeting and I was in my own car, my bureau car, government car, emerging onto the street. And I had the commercial radio on. I was listening to the WMAL in Washington that time, news and music. And as I'm emerging onto the street, I hear a flash that President Reagan has just been shot in front of the Hilton Hotel. So I immediately got on the Bureau radio, the net to the Washington field office. And I asked which Hilton is the incident at? Because in Washington, DC, as you probably know, there are two major Hiltons, the Washington Hilton and the Capitol Hilton. They were both north of my location, and I started in that direction. But it turned out that there were a lot of reporters with the president,

President Reagan, at the time he was shot. So the news was instantaneous. So when I asked the field office, which expecting a response to where it was, they didn't know they hadn't heard about it yet. And they kept saying to me, what incident are you talking about? And I finally just broke protocol and I screamed out, the president's been shot in front of the Hilton Hotel. Eventually I heard on the commercial radio, it was the Washington Hilton, and I continued there. And I probably got there in only three or four minutes. But that's where I was at the time when this all came about. I mean, 1981 wasn't that far after 1963 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And so I'm sure there were a lot of guys,

maybe yourself included, but a lot of guys around the Bureau who either had been around for that assassination or new guys who had been around for that assassination. And that one wound up just being a debacle for law enforcement, for the FBI, with Jack Ruby shooting the suspect in that case, Lee Harvey Oswald before he ever got a trial. So it's like I would imagine as a law enforcement officer with the FBI, the stakes were already high. You've got the attempted assassination of a president and you've also got like, whoa, there's a lot to be careful of here. We're in a very precarious position. Yes, a lot of bad history. And when the Kennedy assassination actually happened, I was sort of in the position you were with the Reagan attempted

assassination. I was a very young person, still in school. And so I remember it from that angle, as so many millions of people do. But at the same time, in the FBI, and it turns out in the Secret Service and elsewhere, we studied the assassination attempt. And it was, and you describe it well, it was a debacle. It was actually a disgrace from a law enforcement point of view, the way it was handled. There were no proper protocols in place. It's well known now, everybody, and I say everybody, the FBI, the Secret Service, the had all studied the Kennedy assassination. So the minute this happened and I realized what was going on and I was driving up to the scene at the Washington Hilton, that Kennedy assassination was very much in the forefront of my mind. And I just said to myself, we can't screw this up. We have to handle this right. This is a

historic case. It turns out a lot of other people had that same interpretation or that same approach to that incident. When you got to the scene, and now having lived in DC for a few years, I'll tell the audience, they call that the Hinkley Hilton. I mean, that's how they now refer to that hotel where we've had a lot of broadcasting events and mixers and so on. But so when you got to the scene that day, what did you find? Well, I got to the scene and I'm trying to reconstruct it probably within five minutes of the incident. So as I arrived, there were still numerous ambulances arriving, and ambulances continued to arrive at the scene.

And as I couldn't find a place to park or anything, I just pulled my car to the side and got out of my car. And it's funny how one's mentality is. And I was in an executive level position in the Bureau already at that point. And I had shown up on occasion in and around Washington, D.C. when I'd hear there was a bank robbery. So I or a dozen agents along with the police working the scene. And I guess I had it in my mind, that's what I'd come upon this time. But that wasn't the case. It turns out I was the first FBI agent there. And I already had in my head, I had about a half a dozen assignments I already wanted to give people and start telling people what to do. And I was the first FBI agent on the scene, a very chaotic scene. The ambulances were arriving. After about five minutes, two very heavy, big Marine Corps helicopters appeared above the scene, and they stayed there for about five minutes. Turns out they were self-dispatched, and they were making

a tremendous amount of noise echoing down through the buildings. So it was a chaotic scene I came upon. So you when you got there, I assume President Reagan had already been whisked off. But what had he? Yes, he was whisked off immediately. He was being pushed into the car as he was being shot, we now know. So he was on his way to George Washington University Hospital. The police and Secret Service had just pushed Hinckley into a vehicle, which apparently was departing the scene as I got there.

I must tell you, Megan, based on studying the Kennedy assassination, I was apprehensive that there might be a bit of what's called a turf war or some unpleasantness, but that was not the case whatsoever. There was, and I'll repeat this probably again before our discussion's over, there was an overwhelming amount of cooperation. As I got out of my car, a man came running up to me, Lieutenant Wilson of the Washington, D.C. Homicide Squad, and he knew me from a previous incident. And he had the revolver in a glass scene envelope that his officers had just taken off of Hinkley. And he said, we have the gun, we want to give it to you. And I said to him, hold on. There's a truck from the FBI lab coming because I had been on the Bureau net and the whole two or three minutes driving up there, and I knew the

laboratory itself was dispatching an evidence vehicle, I said, give it directly to them to shorten the chain of custody. So that's the first person who came up to me. Within another 30 seconds, and once again, it was lucky that we all knew one another. A man came up to me by the name of Powers, who was the agent in charge of the Secret Service Washington field office, and we had met on previous occasions. And his opening words to me was, you're the FBI. You're in charge now. Are you taking charge? That was his opening words.

Well, it turned out the Secret Service had been trained to this new paradigm, the same as we had been. Nobody wanted to make the mistakes that were made in the Kennedy case. And what had happened, I should have mentioned, between or in the years right after Kennedy's assassination, as you know, there was a Warren Commission and other people looked at the Kennedy assassination. A federal law was passed because actually when Kennedy was shot, there was no federal law against shooting, killing or assaulting the president. So a new law, a new statute was passed that once the president has been assaulted, much less assassinated, the investigation falls to the FBI. Protection of the president up until then is the jurisdiction of the Secret Service. They, it turns out, they were trained to this as we were.

So the cooperation was textbook perfect that day. Wow. I mean, can I just ask you, what must that have been like? What was that like within moments coming up to a scene where the president of the United States was just shot in an attempted assassination? And you've got the lieutenant running over to you saying, we've got the gun and trying to give it to you. I mean, is there any element of you as a man just feeling like, oh, my God. That was exactly it. The oh, my God was that whole two or three minutes riding up there. I knew this is really something we have to do it right. Now, I must tell you, it would take a minute or two to tell you this, the background to that day, not only was the director of the FBI and these other people out of town, but as is widely known, the vice president, George H.W. Bush, he was in Texas. And at the moment the president was shot, turns out, he was actually flying between Austin and Dallas. So he was in the air. And then

later, most of the day, flying back to Washington. So he was in the air. And then later, most of the day flying back to Washington. So he was pretty much out of communications. But the tension that we saw that I felt I had just been read into just in the previous 48 hours, from the intelligence side of the FBI, that there was a high level of alert. What was going on in the world back then was you had the solidarity movement in Poland. And Ronald Reagan, the new president, who'd only been president 60 days or so at that point, was taking a very strong, hard stand position against Russian communism. And what we had just become aware of, the FBI had just been told by other entities in the federal government, that there was a possibility that the

Russians might have a full-scale military intervention into Poland. So that was in our minds. And we had been asked, the Washington field office had been asked to task all of our assets and all the possible communications we could become aware of if we found out any iota of information about the Russian intentions that we would immediately advise headquarters, and headquarters would advise the National Command Authority, essentially the president himself. So this was the tension in the world. And I don't think the FBI knew it, but we found out later that the Department of Defense and the White House had only found out in the preceding hours, hours before the shooting, that the Russian picket line of submarines, and they always, in the Cold War, had a picket line on both coasts of ballistic submarines aimed at the United States, and the United States government was very much aware of that. They had moved in. They always stayed a certain distance away, and just in the previous hours, they had moved in. They always stayed a certain distance away. And

just in the previous hours, they had moved in close. So this is all coming together. So that added to the extra stress of the thing. Now, we all know, you know, and you were going to ask me about him, Hinckley, we know he was a disturbed young man. But at the moment the shooting happened, we didn't know that. So we were very concerned. Is this part of a bigger conspiracy? Is this part of something perhaps being engineered by the Soviets, the Russians, and are other people elsewhere going to be shot? So that first hour or two early that day, it was, I describe it. And later we looked up and we did a lot of studies about it afterwards. It was a crisis situation. It evolved into a major case, but at that first hour or two, it was, we considered it a crisis.

Yeah. You don't know what you're dealing with, what you're walking into. Is this guy the only shooter? Is this guy sane? Is he pretending to be otherwise? Is he a decoy of some sort? Or this is just event number one and another event's about to happen. There's so much you've got to process and manage. So I'll go back to the scene for a second. President Reagan had been taken away, but there were three other victims. Press Secretary James Brady, Secret Service Agent Timothy McCarthy, and D.C. Policeman Thomas Delahanty, shot respectively in the head, in the side, and in the neck. So those are serious wounds. And we know, of course, with James Brady, he would never be the same again, though everyone would live.

And so were they still on scene or had they been taken in ambulances? The ambulances were arriving and leaving as I got there. And you just touched on something very important. From a law enforcement point of view, we had the main crime scene right there at the Hilton. And it turns out with an awful lot of witnesses who had to be interviewed. But very quickly, we realized we had several other crime scenes. The president was taken, as were one of the other victims, to the George Washington University Hospital. But one or two of the other victims, I think Delahanty and McCarthy, were taken to DC General Hospital. So we had two different hospital scenes. Then we quickly found out we wanted the Secret Service limousine, the president's limousine.

That in itself became a crime scene because that's where he was hit. And that's where one of the bullet fragments was. So we had to secure that crime scene. So we had just in DC in very short order, we had about four different crime scenes in addition to the main one at the Washington Hilton. My goodness. Do you, in these situations to the doctors doing the surgeries, no, everything's evidence, you know, that we're going to have to save every fragment that is removed from this person whether it's the president or the other three guys all of its evidence well we were somewhat lucky in that regard yeah and the hospital being in the in the district of columbia in those

days the emergency room in that hospital saw a lot of shootings. So the urban situation was such. So the doctors and not just the doctors, the nurses, the technicians, they had some familiarity with the protocol with shootings. So that was an advantage. We had in the FBI a priority and it very quickly spread. And I was in touch with the supervisors I was sending to the different scenes, a priority of doing this investigation correctly, making a textbook perfect. We didn't want to leave anything where there could be, you know, six months later, allegations of a cover-up or a conspiracy or these things that came up after the Kennedy shooting. So we wanted to do everything right. And that was our priority, securing the evidence.

A lot of evidence was actually at the hospital when Reagan, and we may be talking about him later in the discussion, but he was quite a remarkable human being. And he did have this wonderful sense of humor. And he was very popular at that time, and everybody really loved him. And so that affected people, their emotional involvement in the whole case. When he arrived at the hospital, the emergency people there, as is their protocol, they literally cut his clothes off him. And his clothes fell to the floor. His suit was bloody. His shirt was totally blood soaked. It all fell to the floor. It turned out he had very little on in his pockets, like most presidents. He didn't carry a wallet.

But all of that just fell to the floor in his blood. And some of our agents, one in particular, was on the get to in just a bit. So let's rewind, not yet all the way to the beginning of Hinckley, but let's rewind to the actual moment of the shooting. It's interesting to me to start with the crime scene and discuss that and then go back, because everybody knows who shot Reagan. It was John Hinckley. And that backstory is a whole other ball of wax, which we'll get into in detail. So Hinckley did show up there. We now know he did act alone. He wasn't a Russian operative. He was a lone wolf.

And we'll talk about his reasons. But how was it so easy? How is it so easy? You know, in today's day and age, we think impossible just to show up at a hotel, get in the crowd and shoot four people, including the president. Okay. Well, a key to that, or key to that explanation, is a man named Al Fury, who was the director of security at the hotel at the time. He was a former Washington Metropolitan Police Department detective who had worked very closely with the FBI. Actually, he was on the

robbery squad and he had worked with the FBI and bank robbery. So here's another very fortunate coincidence that we already had a relationship. I had already met Al Fury in other circumstances, so we knew him. He saw the crowd gathering outside the ballroom exit, which is where the president ultimately exited the hotel. And he'd been given a speech to 5,000 people with AFL-CIO on the inside. So he was done. Exactly. And before the president exited from there, Al Fury was there at that exit right at the curb with the general manager of the hotel, Bill Smith. Now, the Hilton Hotel's system, they had a tradition that whenever the president or somebody like the president was at the hotel leaving, that the general manager always saw the person off. So Bill Smith was

waiting there and Al Fury, the director of security, was waiting beside him for the president to exit. Al Fury, and he was interviewed extensively about this later on, he saw this crowd beginning to gather. Now, it wasn't a big crowd. It was only a crowd of 10 or 15 people, almost all of whom were professional journalists, photographers from the media. And the picture you're showing right now is a photo that he actually took that photo. Al Fury took that photo. This is the before. Yeah. And Al Fury. Everyone looks normal. Everyone, you know, people are just hanging out waiting. It's clearly, you have no idea what's about to hit. Look at it closely. He called to the crowd then. He took a picture of them because he was like a photo buff too. He yelled to the crowd,. He took a picture of them because he was a photo buff too.

He yelled to the crowd, smile for the birdie. And all of those people are pretty much media people, cameramen, and they're all smiling at Al, just taking the picture. Except if you look to the left in the background, there's the face of John Hinckley. And he's not smiling. He has this totally impassive look on his face. So this photograph became key. This photograph was taken about 10 minutes before the shooting. And Al, you asked about how could this happen. Al was a little annoyed, frankly, and this is all on the record historically with the Secret Service, that they were going to exit from that exit. He invited them to drive their cars into the underground garage that's adjacent to the ballroom,

which they had used for other VIPs in the past. And the VIP could exit the ballroom, get in their limo and depart, get in the limo safely undercover and depart the building. They declined to do that. The Secret Service? Yeah, they declined to do that. Now, later on, when they had their own internal investigations, the explanation has been offered that the White House political people wanted the president to be seen. They didn't want him exiting from inside the garage.

Nonetheless, Fury wanted to control this crowd. He went up. It was Al Fury, not the Secret Service. He went up to the upper lobby, the main lobby of the Washington Hilton. He got these ropes, and you can see it in that photograph, like a black velvet rope that they would have in a lobby to demarcate the lines with people waiting to check in. And there it is, the black velvet rope across the crowd. Al put that there to hold those photographers sort of back in. And they all were very compliant and stood back. And so how many feet away from President Reagan were they when he came out? Oh, 10 yards,

perhaps 10, 12 yards. So they're close. Very close. Very close. Where that picture is taken from is where the exit is. So Al standing in front of the exit, taking the picture of the crowd. And then you can see to the right, you see in Delahanty. The crowd is behind him. And just to explain to the listening audience, too. So what we're seeing here is at first we saw the crowd. It was 10, 15 people, as Tom said. And you can see one of the journalists has a red and blue umbrella over his head. And the second shot we're seeing is a President Reagan coming out.

He's fine here. He's smiling. He's waving his right hand above his head. And he is, yeah, about 10 yards away from you can see the blue and red umbrella. You can no longer see Hinkley and all the other journalists, but they're they're right there. It looks almost like he's about to walk over to them to glad hand. Go ahead, Tom. And this shot with his arm in the air is literally seconds, two, three, four or five seconds before he's shot. The car, you don't see it, but Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy

is the fellow in the very light blue suit standing to the right of that picture. And the car is right there. And now you see the car from another angle. So when Hinckley starts shooting, the Secret Service agents start pushing Reagan into the limo. And that's what you're seeing right there. His arm initially was extended in the air and the bullet, his arm is extended waving. The bullet actually entered under the armpit. So the arm went under the right armpit because I know it, didn't it wind up going through the left lung? Yeah. And the bullet entered under the armpit in any event. And it turns out it lodged

like inches behind, it's described behind his heart. So when, to jump forward to the emergency room if you want to do that now, when they went in the surgeons to get the bullet, they couldn't, was on duty beside the surgeon in the emergency room. And to assist the surgeon in getting to the bullet, the intern reached with his hand into the open chest of the president and cupped the president's beating heart in his hand and held it aside like an inch or an inch and a half so that the surgeon could reach under the heart and take out the bullet, which is what happened. It's amazing to think of it. This 24 year old is holding the president's beating heart in his hand. It's quite a remarkable scene. So that guy would be 65 years old now. And if nothing's happened to him or her, they're still walking this earth being able to say

they did that. That's extraordinary. And you know what? To the surgeon's credit, that's how you train the interns in medicine and the residents, whether it's the president of the United States or it's not. They always used to say, I know a lot of doctors and they always say like, the last thing you want to do when you go into a hospital and you need a surgery is say, give me the head of the department. You want the workhorses who are in there every day,

like that intern and that surgeon just plowing through person after person. Yes. And what was a little more tense for then they would just discovered, I think they had just discovered it. Hinkley had this unusual, the weapon he had, the revolver, was only a.22 caliber weapon, but he was firing these rounds,.22 shorts, that were called devastated bullets. So there were a hollow point bullet that had this explosive powder in the hollow point of the bullet, and it was supposedly going to explode on impact. One of them did, unfortunately, the one that hit Brady, the press secretary in the head, that exploded, we now know, in him.

And that's what did so much damage in his brain. The bullet that's sitting behind the president's heart was also a devastate around, but it had not exploded. And I'm not sure if they knew, the surgeons, at that moment that this was a devastate around, but it had not exploded. And I'm not sure if they knew, the surgeons at that moment that this was a devastate around because it was all happening so fast. We may not have known that. So it could still explode? So I mean, when they're taking it out? That has to be on their mind as a concern. And was it easy back then? I don't know anything about Devastator Bullets, but was it easy for Hinckley to get them?

Yes, and it probably would have been easy today. What happened was, and we also quickly learned this that afternoon, which we'll probably get command post in the Washington Hilton. Al Fury and Bill Smith offered us a suite of rooms right off that entrance. So we had what we call in law enforcement a forward command post, the command post right near the scene of the crime. earlier, there were no cell phones in those days. We were just starting to have car phones, actually. So the Hilton people, in minutes, set up in the command post a whole bunch of extra phone lines. They ran in, set up the jacks and everything. So we were calling from there all around the country. We very quickly determined that Hinckley had been in Dallas, Texas, just days before coming to Washington, D.C. So we sent a lead, phoned the lead to Dallas. I contacted my counterpart, who also happened to be a personal friend, Gary Penrith, who was the ASAC, that's the second in charge of the Dallas office, and gave him some of these leads and continued to keep an open line to him all day. They went out, they found this place, this pawn shop, Ricky's pawn shop, where he purchased the gun.

And an agent went in there within hours of the shooting and obtained all the paperwork. So he went in, purchased the gun legally at a pawn shop. Then would come the shock of going into his hotel room, I think, in D.C. Is that where you went? Like, you tracked down where he was staying. Yes. So what happened, if I can back up a little bit in the sequence of this, he was taken, and once again, Lieutenant Wilson told us this, it's one of the first things he told me, they took Hinckley to the homicide office of the Washington Metropolitan Police headquarters. I sent immediately by name two agents over there, eventually three, but in any event, George Schimmel and Henry Regal, who were very good agents and very good interviewers, to get him, they went over there, they got him,

and the police said they hadn't attempted to talk to him yet at all, turned him over to us. These agents took him to the Washington field office. That photograph you're showing now is him in the Washington field office with our case number. He's holding it up there. They interviewed him. He didn't deny his identity. He didn't deny what he did. And he told them he had been staying at a hotel in D.C., the Park Central. So we immediately sent the police and FBI, went to the Park Central, did not go in the room. We wanted to do everything by the book. So they secured the room from the outside, didn't let anybody go in. And another agent, Tom Bush was his name, went to the U.S. Attorney's

office and sat down with the U.S. Attorney's staff and drew up an affidavit for a search warrant of the hotel room. That took, you know, a good part of the afternoon. So they were ready to do the search of the hotel room in the evening, 9, 10, 11 o'clock at night by that time. That's when I left the Washington Hilton and went and joined the search team at the. Park Central Hotel, which, by the way, that hotel doesn't exist anymore. And that's when we went in the hotel room and that was bizarre what we found there. First thing we we had already had it well planned.

Once again, concerned about history before we touched anything. When we entered the hotel room, the whole room was filmed and photographed before anything was touched. Then fingerprints in the logical places that you would, they dusted for fingerprints, just in case it ever came up in the future that he was with somebody else, or there was an allegation that somebody else was with him. So they collected fingerprints. And then we looked, and there on a desk, there was like a desk table in the room. He had laid out his entire plan. He had the portion of the morning's newspaper laid out where they had the president's schedule. That's something that's changed. But in those days, they would always print in the Washington, D.C. papers the president's schedule for the day. He had that circled where the president was talking to this AFL-CIO labor group at the hotel.

He had that circled. He had a map of D.C. with the Washington Hilton Hotel circled, and he had a statement in the form of a letter to the actress Jodie Forster saying that he was going to do this world historical deed to win her heart. So there it was, the motive, the whole story laid out for us to find. It's so crazy. And I just want to tell the listening audience. There it was, the motive, the whole story laid out for us to find. It's so crazy. And I just want to tell the listening audience. So the picture of John Hinckley Jr., who at that point would have been 26. He was born in 55. So in 81, he's got to be about 26 years old.

He looks young. He's got sort of messy hair. We can put it back up there. It was kind of long, you know, long hair. He doesn't look deranged in the picture. He looks, I don't know, like, I don't want to compliment John Hingley Jr., but, you know, somewhat handsome, I guess. And, you know, he doesn't have that crazed lunatic look. Like, you look at Jeffrey Dahmer and you're like, yep, but this guy doesn't have the look. So, but you get to the evidence inside the hotel room and this is March 30th, 1981, the day that president Reagan was shot.

The letter reads as follows. I will admit it. I will admit to you that the reason I'm going ahead with this attempt now is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress you. I've got to do something now to make you understand in no uncertain terms that I am doing all of this for your sake. And it ends with, I'm asking you to please look into your heart, again, this is Jodie Foster, and at least give me the chance with this historical deed to gain your respect and love. I love you forever, John Hinckley. I mean, your heart must have dropped when you read that. That's what this is about? Yes. And then, as I said to you before, we were sending leads to Dallas. We were also sending leads to Denver because his parents lived just outside Denver in Evergreen, Colorado, and there were leads out there to be done. And now we have Jodie Forster in the picture.

She at this time was an undergraduate at Yale University. So we immediately sent leads to New Haven for the agents there to locate and interview Jody Foster, which they did that evening. And it turns out Jody Foster had been been bothered or in a manner of speaking, harassed by this fellow for quite some time. And she's living with the typical undergraduate college thing with two or three other young women. And she recorded some of his phone calls to her. The agents in New Haven, she gave them the tapes she had made. They immediately, which was the practice with evidence, they make what they call a dupe, a duplicate copy. And then we worked from the duplicate copy. We don't touch the original again, that evidence. So they sent the duplicate and the original to the Washington field office immediately,

because we were the office running the case, the office of origin and FBI talk. And what was kind of interesting back in those days, something the FBI did a rather irregular, some people would say, but to get evidence from one end of the country to the other, the agents would go to the airport and the next nonstop flight going from New Haven to Washington, D.C., they'd go to the pilot. There was a great camaraderie and working relationship between the airline pilots and the FBI because they had been training together for airline hijackings and things, they would entrust to the captain of the plane

this evidence. And when the plane landed, the captain of the plane would hand it directly to an agent in Washington Field. So this is in the days before FedEx. This is what we did. This is how we got evidence around the country. So the very next morning in our day after the shooting, we had that tape and we're playing it, the duplicate copy on the desk there. And we hear the conversation and we can hear her voice very distinctly, of course. And we hear his voice faintly in the background. And she's saying to him quite manly. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me me pause it there let's build up to that because before we get to the tape which we have and we'll play um let's just set set it up for the audience so they understand what poor jodie foster was dealing with prior to this point now

now we know her as an adult woman but she was a teenager at the time this was happening to her and this rooted in part in her her award- role in Taxi Driver, in which she played the part of a 12 year old prostitute named Iris. The Robert De Niro played the taxi driver named Travis Bickle. And John Hinckley Jr. became obsessed with this movie. He watched it some 15 times at least. This is back before you could just download it on your living room TV. You had to go to the theater back then. And he began dressing just like this fictional character, Travis Bickle, army fatigues, drinking peach brandy, which is the drink of choice of the De Niro character.

He became obsessed with assassinations and guns like Bickle. And most importantly, he became obsessed with Jodie Foster. I'm coming, you fuck. Shit heel. I'm standing here. You make a move. You make a move. It's your move. I'm trying, you fuck. And so why don't you give us some background on what his initial behavior toward Jodie Foster prior to who was a young, a genuine young woman at this time.

The agents interviewed her in New Haven, and she had been getting these calls from him. And you hear her on the tape saying to him, you shouldn't call me like this. This isn't right. But she stayed on the phone with him very mannerly, very politely asking him to not call her again. Whereas by this time, I was a married man. I had two young daughters. And so was many of the other agents around the table listening to the tape. And we all would tell our wives and our daughters, if you get a nut calls you on the phone, you don't stay on the phone with this person. You hang up immediately. And we found ourselves listening to Jodie Foster talking to this guy. We were so emotionally involved in it ourselves. We started yelling at the tape, hang up, hang up, hang up on him. So, but she didn't. And she was very polite.

Well, it's amazing that she didn't, not judging Jodie Foster, but it's just kind of amazing that she didn't know that because she was a huge star. So you just kind of think these Hollywood actors and actresses have some sort of training or, you know, somebody sits you down at some point and says, OK, now you're a huge star. Here's what you should do and shouldn't do with crazed stalkers who are bothering you. The poor woman was put in the most difficult position possible. So just by way of background, before that moment, he was writing to her. He was obsessed with her. She was, again, young and not yet at Yale, I think, when this began. But here's at least a couple of examples. He wrote to her a letter March 6th. Again, the assassination attempt was March 30th, 1981. And okay, let's see. He wrote dozens of poems, letters, and messages to her.

They did speak two times over the phone. He tape recorded the conversations with the then 18-year-old Jodie Foster. He called her dorm room when she got to Yale at least five times. In the first phone call, he introduced himself saying, this is the person that's been leaving notes in your box for two days. He sent her a letter at 1am, I guess that he dropped off that read Jodie Foster, love, just wait, I'll rescue you very soon. Please cooperate. JWH. And indeed, there was this phone call, which she taped right around there. And here's what we have of that. This is Sot One. Who is this? It's Joe.

Oh, no. Who is this? It's Joe. Who is this? It's John. Oh, no. Oh, no, not you again. Who is this? Who is this? Hello. Oh, no, not you again. Look, I really can't talk to you, okay?

But do me a really big favor. You understand why I can't, you know, carry on these conversations with people I don't know. You understand that it's dangerous and it's just not done. It's not fair and it's rude. Oh. All right? Well, I'm not good at listening. Well, I understand that, but it's just not done it's not fair it's rude oh all right well i understand that but it's just it's the same thing okay so you just don't ever want no it's a really nice part of you

that's the call that was driving you nuts yes yeah i mean she that's it goes on she's trying to reason with him and you can't reason with somebody who's not mentally well and those pictures make him look absolutely deranged as you get other shots of john hinkley jr um so you guys are thinking oh my god why is she talking to him then there was another letter put under her dorm room from the same date, March 6th, 1981, that read, Jody, goodbye, exclamation point. I love you six trillion times. Don't you maybe like me just a little bit? You must admit I am different.

It would make it it would make all this worthwhile. John Hinckley, of course. So now he's he signed it by his full name. But she's not involving law enforcement, Tom. Is that true? She's not. law enforcement tom is that true she's not she hasn't gone to the cops as far as i know not until the agents went up and interviewed her that that day yes like we know so much more now about stalking and how dangerous it is um i mean i'm sure this would be handled very differently then comes march 30th and the

attempted assassination and the letter that I just read that you found in his room. But is it true that at least at some portion along this buildup, he was planning on killing her? Well, we wondered about that. The other thing, what, well, two things. We wanted, once again, this concern about the Kennedy assassination and all the conspiracy theories that came up after that. So we wanted to the general public, probably thought the case was solved. Guy who did it has been arrested. But we wanted to retrace his steps, and that's what we did. And we found out that he had actually been stalking even before the election or during the election. But before Reagan became president, he had been stalking the previous president, Jimmy Carter.

And he got quite close to him a couple of times. We also found out he had gone to fire him. Was that about Jodie Foster, Tom? Was that about Jodie Foster? Or that was just about Carter? That was, he wanted to do a historical act. So his motivation was not in any way political. It didn't matter to him whether he shot Carter or shot Reagan. He wanted to do something, but it just never worked out. He never got close enough. But to impress Foster, even with respect to Carter, was it still about her? Yes. Yes. That's what we believe, that that was part of his motivation. The other thing in retracing, as part of retracing the steps, trying to find out if he had any co-conspirators, which he did not, we're all satisfied he was totally a loner. But we were also concerned literally about him. If you remember the Kennedy assassination, one of the real disgraceful things about it was that through mishandling by law enforcement, this fellow

Jack Ruby was able to get close to Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy, and kill him right on national television. We didn't want anything like that to happen. So we were very concerned. Routinely, what would have happened to a federal prisoner, criminal prisoner in Washington, D.C. in those days, he would have been in the D.C. jail, which then and now really, but then was considered not a very safe place. And here's John Hinckley, who you even see in the pictures. To be fair, he was a very soft individual. I'll characterize him that way. And if we had committed him, which would have been the routine thing to do overnight to the DC jail, he would have been in very bad shape the next day if he was even alive.

What was he like? Was he talking crazy? Did he seem crazy? No, he was very impassive. And I only got to see him once, and that was actually a day later at his arraignment. And it was just like the picture that Al Fury took of him. You know, no, just a blank face, no emotion, no fear either, just a plain blank face. No sign of anything that you would see in any human, one way or the other. We were concerned about him. This is a key point. So what we did, we did something very irregular, which has not come back to haunt us. We took him outside the district. And in a caravan of cars, FBI agents, we took them all the way that evening to Quantico, Virginia, where we had FBI had a long term, very good relationship with the Marines at Quantico.

And within that Marine Corps base, they have like every Marine Corps large base, I guess. They had a brig. They use the Navy term brig, which is where they would put any misbehaving Marines, lock them up. And there were few, if any, prisoners in the brig at Quantico. But the Marines took him from us, locked him up by himself. Agents stayed there that night, too. But the Marines secured him. And then the next morning for his arraignment in district court in the District of Columbia, in another caravan of cars, we took him back to the arraignment. I went with the case agent,

Frank Weigert was the fellow who chose to be the case agent, to his initial appearance arraignment the following morning. And that's the only time I physically saw Hinkley, actually, and he was the same way. But this was the kind of thing we did because we didn't want anything to happen to him. You can imagine if he got beat up or killed in the D.C. jail, the conspiracy theories would be still going on today that there was some kind of cover up or something. And we wanted and we did avoid that. And I want to say this in case I don't have a chance to say it later. The cooperation between the Secret Service, the DC police and the FBI was superb. Everybody cooperated. There was no infighting or anything. And I think it's because of that, that the whole thing was handled properly as it should have been. No turf wars. So was Hinckley talking? You know, now, of course, he had the note in his hotel room, and now we know the whole story. But did he talk to law enforcement? Say, yeah, I did it to impress Jodie Foster. Yeah, he responded. Well, he didn't initially say that. He told Henry Ragle and George Schimel when they interviewed him that uh when you get to my

room you'll you'll you'll know why I did it that's what he said um and he told them where his room he didn't deny he did it and he told them where his hotel room was what did and now this is after excuse me what did Jodie Foster say she didn't say an awful lot. She said this fellow had been bothering her. And I mean, she was, I don't know if too strong to say she was a victim, but she certainly was harassed by this fellow. She was stalked. Yeah. And she made it her own personal resolve not to talk about this too much in the years since then. I think she's only talked about it once publicly.

I could be wrong on that. You can see why, who would want to relive that or continue calling attention to that. I mean, especially with a president as beloved as Reagan. You just don't want any association with such a dark chapter, but she has it, unfortunately, through no fault of her own. They're gearing up for a trial now. And as I understand it, there was at least one interview or deposition. I'm not sure what, I read the word

deposition, which sounds like the wrong word to me in a criminal case, but he gave some sort of testimony or she gave some sort of testimony and he was there for it? I believe so. I believe that is what happened. And at the trial, and we can go back, which you probably want to do to our interview of President Reagan, but the U.S. Attorney's Office and the defense didn't push it. Reagan didn't testify. And James Brady, who was, as we all know, was in very bad shape, he didn't testify. But the other two victims, Officer Delahanty and Secret Service

Agent Timoney McCarthy, both testified. And I think Jody forced it, as you said, use the expression deposition. She provided a statement. I think it was recorded. They didn't make her come to the courtroom. I think they just played her statement there. Okay. Okay. I had read.

I'm looking for it in front of me. I don't see it right now. But I had read that she gave some sort of testimony and he was there. And there was some awkward moment that followed. But in any event, so you had to interview. So, yes. Yeah. Because you have the right to confront your accusers.

Yes. Yes. OK, let's see. Hold on. I have it here in front of me. So she was required to give a deposition for the trial. Again, that sounds like the wrong word. But OK. When Jody denied a relationship with John Hinckley, he got up and walked out.

He left the room because he was again. I've talked to my audience about this. Some what we call an erotomania. That is somebody who thinks that they are in a love relationship with someone they've never met. I've had one of these stalkers and it's extremely disconcerting. And the last thing you're supposed to do is communicate with them. So she didn't know that there hasn't there wasn't enough research on stalkers and how to handle them back

then. But that's that's why he was so insulted that she was saying they did not have a relationship. Now they go to they go to trial. You said that we didn't need president Reagan's testimony. Why is that? Just because you had enough evidence without that? Well, we had enough evidence without it. The, uh, the U S attorney at the time was Chuck Ruff. I worked with him quite closely and, uh, Roger Adelman was the lead assistant U S attorney on the case. It was very competent person. He. He later was one of the prosecutors in the abscam cases, and I worked with him there too. I don't think they wanted to put the president on the spot, and I don't think anybody pushed it. So he was left alone, left out of it, so to speak. So just to go back to President Reagan and what happened to him that day. First of all, I don't know whether he would have been a very useful witness anyway, because he he didn't see who shot him. Isn't that correct? Like I thought he very evening, after the search of the room,

I went back to the Washington field office. And by then the agent in charge, Ted Gardner, had returned from this offsite with the director. And we picked a fellow, Frank Weigert, to be the case agent, which is a key role in the FBI, the way the FBI is organized. And then the following morning, we knew we'd have to interview the president because he's not only a potential witness, he's also the main victim. And as much as I would have liked to have interviewed Ronald Reagan, because I'm also an admirer of his, I didn't think it was proper. I thought we had to have two working level FBI agents do this. Fortunately, the agent in charge thought the same thing. We picked two fellas, Robin Montgomery and John Povlansky, who are two of my agents on the criminal side of the house in Washington Field.

A unique thing about them is that both of them had suffered gunshot wounds themselves. They had been both shot in Vietnam. Robin was a Marine and Pawlowski had been in the Army. They had both suffered gunshot wounds. We thought that was a good thing in this sense that they would be able to empathize with the president and perhaps have a good dialogue with him. And they did. So two or three days went by before he was well enough to be interviewed. They went and interviewed him. They will vote. And we instructed them as soon as they were done with the interview

to come back and report to us what had happened. They were very touched by him. They said he is just, in private, was just like his public persona. They went in the hotel room, excuse me, the hospital room. He's in bed, he's lying in bed, and he welcomed them as if they were coming into his home. And he reached over, and there was a typical, as in a hospital room, there was a pitcher of water and a couple of plastic cups. And he started to pour out two cups of water to offer to them. And Robin jumped over and said, no, Mr. President, let us do that. He poured out the glasses of water.

And but he was like welcoming them into his home. That was his attitude towards them. And then they went back and forth. And essentially he said to them, he said, I really can't tell you. He said, I don't remember anything. I don't remember being shot. I don't remember who shot me. But then he said, he added, he said, I just made all those jokes on television to make the people feel good about themselves. That was his explanation. of all he tried to walk into the hospital he tried to walk from the presidential limousine into the hospital and it wound up collapsing because of the blood loss um and apparently at

first it wasn't even clear whether like that he knew he'd been shot once they got him into the presidential limo it was like they looked down and he was bleeding and he realized he'd been shot so he gets in there and and he joked with his surgeon saying, please tell me you're Republicans, which is such a classic line before somebody cuts him open. Yeah, just reassure me. Well, one of the wonderful lines he repeated to the two agents who were interviewing him was he where they identified with one another. He said, he said, you know, it hurts to be shot. And they said, yeah, we know. Right. They did. They did know.

So President Reagan, unlike Jodie Foster, he did talk about it. We have just a little bit of him describing the event on Larry King Live. This is SOT 5. I heard a noise and we came out of the hotel and headed for the limousine. And I heard some noise and I thought it was firecrackers. And the next thing I knew, one of the Secret Service agents behind me just seized me here by the waist and plunged me headfirst into the limo. I landed on the seat and the seat divider was down. And then he dived in on top of me, which is part of their procedure to make sure that I'm covered. Well as it turned out later the shot that got me

caromed off the side of the limousine and hit me while I was diving into the car and it hit me back here under the arm and then hit a rib and that's what caused an extreme pain. And then it tumbled, it turned instead of edgewise and went tumbling down to within an inch of my heart. Oh my God, he so easily could have been killed, Tom. I mean, so easily. Yes. It's crazy when you think about it. So he was asked by Larry about forgiveness, right? I mean, it's always an interesting question, especially for Christians who are, you know, really taught that that's a critical piece of our faith. He was asked about

it, and here's what he said. I didn't know for quite a while until they began to tell me about the young man that had done this and what his problem was, that he was not exactly on a normal basis. And so then I added him to my prayers, prayers for myself, that, well, if I wanted healing for myself, maybe he should have some healing for himself. You forgive John Hinckley? Yes. I found out he wasn't. He wasn't thinking on all cylinders. Extraordinary moment.

Yes. He did forgive him. He did forgive him. And along those lines, I think it's significant and it should be mentioned that later on, President Reagan had more than one opportunity to meet with Pope John Paul II and with St. Mother Teresa. And she came to Washington to see him too. And in their private discussions, he later said that both these saints told him that his life was spared for a higher purpose. And he said he always had that in mind in the rest of his life, that there was a reason his life was bad.

Well, that just gave me a chill. You think about the Cold War, the Brandenburg Gate, you know, I mean, good gracious, all the things that President Reagan accomplished after this. As you point out, he'd only been in office, I think, 67 days when this happened. That's chilling. So let's spend a minute on the trial and then we'll get to John Hinckley. John Hinckley pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. And if you look at his background,

just to give the audience some facts, he was the son of John Hinckley Sr., who was chairman of the board of Vanderbilt Energy Corporation, a Denver-based petroleum exploration company. He's said to have had a normal childhood, grew up in an affluent suburb of Dallas, Texas. As he got older, he began to withdraw. His parents talked it up to shyness. Eventually, they moved to Evergreen, Colorado. He went to Texas Tech off and on. He did not graduate. Spent a lot of time in his room alone. Very, very common amongst people who wind up, I mean, normal people do that too, but a lot of these killers, a lot of alone

time behind closed doors where nobody can see them. Wrote poems, played his guitar. 75, six years before the shooting, went to Hollywood to pursue a career in music. So what happened between 75 and 81 to this guy who was trying to make it to Hollywood as a performer to this guy who was behind that rope line pulling the trigger four times? Well, we went back and looked at a lot of that, and he was just spiraling downward, worse and worse. And his parents, you have to feel sorry for them. They were apparently very good, very responsible people. They did all they could trying to help him. He had a brother and a sister who both led very normal, successful lives. It's just one of those sad things. You just never know. And you know what? I mean, I will say a lot of times when there's psychotic break, it happens right around this age, young 20s, young to mid 20s, or late teens for young men in particular. So I mean, I feel like today we'd be looking at this a little differently. We'd probably know a little bit more. So he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and he prevailed. Despite the best effortsman's opinion, just after the first 24 or 48 hours, in my layman's way of speaking, I thought, well, this guy's crazy. I mean, but to be crazy

for insanity plea is, it's a little bit more precise than that.S. attorney and his staff, I mean, Chuck Ruff and Edelman, they really believed they could get a conviction. And so things went full bore ahead. And as I say, we gathered up all the background we could on Hinckley. But there was outrage in the country when he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. And then, of course, as we all know, committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital. That was one of the several major outcomes from this case beyond his guilt or innocence. And one of them was a reform of the insanity plea. The first was done within a couple of years in the federal system. The federal insanity rules were changed so that the burden was on the defense to show the insanity, as opposed to being on the government to show the person was not insane. So that was one big change.

And a whole bunch of states then in the following year or two changed their statewide insanity thing. So the insanity defense since then has been greatly limited. It's not as used as much as it had been. So that was one of the big changes, the insanity defense. I can talk about some of the other major changes when you want to get to that. Yeah. Well, so they said his lawyers argued that he was sick with narcissistic personality disorder, citing medical evidence that he had a pathological obsession with a 1976 film Taxi Driver, that both sides had dueling psychiatrists.

And June 21, 1982, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity on all 13 counts. He had prepared a statement thinking that it would be a guilty verdict saying in part, my assassination attempt was an act of love. His mental diagnosis at the time was major depressive disorder and various forms of schizophrenia. Again, not uncommon to see a schizophrenic break start for the first time, the first one to come right around his age or slightly before. And yeah, so keep going. What were the other changes that came out of this trial? Well, one that's not so well publicly known, the Secret Service changed a lot internally. The president's schedule is no longer published in advance. They now use metal detectors at all gatherings like this, at places like the Washington Hilton.

They have them there to be used all the time. But the other big, big change that affects American life to this day was the Brady handgun bill named after the man who was injured, Brady. That changed, and they created the National Instant Background Check System, which is in use today, to this day is actually managed by the FBI, their CJIS division in West Virginia, where you need this instant background check, supposed to be instant, done before you can purchase firearms. That was all a result of the part of the Brady handgun bill, which got its push from this assassination attempt. Didn't Hinkley say something like they said, what would have stopped you? And he said, you know, if I had to wait,

if I had to go through some sort of a waiting period, it fell out a bunch of paperwork on the guns, I probably wouldn't have done it. Yeah, I don't remember that, but that could be. Yeah, he did. And so, I mean, now gun control and gun legislation is so controversial. But in this case, you've got a statement from the defendant saying if they'd made him go through a few more hoops and this clearly is a crazy guy, he might not have done it.

And even the gun enthusiasts don't want crazy guys like Hinckley to have such easy access to guns. This was a real problem that we had in our in our system. My team will tell me where the where the quote was. Oh, here it is. Here it is. When Hinckley was asked by his father what would have stopped him, he said, if he had to fill out forms, get a permit, or anything complicated. So Secret Service Agent Timothy McCarthy made a full recovery return to the service. D.C. policeman Thomas Delahanty recovered but suffered from a critical injury that forced his retirement, and press secretary James Brady nearly died. He was shot in the eye. He suffered permanent brain damage, as you point out. They had the destroyer bullet. He was in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, as I recall, and really was never the same again. And you think about the damage Hinckley did, and you look at President Reagan smiling,

going on to do all these amazing things. And you got to remember James Brady and the devastating injury that he suffered as a part of this story. Well, the fact is Brady died approximately five years ago in Virginia. And in Virginia, the coroner or whoever the responsible person is, they decided that his death was a homicide from the original wounds.

But the state of Virginia then never did not proceed to prosecute Hinkley for that, nor did the federal government. So Hinckley goes off to the mental facility where he stays until this year. Hinckley is a free man right now. Now he is. He was in St. Elizabeth's Hospital, which is quite a, was a gigantic mental, federal mental health hospital in the District of Columbia. It's like a village unto itself. I had to go there in connection with other cases, with other people, and it's a phenomenal place. But he was then for several years allowed to go stay for long periods of time with his mother, who lived in a home, had a house in Williamsburg, Virginia, overlooking one of the golf courses there in a gated community. And it was the Secret Service, of course, it was like 50 feet or so up a little hill,

overlooked one of the greens on the golf course. And at that golf course in Williamsburg over the years, President Clinton had played there, President Obama. I mean, it's that kind of a place. And yet here's Hinckley staying in his mother's house just overlooking that. So you can understand why the Secret Service was so concerned about that. Eventually, this past year, as you just mentioned, he's been completely free now. He's a completely free man. And to this fall of 2022, he's embarking on a tour, a concert tour. His music that he was always ambitioning to do, he's going to go play, perform around the country. We have some of that. I'll play that in one second.

But first, I wanted the audience to hear him talking about how he sees it now. This is on CBS News 2022. This is him apologizing for what he did. Soundbite 7. I shot four people. And I'm sorry to the Reagan family, the Brady family, the other families of the victims. I'm sorry to Jodie Foster. I have true remorse for what I did. I know that they probably can't forgive me now, but I just want them to know that I am sorry for what I did. Michael Reagan, President Reagan's son, said he forget, he said, my dad forgave him and I forgive him too. Patty Reagan said, not me, no, and talked about the trauma that he caused, not just her family, but the nation. What did you think of the fact that they let him out?

Well, I really don't have a strong opinion on that. He clearly was a mentally ill person. And I kind of share a little bit of the take of, which for a while I think was the official take of the Secret Service, that someone with these kind of a combination of mental disorders that he had, are they ever truly cured? Now, maybe he can function and with a lot of medication, but will he be a danger again? And that was always their concern. Mm-hmm. He was behind, not really bars exactly, but in this facility for 40 plus years. He described that in the following way, again, on CBS 2022. Listen. I've been the most scrutinized person in the entire mental health system for 41 years, I'm just trying to show people I'm kind of an ordinary guy who's just trying to get along with your buddy else. The thing is, Tom, they put him on medication, and that can be used to control diseases like schizophrenia.

And you've got a judge, Paul Friedman, 2003, saying he's no longer a danger to himself or others so he can visit his mom's home. Then in 2016, they granted him convalescent leave from the mental hospital, allowing him to live with his mother. He didn't cause any trouble. Then came 2021 and same judge said that he would free Hinckley from all remaining restrictions in June of 2022, as long as he did well living in Virginia. And he did. So he's been out prior to being released and didn't cause anyone any harm. And that's the thing. When they find you not guilty by reason of insanity, they're saying you are not responsible for what you did. So there'd be no reason to hold him if the determination has been made that he's no longer a danger to society. There's no desire or justification to punish

if you're not mentally responsible for the crime you committed. And now, to your point, he is trying to make it as a musician. Here is his song, Hope for the Future, in part on YouTube. Here's my latest song I want to sing for you now. It's called Hope for the Future. Hope you like it. I got hope for the future. I got all the love that you will ever need. I got hope for the future. I don't know, Tom, maybe I'm a bleeding heart.

I feel sorry for him. You know, I think he is a mentally ill guy. That's everyone who's looked at him has said that this isn't some deranged lunatic like serial killer. This is somebody who is just not of his right mind, as President Reagan said. Well, I felt sorry for him. And I even from the get go, I felt very sorry for his parents and what they went through and how much they sacrificed in trying to help him. And then his mother, who survived the longest, the burden he was to her. What a story. My goodness. How much safer is our president today than our president was Ronald Reagan in 1981? Well, without a doubt, they are safer. And some people would even say it's almost overkill. The amount of security around the president. I mean, you just think back to Harry Truman. Harry Truman drove himself around, you know, had one Secret

Service agent beside him when he was vice president and then president. Then we went to the details. You see a dozen, perhaps, on the scene with Ronald Reagan. And now it's, you know, six and eight and 20 cars sometimes when they move just between Capitol Hill and the White House. So it's, uh, uh, they're much safer. Uh, but you know, a fanatic or a dedicated, uh, assassin, if they're willing to sacrifice their own life, president still could be hurt, unfortunately, not likely, but it could happen. Well, thank God there hasn't been another successful shooting or injury to a sitting U.S. president since that moment 40 plus years ago. Let's shift gears in the time we have left because you've written a lot about the FBI

and how many years of service in the FBI for you? I was in the FBI for 33 years in a variety of positions. And then in the years since then, I had on a number of levels, a very close affiliation with the FBI, particularly its executive management. Okay, so one of the things that you have been calling attention to is your disappointment in Robert Mueller

and the direction he took the FBI. James Comey took that baton and ran with it too. And I didn't know this, but you root it, I think, in this critical moment after 9-11, in this meeting in which you say Robert Mueller was embarrassed in a meeting he had with then President George W. Bush. Tell us. Yes. Well, if I could back up just half a second on that. Sure, sure, sure. There, as everybody knows, there's a lot in the last three or four years has gone wrong with the FBI. And current Director Wray has pointed out that the two or three key miscreants of the Russian collusion probe are no longer in the Bureau. And then we had the terrible

situation with the gymnast and Director Wray again points out that the two agents involved in that are no longer with us. With Larry Nassar, they're covered up for him. Yeah, each time something goes, yes, each time something goes wrong, they point out that the people have been fired or disciplined, which is as it should be. My contention is they have to look at, and I plead with them to look at what's happened. Why do we have this happening, continuously happening? What's happened to the culture? And in talking to a whole lot of people, including Director Mueller, who told me this himself and told many other people this, I think a lot of it goes back to an unintended consequence of the reaction to September 11th.

Robert Mueller became the director of the FBI just about five days before the September 11th attacks, which happened on a Tuesday. That Saturday morning, President George W. Bush summoned Mueller to Camp David to give a report on the FBI's investigation. Mueller went there. Now, so there were only about three and a half days between the attack and the meeting on Saturday morning at Camp David. In that three and a half days, the FBI did what it does best, investigate. And in those three and a half days, they had identified all 19 hijackers, their associates, their credit cards, their automobiles, where they stayed, who they associated with, their background, and their connections to Al-Qaeda was coming into focus. So Robert Mueller went to Camp David with this report, expecting praise and thanks for it. And when he was done talking,

President George W. Bush said to him, in effect, I don't care about that. I just want to know how you're going to stop the next one. Then about an hour later that morning, George Tenet gave a proposed plan of action going forward. The CIA? Yeah, then the director of the CIA, several people present said that President Bush said, that's great, and then turned and looked at Mueller and said to Mueller, that's what I'd like to hear. That's what I want to hear. So Mueller went back, and in Mueller's own words, he became bound and determined to change the culture of the FBI, and that's the word he used, and to make it into more of an intelligence agency. And a lot of us have looked at this and we said, well, maybe that's the root of the problem. Because when you the FBI always had a counterintelligence mission, but they behaved like a law enforcement agency.

They were trained to operate within the Bill of Rights. They were trained as you are in a law enforcement agency. You look forward to the day. Everything you do is going forward to the day where you're going to stand up in front of a judge or in front of a jury and raise your right hand and pledge to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That gives you a certain, that creates a certain culture. In an intelligence agency, you deal in guesses, estimates, your best thinking at the time, and you deal in deception and deceit. And that's part of it. And a lot of us think that this change in the FBI's culture is what has allowed these problems that manifest themselves under Director Comey and since then to come about. And we just hope and pray that the FBI changes its culture, gets back to its law enforcement roots. Go back to being federal law enforcement and not a wannabe domestic CIA. Correct. Very well said. Yes.

So when you look at all the problems that we're seeing in the news these days about the FBI, can you root it to that? I mean, I'm thinking about the FBI's raiding everybody now. They're they're treating civilians accused of misdemeanors as like kingpin drug suspects with like 30 agents. We saw them go after the pro-life guy who had some tiny skirmish with somebody outside of an abortion clinic. Next thing you know, 20 to 30 law enforcement from FBI are raiding with guns drawn. We saw James O'Keefe, you know, journalist at Project Veritas get raided by the FBI, who then clearly either the FBI or DOJ leaked what they found to the New York Times, which is just absolutely unforgivable. We've seen the Gretchen Whitmer, you know, alleged entrapment with people being like,

I don't know. And the FBI agents being like, we were going to kill her, right? We're going to kill like they're just out of control. So is it all in your mind connected? Yes, it's connected to this cultural change. And I tell you, and I've told people this, and like some defense attorneys today find it hard to believe, but when we were in new agents training and then in our periodic training, legal training, which you got periodically, but in new agents training, we spent a lot of time on the U.S. Constitution, on the Bill of Rights, particularly the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. And contrary to what people might think, our legal instructors told us not to look at the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment as a barrier, as an obstacle to doing our job, but to embrace it. And we even had one legal instructor back in those days gave us a copy, a pocketbook-sized copy of the Constitution and told us to keep it in our breast pocket here always with us. And a lot of us did this. And that whenever you go to interview someone or whenever you go to execute a search warrant at someone's home, if you have that copy of the Constitution

with you and you remember it, you'll never go wrong. You'll never go off the line. You'll never go off the wires. That's how we were taught. And I've learned since then that a copy of the Constitution is not issued to FBI people. Now, in the last year or two, because I keep hopping on this, and I've spoken to a lot of FBI executives about it, happily, I can say that they now are giving a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution to every new FBI employee. Now, that may seem like a simple thing or a little thing, but little things mean a lot, and little symbolic things mean a lot. They're reminders of things to people. They're totems. And that's important. Let's say, Tom, that, you know, it's 2024 and suddenly we

have President DeSantis or President Youngkin or whatever, some Republican, and they call you up and say, Tom, I want you to come out of retirement, and I want you to head up the FBI, and I want you to make it like it used to be, and get rid of all the politics and all these bad actors like Peter Strzok. I realize he's no longer there, but I don't even want the possibility of another Peter Strzok at the FBI. What do they need to do? In practice, how do you get rid of the rot that's there now? Okay. It's a cultural problem. There's been books written about this in corporate settings and government settings too.

To change the culture, you have to change a lot of things, big and small. And I mentioned one of the small things. But the first thing you have to do is recognize that there is a problem. And a lot of this won't be imposed by outside, by the Congress or by the president. Unfortunately, it has to come from inside the FBI. Recognize the problem. Change a lot of things, big and small. Change your orientation.

Change your mission statement. They've taken law enforcement out of parts of the mission statement and they keep emphasizing intelligence every time ray speaks he quotes muller and comey that we're now an intelligence driven organization no we want to operate within the law and now myself and others for years whenever we were called upon to go out to speak to a community group or when I was overseas and I spoke to our allies, I always explained that the United States of America was blessed, truly blessed, that as our domestic security agency, we was a law enforcement agency, which meant they operated within the parameters of the law and the constitution. And we were blessed to have that. Unfortunately, the way it's being twisted now, we are now to the point where we have a domestic intelligence agency that has police

power. That's the problem. That's what has to be changed culturally. When you hear the stories about, you know, the investigations of Trump and all that the FBI did during the Trump years, was that shocking to you? I mean, like, how bad is that on a scale of one to 10, the way they behaved? 10 being, you know, the agency needs to be dismantled down to the studs, and one being mildly problematic. Well, I don't advocate dismantling the FBI, and I don't advocate breaking up the FBI, but it was shocking because the most fundamental thing shocking, and this has been documented now, not just in the Mueller report, but in stuff since

then with Enduram's documenting it again for us, there was no predicate. There was no logical reason to begin what they call Crossfire Hurricane, which was the code name for the investigation of the Trump presidential campaign. There was no good reason to do it. They hung their hat, and Comey and his book hangs this hat on, this one conversation that this fellow Papadopoulos had in England with somebody at a bar where he said the Russians have dirt on Hillary Clinton. Well, and I'm sure, Megyn Kelly, you know this. You've been a reporter in Washington. Any presidential election, you could stand or sit at a bar anywhere in Washington, D.C., and you could hear 10 rumors like this about anybody. There's rumors flying all

over the, that's not enough. Under the attorney general guidelines to open a counterintelligence investigation on an American, you have to have articulable facts. And there were none with this. There was no reason to begin that investigation, much less on a presidential candidate and a presidential campaign. I can remember when we were contemplating open investigations on a U.S. senator or a congressman when William Webster was director, he would challenge us, do you have enough? Go back and look again. They didn't want us interfering in politics unless we had a solid reason to do it. And they opened a campaign, an investigation, Comey did and his minions, on a presidential candidate without any legitimate predicate. I mean, and in doing so risked the trust and credibility of the entire agency.

It has not recovered. In fact, if anything, it's continued to go downward. And as you point out, I happen to agree with you. It's an agency we really need. We need and we need to believe in it. And we have to do, we can't just give up on it. We have to just, we have to revamp, have to be honest about the problems. We'd have to get somebody like you in there or somebody who thinks like you to help lead it into the next phase. And I do think that's probably going to require a change in administrations. What a pleasure talking to you, Tom. I appreciate all your years of service, your great storytelling, and your honesty. Thank you. Thank you. Tomorrow, we're going back in time to World War II with a fascinating discussion. Looking forward to bringing you this.

And I'll talk to you then. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.