FBI: American Gestapo

by LAWRENCE SELLIN, PHD
December 16, 2017

Any government agency with law enforcement and surveillance authority that uses those powers for political purposes is the definition of a secret police, no better than the Nazi Gestapo or the Soviet KGB.

There is indeed probable cause to conclude, meaning indictable offenses, that employees of the Department of Justice and/or the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), sympathetic to the Democrat Party, used the power of their offices and with the assistance of foreign nationals to influence the 2016 election in favor of Hillary Clinton, first to exonerate her and then obtain information to prevent the election of Donald Trump or to provide a basis for his impeachment should he win.
It is also abundantly clear from the Congressional investigations involving the Department of Justice and the FBI that those institutions of government are protecting themselves at the expense of transparency and accountability to the American people.
In other words, the government employees involved consider the survival of the Deep State more important than the survival of the Constitution. That is the definition of tyranny.
Here is a summary of the apparent sequence of events based on the revelations so far. There may be more damning evidence yet to be disclosed.
–        The Democrats hired Fusion GPS to find dirt on Donald Trump.
–        Fusion GPS hired former British MI6 agent in Moscow, Christopher Steele, to canvass and very likely pay his Russian contacts, some of whom may be present or former members of Russian intelligence, for negative information about Trump.
–        Steele creates the “Trump dossier” and distributes it either directly or indirectly to media outlets and to politicians like Senator John McCain (R-AZ).
–        The FBI obtains the “Trump dossier,” but inexplicably or perhaps intentionally does not check the veracity of any of Steele’s assertions.
–        The FBI uses the “Trump dossier” to apply to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to obtain warrantless authorization to conduct surveillance on Trump and his associates.
–        It now appears that Christopher Steele might have been, at some point, on the FBI payroll, and, by extension, the Russians.
The use of an un-vetted document from dubious Russian sources as a basis for unwarranted surveillance of American citizens, ultimately for political purposes, renders the entire Mueller investigation a farce and could provide exculpatory evidence to vacate the guilty plea of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. It is a verdict many believe was based on improperly-obtained information as part of an overall effort by politically-motivated federal employees to manipulate the results of the 2016 election.
The conditions that led to the election of Donald Trump as President remain. They bear repeating.
The federal government and the media are, as institutions, hopelessly corrupt and, although we have elections, we no longer have representative government.

There is a Cold Civil War underway in the United States to determine who should control the federal government.

It is not a contest between the Democrat and Republican policies, but a battle between the entrenched power of the bipartisan political establishment, the Deep State, versus the freedom and well-being of the American people. It is a conflict between those who want to adhere to the Constitution and the rule of law and a ruling elite, who wish to continue the practices of political expediency and crony capitalism for the purposes of personal power and profit.
Americans now believe that we are no longer citizens of a republic, but subjects of an elected aristocracy, composed of a self-absorbed and self-perpetuating permanent political class, which serves its own interests and those of its international financiers, not those of the American people.
Three years before the start of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln said a government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free – that a house divided against itself cannot stand.
Likewise, a government separated from the people cannot stand.
The American Revolution, a war to free ourselves from foreign tyranny, lasted eight years.
The Second American Revolution, a battle to root out the corruption and despotism of the Deep State will take longer, but equally necessary.
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The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on President Donald Trump’s visit to the FBI (all times local):
8:50 p.m.
President Donald Trump has unleashed a blistering attack on the FBI’s leadership.
He is denouncing the bureau for its handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, calling it “really disgraceful.”
Trump says “you have a lot of very angry people that are seeing it.”
The president’s broadside appears to reflect his anger over revelations that senior FBI officials exchanged anti-Trump and pro-Clinton text messages while working on last year’s Clinton probe and during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump associates colluded with Russian officials in the 2016 election.
Trump laced into the bureau as he was departing for its training academy in Virginia, where he lavished praise on graduates of a weeks-long FBI National Academy program for law enforcement leaders from around the country.

__
3:45 p.m.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is distancing himself from President Donald Trump’s criticism of the FBI. Sessions says he does not share the view that the FBI “is not functioning at a high level all over the country.”
Sessions, speaking Friday at a news conference about the Justice Department’s crime-fighting efforts, said the FBI is “fulfilling a fabulously important role working to fight against violent crime.” But he stopped short of saying whether he agrees with Trump that the reputation of the agency is “in tatters.”
Trump again blasted FBI leadership Friday even as he praised state and local officers.
Sessions says it’s noteworthy that Trump expressed support for law enforcement in a speech at the FBI’s National Academy. The program is for law enforcement leaders from around the country, not FBI agents.
___
11:20 a.m.

President Donald Trump is calling for the death penalty for anyone convicted of killing a police officer.
Trump, while speaking at the FBI National Academy in Virginia on Friday, pledged to support law enforcement officers and condemned those who attack them.
During the presidential campaign, Trump pledged to sign an executive order as president that would demand capital punishment for cop killers.
He has yet to do so.
The president was warmly received by the crowd of local law enforcement officers who cheered his calls for a crackdown on gangs and an end to chain migration.
The president painted a dark picture of a nation under siege by crime, at one moment wondering aloud “What the hell is going on in Chicago?”
The crowd laughed.
___
10:40 a.m.
President Donald Trump is addressing a graduating class of law enforcement officers at the FBI National Academy.
Trump on Friday praised the academy, a 10-week professional course of study for U.S. and international law enforcement officers.
Trump, a frequent FBI critic, promised that as president he will be “more loyal than anyone else could be” to the police.
He honored the graduates for completing the rigorous training, saying the “elite training will help save lives.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray says Trump is the first president to address a graduating class at the FBI training center in Quantico, Virginia since Richard Nixon.

__
9:50 a.m.
President Donald Trump says “it’s a shame what’s happened” with the FBI, calling its handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation “really disgraceful.”
Speaking to reporters as he departs for a speech at the FBI training academy in Quantico, Va., Trump promises that “we’re going to rebuild the FBI.”
Trump alluded to newly revealed edits to former FBI Director James Comey’s 2016 statement on the Clinton probe: “It is very sad when you look at those documents, how they’ve done that is really, really disgraceful, and you have a lot of really angry people who are seeing it.”
Trump reiterated that “there was no collusion” between his campaign and the Russian government, adding the recent revelations prove his claim that the Clinton investigation was “rigged.”
___
7:53 a.m.
The White House says newly-revealed FBI records show there is “extreme bias” against President Donald Trump among senior leadership at the FBI.
Deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley tells Fox News Channel that edits to former FBI Director James Comey’s statement on Hillary Clinton’s private email server and text messages from a top agent critical of Trump are “deeply troubling.”
“There is extreme bias against this president with high-up members of the team there at the FBI who were investigating Hillary Clinton at the time,” Gidley charges, as special counsel Robert Mueller pushes on with a probe of possible Trump campaign ties to Russia. Gidley says Trump maintains confidence in the FBI’s rank-and-file the Justice Department.
Trump is scheduled to attend an FBI National Academy graduation service later Friday.
Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump heaped praise on law enforcement while decrying anti-police sentiment in a speech to FBI academy graduates on Friday not long after he lamented the agency’s “sad” and “disgraceful” state.
In remarks to the FBI National Academy that also touched on immigration and violent crime, Trump called himself a “true friend and loyal champion” of police while noting that members of law enforcement “rarely get the recognition” they deserve.
“We will protect those who protect us,” the president said, adding that those accused of killing police officers “should get the death penalty.”
“Anti-police sentiment is wrong and it’s dangerous, and we will not stand for it,” he said.

An hour earlier, speaking to reporters on the White House lawn on his way to talk to graduates of the academy in Quantico, Virginia, Trump said: “It’s a shame what’s happened with the FBI, but we’re going to rebuild the FBI. It’ll be bigger and better than ever.”
Referencing the 90 pages of newly released messages, many critical of the president, between an FBI lawyer and an agent later assigned to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, Trump called it “sad when you look at those documents and how they’ve done that is really, really disgraceful and you have a lot of very angry people that are seeing it.”
In his speech, the president also made a pitch for cracking down on immigration and stepped up his attacks on the visa lottery system and chain migration, which his administration has called on Congress to end in the wake of recent terror attacks in New York City.
He also painted an inaccurate picture, however, of a system that invites the “worst people,” insinuating that names were put “in a bin” and chosen out at random. (Actually, visa lottery applicants must meet eligibility requirements to enter the program, and applicants are vetted through strict State Department processes.)
“Congratulations, you’re going to the United States!” Trump said. “What a system.”
Promises of an immigration crackdown spurred applause from the law enforcement crowd as Trump went on to issue a new message to members of the MS13 gang Friday. “We will find you, we will arrest you, we will jail you, we will throw you the hell out of the country,” he said.
But the last option was the one preferred by the president, he said, because in jail “we have to take care of them — who the hell wants to take care of them?”
The “jail stuff,” Trump said over laughter from the crowd, “is wonderful, but we have to pay for them right?”
The FBI’s website describes the National Academy as a 10-week “professional course of study for U.S. and international law enforcement managers nominated by their agency heads because of demonstrated leadership qualities.”
Trump tweeted this month that the FBI’s “reputation is in tatters,” prompting FBI staffers — including Trump’s own pick to head the agency after he fired former director James Comey — to defend it against the president’s assertions.
“The FBI that I see is tens of thousands of agents and analysts and staff working their tails off to keep Americans safe from the next terrorist attack, gang violence, child predators, spies from Russia, China, North Korea and Iran,” FBI director Christopher Wray said last week during an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee.
During a passionate, two-minute-long defense, Wray described the FBI as “respected and appreciated by our partners in federal, state, and local law enforcement, in the intelligence community, and by our foreign counterparts in both law enforcement and national security in something like 200 countries around the globe.”

Later on Friday, in response to questions from reporters, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he did not agree with Trump’s dim assessment of the FBI.
“Well, I don’t share the view that the FBI is not functioning at a high level,” Sessions said during a press conference announcing new anti-violent crime initiatives. “In my view, the FBI has huge national security requirements, it’s also fulfilling a fabulously important role in helping fight against violent crime, also.”

Rep. Trey Gowdy. REUTERS/James Lawler Duggan

• Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy suggested that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe will be forced out at the top law enforcement agency as soon as next week.
• Gowdy argued that newly released FBI records reveal political bias against President Donald Trump — and in favor of Hillary Clinton — at the highest levels of the FBI.

---

Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, suggested in a Friday interview that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe will be forced out at the top law enforcement agency as soon as next week.
Gowdy argued that newly released FBI records reveal political bias against President Donald Trump — and in favor of Hillary Clinton — at the highest levels of the FBI. Gowdy said that McCabe will likely be pushed out of the agency as a result of the perceived bias.
“I’ll be a little bit surprised if he’s still an employee of the FBI this time next week,” Gowdy told Fox News of McCabe, adding that he would be “shocked” if McCabe testifies before the House next week.
The Washington Post reported last week that Gowdy settled a $150,000 veteran discrimination and retaliation claim from a former aide, who was fired in 2015 from the House Benghazi committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. The aide alleged that he was wrongfully terminated in part for his unwillingness to engage in what he believed was a partisan investigation into Hillary Clinton’s time as US secretary of state.
Attacks on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team of investigators have escalated sharply in recent weeks, culminating in a partisan haranguing of the FBI director last week over the perceived missteps of his predecessor.
Conservative and far-right media outlets, already skeptical of Mueller’s probe into President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, grew louder in their calls for FBI Director Chris Wray to either clean house or for Mueller to resign. It came after news that two special counsel investigators at one point exhibited perceived political bias.
Trump again characterized the criminal justice system as “rigged” during a rally in Florida on Friday, echoing comments he made last weekend following former national security Michael Flynn’s guilty plea as part of Mueller’s probe.
President Donald Trump lamented the state of the FBI, the nation’s top law-enforcement agency, shortly before delivering a speech at an FBI graduation ceremony on Friday in Quantico, Virginia.
“It’s a shame what’s happened with the FBI, but we’re going to rebuild the FBI. It’ll be bigger and better than ever,” Trump told reporters before boarding Virginia-bound Marine One on Friday morning.
The president also recently described the country’s top law-enforcement agency as “in tatters,” but a White House spokesman said on Friday that Trump had “full faith and confidence” in the rank-and-file members of the Department of Justice and the FBI.
Also on Friday morning, Hogan Gidley, the White House’s deputy press secretary, said that recently released FBI records showed “extreme bias” against Trump among leadership at the FBI.
Recently disclosed text messages between two FBI agents assigned to the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion with Trump’s campaign included a reference to Trump as an “idiot.” Both agents are no longer involved in the Russia investigation. Other records revealed edits made to soften the statement of James Comey, then the FBI director, concerning the agency’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
Gidley called the records “eye-opening” and “deeply troubling.”
“There is extreme bias against this president with high-up members of the team there at the FBI who were investigating Hillary Clinton at the time,” Gidley told “Fox & Friends” on Friday morning.

Did the Barack Obama administration ditch FBI material used to train counterterrorism agents?
At a House committee hearing on worldwide terror threats, Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., claimed the former administration purged information that could “allow us to see in totality the threat that faces America.”
“Just curious if you can tell me if the FBI has taken any steps to reverse the previous administration’s purge of training courses and information about Islamism, jihad, Sharia, and the Muslim Brotherhood,” Perry asked FBI director Christopher Wray at the Nov. 30 hearing.
Wray said he was not aware of efforts to purge training material.
“They were purged in the last administration,” Perry told him.
Is that true?
Perry’s office did not respond to our requests for information. We found the FBI did rescind training material during the Obama administration — but it was less than 1 percent of 160,000 pages of training documents that were found to contain information that was factually inaccurate, imprecise or used stereotypes.
The review came after media reports show that training material included claims identifying “mainstream” American Muslims as “likely to be terrorist sympathizers.”
The Arab American Institute said the documents “crudely” depicted Arab Americans and American Muslims “as threatening, irrational, or otherwise abnormal.”
Here’s what we know about the FBI’s review and rescinded documents.
Reports of anti-Muslim training material
Wired in July 2011 reported that part of a January 2009 presentation for new FBI recruits said that Islam “transforms (a) country’s culture into 7th-century Arabian ways.”
Additional Wired reporting in September 2011 found that during a training session at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., agents were told that “mainstream” American Muslims were “likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a ‘cult leader’; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a ‘funding mechanism for combat’.” A chart in the presentation contended that the more “devout” Muslims are, the likelier they are to be violent, Wired reported.
The FBI distanced itself from the messages in the training.
It told Wired that the presentation had a disclaimer saying the views expressed were of the author and “do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. government.” An FBI press release issued a day after Wired’s report said the training segment was presented only one time and quickly discontinued.
At a November 2011 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., asked then-Attorney General Eric Holder about the training material, presenting among examples a claim that ‘‘the Arabic mind is swayed more by ideas than facts.”
“It is regrettable that that information was, in fact, a part of a training program,” Holder said, adding that there was an ongoing review of training material “to ensure that that kind of misinformation” was not being used, because it could undermine and negatively impact outreach efforts.
The FBI reviewed 160,000 pages of material and eventually removed hundreds of pages from its training. Less than 1 percent of the material reviewed had “factually inaccurate or imprecise information or used stereotypes,” the FBI told Wired in February 2012.
A March 2012 letter from Durbin to then-FBI Director Robert Mueller expressed disappointment that the FBI would not produce a written report on the material deemed inappropriate, and that it would not be publicly shared or given to Congress. Durbin’s letter said FBI briefers shared copies of “a handful” of the material with Senate Judiciary Committee staff, but were not allowed to keep the copies.
The FBI did not confirm to PolitiFact if it eliminated such material, but referred us to public source material and 2012 congressional testimony.
At a May 2012 House Judiciary Committee hearing on oversight of the FBI, Mueller said 876 inappropriate training documents had been removed after a review of 160,000 documents and over 1,000 videos, but did not specify what the material said.
Judicial Watch, a conservative group that litigates on public corruption and other issues, said documents it obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit showed that reasons cited for the removal of material included: “Article is highly inflammatory and inaccurately argues the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization,” and “author seems to conflate ‘Islamic Militancy’ with ‘terrorism’ and needs to define the difference and use it in their analysis.”
“The excised material included references linking the Muslim Brotherhood to terrorism, tying al Qaeda to the 1993 World Trade Center and Khobar Towers bombings, and suggesting that ‘young male immigrants of Middle Eastern appearance … may fit the terrorist profile best’,” Judicial Watch said.
Our ruling
Perry said the Obama administration purged “training courses and information about Islamism, jihad, Sharia, and the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The FBI removed nearly 900 training documents containing information that was inaccurate, imprecise or depicted stereotypes, after a review of 160,000 pages and more than 1,000 videos. The review came after 2011 media reports about training material portraying Muslims stereotypically and prone to violence.
Though the FBI did not publicly disclose the material it rescinded, Judicial Watch said that through a lawsuit for information, it found that removed material included references to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Perry’s statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. We rate it Half True.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the FBI Friday, hours after President Donald Trump ripped the bureau’s leadership and suggested that its reputation was “in tatters.”
“I don’t share the view that the FBI is not functioning at a high level all over the country,” said Sessions, who added, “… In my view, the FBI has huge national security requirements but it’s also fulfilling a fabulously important role working to fight against violent crime.”
Sessions also praised Trump for speaking to graduates of a weeks-long FBI National Academy program for law enforcement leaders from around the country, calling it “the first time a president in 47 years has spoken to the FBI[‘s] … graduating police academy class.”
“He made clear that he supports them 100 percent in their activities and that we are going to be a law enforcement administration that helps the law enforcement be successful,” said Sessions.
As Trump departed the White House for the speech in Virginia, he said, “It’s a shame what’s happened with the FBI,” an apparent reference to revelations that senior bureau officials exchanged anti-Trump and pro-Hillary Clinton text messages while working on last year’s Clinton probe and during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump associates colluded with Russian officials in the 2016 election.
“We’re going to rebuild the FBI, it’ll be bigger and better than ever,” Trump went on, “but it is very sad when you look at those documents, and how they’ve done that is really, really disgraceful, and you have a lot of very angry people that are seeing it.”
Also Friday, White House Deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley told Fox News that edits to former FBI Director James Comey’s statement on Clinton’s private email server and anti-Trump texts from a top agent were “deeply troubling.”
“There is extreme bias against this president with high-up members of the team there at the FBI who were investigating Hillary Clinton at the time,” Gidley charged, as Mueller pushes on with a probe of possible Trump campaign ties to Russia. Gidley says Trump maintains confidence in the FBI’s rank-and-file.
Sessions had previously drawn the wrath of Trump for recusing himself from overseeing Mueller’s investigation over questions about his own contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

In my last column, I criticized the anti-Trump “resistance” for its excessive zeal in exposing Russian espionage, observing that counterintelligence work driven by politics and emotion rather than facts and discipline is bound to go wrong. At worst, we run the risk of a new wave of McCarthyism, with meandering witch-hunts for Kremlin agents (most of them imaginary) instead of serious counterspy efforts.
What’s interesting is that the “resistance” is a movement of the Left and its adherents, with few exceptions, are recent fans of counterespionage. Their interest in Russian spying is driven by Donald Trump and is as intense as it is new. Their enthusiasm for unmasking traitors customarily outpaces their understanding of real-world intelligence operations.
It’s difficult to miss that these are the same people who mocked Mitt Romney only five years ago when the Republican nominee for president presciently opined that Russia constituted our main geopolitical foe—a suggestion that was mocked as old-think by President Barack Obama and his followers.
Moreover, the Left was hardly brimming with anti-Kremlin zeal back in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was mainly the Right, aided by a few stodgy old Democratic Cold Warriors, that signaled the alarm about Soviet espionage and propaganda as a threat to our country and the West. Indeed, for many on the Left, the notion that Moscow was aggressively spying on us was a notion deserving of derision.
How times change. Now the Left is on the enthusiastic hunt for Russian agents, while the Right has transformed itself seemingly overnight from a Romneyian skepticism about the Kremlin to indifference to the threat at best, and at worst a strange and unsettling affection for Vladimir Putin. President Donald Trump is the Republicans’ biggest Kremlin fan, and his reticence to hear anything bad about Russia extends to any classified White House discussions about Kremlin interference in our 2016 election. As a bombshell new report in the Washington Post explains, the president’s Intelligence Community briefers customarily avoid anything to do with Russia in their daily briefing to the commander-in-chief altogether, lest they upset him by saying something bad about Putin.
As if that weren’t bad enough, Team Trump has now taken to direct public attacks on our Intelligence Community in a desperate effort to stave off the results of the investigation of the president’s ties to Moscow that’s being led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. President Trump’s lawyers misinformedhim that the Russia investigation would wrap up by the end of 2017, without grave damage to the White House. That was patently false, as demonstrated by recent indictments and plea deals by major members of Team Trump, not to mention the prospect of more indictments soon—perhaps of people even closer to the president.
With his presidency and more on the line, Donald Trump is in the fight of his life, and it’s no coincidence that his media mouthpieces are hurling everything they can at the people who are investigating him—above all Mueller and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Attacks on Mueller are now routine, with torrents of unsubstantiated allegations of his alleged bias against President Trump. According to the Fox News version of reality, Mueller, a Republican, has surrounded himself with partisan Democrats who are out to sink Team Trump, evidence be damned.
A scandal has emerged over private text messages sent last year between Peter Strzok, a top FBI counterintelligence official, and his mistress. These texts showed Strzok to be notably anti-Trump, privately—as, let it be said, were virtually all IC personnel in 2016 who were acquainted with the modus operandi of Russian intelligence, since they understood that Trump’s Kremlin ties were problematic at best—and as a result Mueller removed him from the special counsel investigation.
This event has been turned into a cause célèbre by Trump fans, notwithstanding the administration’s alleged hatred for leaks, with the implication that the FBI is tainted. Indeed, the president’s media allies are portraying our nation’s top law enforcement agency as a rogue outfit and worse. Fox News has led this charge, naturally, and last week Fox stalwart Gregg Jarrett, in an appearance on the vehemently pro-Trump Sean Hannity show, which parrots Kremlin lies, went full tinfoil, in a monologue worthy of Alex Jones:
Mueller has been using the FBI as a political weapon. The FBI has become America’s secret police. Secret surveillance, wiretapping, intimidation, harassment and threats. It’s like the old KGB that comes for you in the dark of night, banging through your door.
Not to be outdone, this week on Fox News, Tom Fitton, the head of Judicial Watch, a right-wing lobbying group, called for the Bureau’s dissolution:
I think the FBI’s been compromised. Forget about shutting down Mr. Mueller. Do we need to shut down the FBI because it was turned into a KGB-type operation by the Obama administration?
Let’s be clear here. Jarrett and Fitton—with no pushback from Fox hosts—publicly compared the FBI to the Soviet secret police, which murdered millions of innocents, ran the GULAG, and served as the enforcer of Red terror for 74 years. The KGB was one of the nastiest, most blood-drenched organizations in human history. It was judge, jury, and executioner for the Bolsheviks. The rational mind has difficulty seeing how the FBI, a law-based police force held to account by Congressional oversight, is “like the KGB” unless facts simply don’t matter anymore.
Apparently, they don’t matter to Team Trump, since their fact-free war on the FBI and more broadly the IC shows no signs of abating. Of course, there’s nothing new about attacking American counterintelligence, seeking to delegitimize it by any means possible. Throughout the last Cold War, Soviet mouthpieces and allies portrayed U.S. efforts to detect and deter Communist espionage as illegitimate, sneaky, and somehow just not right.
Hence, we have countless media depictions, beginning in the 1960s, of Western (especially American) counterintelligence as inherently suspicious, paranoid and malevolent, when not merely risible. Such characterizations served to delegitimize U.S. efforts to stymie Soviet espionage and propaganda, and none can deny they were effective. The chronic American weakness in counterintelligence has many causes, but popular distaste for their work thanks to such scurrilous media depictions is surely a factor.
The Kremlin went further, employing Active Measures on a regular basis to smear American counterintelligence, fabricating evidence such as faked “official” documents to present our counterspies in a dismal light. For decades, the FBI, America’s lead counterintelligence agency, was a special target of KGB disinformation, never more than when it was headed by J. Edgar Hoover, the eccentric yet gifted man who led the Bureau for a half-century until 1972.
As revealed by KGB archives after the Cold War, Soviet spies targeted Hoover for public harassment, and it worked. To this day, some Americans whisper sordid allegations about Hoover’s personal life: for instance, that he was secretly a flamboyant homosexual, even attending parties wearing a dress with a feather boa like an “old flapper.” Few know that these stories were ginned up by KGB disinformation specialists in Moscow and have no basis in fact. Combined with Kremlin lies that alleged the FBI was secretly behind everything from right-wing domestic terrorism to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy—the latter was another spectacularly successful Chekist Active Measure—this dirty campaign did enduring damage to the public reputation of the Bureau and its leadership.
These lies were parroted by too many Americans, mainly on the Left, until they became cosmically true due to constant repetition. They live on today despite their thorough debunking. Something similar is happening now on the Right. To protect Donald Trump from the Russia investigation, which the president has repeatedly insisted is a “hoax” and “fake news,” his defenders are spinning their own hoaxes and fake news in a sordid fashion, taking aim at core institutions of our Republic.
Since the inauguration, the Trump White House has howled gigantic curses at the alleged “deep state,”another figment of the fervent imagination of the InfoWars and Fox News set, and they’ve now taken direct aim at the FBI. The Bureau will survive this unpleasant episode, but its reputation is being damaged by allies of their boss, our president, who are acting in concert with the FBI’s old enemies in Moscow. Why the Russians seek to dismantle American counterintelligence, their main enemy in the SpyWar, is no mystery. Why our president does, however, is a deeply troubling question that gets at the heart of the rot in Washington right now.
John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.