Former FBI agent Peter Strzok and his bureau paramour, Lisa Page, used their positions to try to defeat Donald Trump in 2016’s presidential election. Now, though, dishonest FBI agents may have an even greater incentive to undermine Trump’s White House efforts — if ex-deputy FBI director and “dirty cop” Andrew McCabe is to be believed.
After all, he claims, FBI agents fear they’ll go to prison if Trump is reelected — and some are even contemplating fleeing the country.
My, some can now just hear that old law-enforcement refrain, “You’ve got nothing to fear if you haven’t done anything wrong….”
Fox News reports on the story:
McCabe, a CNN analyst, told “The Source” anchor Kaitlan Collins that there was an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty within the intelligence community over the prospect of Trump returning to the White House.
… “It’s terrifying. It’s frightening,” McCabe declared of how some officials view Trump’s possible return to power.
… He said he was told by former colleagues, including some from the Obama administration, that they’ve had “torturous discussions with their family members about whether or not they have to leave the country to avoid being unconstitutionally and illegally detained.”
“Illegally detained,” my — project much? Anyway, “McCabe didn’t spell out what he and other Washington officials had done to make themselves enemies of the former president, but some of their clashes with Trump are well-known,” relates the Big News Network.
“The FBI improperly spied on a Trump campaign staffer in 2016 and lied to the US FISA court to obtain warrants in a probe of alleged Russian interference in that year’s election,” the site later explained. “The agency also covered up its knowledge that the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy narrative was false. A high-level FBI agent and his mistress [Strzok and Page], an FBI lawyer, discussed the use of the Russia investigation as an ‘insurance policy’ to ensure that Trump didn’t win the election.”
Returning to the projection, McCabe certainly didn’t shrink from the dramatic. “If he [Trump] feels like he’s been wronged in some way, then he focuses on revenge and then in vengeance,” he also told The Source, Breitbart relates. “He’s made it perfectly clear that that’s what he’s gonna do. In the process of seeking that he run[s] the risk of dismantling or greatly incapacitating the Department of Justice and the FBI. That is something that Americans on both sides of the political aisle should be worried about. We depend on those institutions to protect us.”
Yes, for sure, and don’t you feel safer knowing the FBI is out there to illegally spy on populist presidential candidates and monitor scary trad Catholics? I mean, without these feds you could at any moment turn around and then find yourself being strangled with a set of Rosary beads.
Commentator Monica Showalter has her own response to McCabe’s hand-wringing.
“Oh, spare us,” she writes, and then explains:
Up until a few years ago, the FBI used to be a studiously non-political organization. Now they’re the willing storm troopers of every instance of legal overreach instituted by Democrats in search of political enemies to punish, draconianly, of course. This is and should be illegal.
To the extent that they have been caught in legal malfeasance, particularly of the politicized kind, they’ve walked away with slaps on the wrist if not complete impunity. Start with McCabe himself, who got fired for leaking to the press, which he knew he was not supposed to do, but did anyway. His subsequent lawsuit restored his full pension and he’s now living high on the hog. Who says crime doesn’t pay?
There were worse ones on the political front in recent years, too. How is it that former FBI assistant counsel Kevin Clinesmith got probation for altering, that’s right, altering, notes to FISA judges in order to get full surveillance authority on Trump’s associates even though he knew the man he was targeting didn’t merit it otherwise? The creep not only altered emails, which actually takes a lot of knowhow and can’t be done accidentally, and is highly illegal, he got probation for it, not even losing his law license. The guy should be in jail, because he framed someone, which is what dirty cops do. This kind of activity undermines public faith in the entire organization. Should he have not been background-checked for character issues?
Then there’s Strzok’s “punishment,” which amounts to making a nice living on the talking heads circuit. Showalter mentions other FBI transgressions, too:
- Spying on the aforementioned Latin Mass attendees, and on the military, looking for “extremists”;
- Being complicit in social media censorship; and
- Acting as “storm troopers” with pro-life activists and J6 protesters.
At the same time, the bureau was wholly uninterested in seeking justice against the country-rending BLM and Antifa rioters.
In fact, the FBI’s behavior can be so egregious that it shocks even its own members. Just consider the following, reported by Bloomberg in March:
“Did this really just happen? Am I dreaming? The FBI served a Search Warrant on a former president?” wrote an incredulous bureau employee in an email that was sent to the FBI’s acting ombudsman, Chauncenette Morey, shortly after the Mar-a-Lago search. “If he [Trump] took documents, give him a call and ask for them back. Like … Seriously? My own agency …. A bunch of democrat political hacks up top…I’ve lost just about all faith in our leadership.” [Relevant tweet below.]
Then there was special counsel John Durham’s May 2023 report, which “found that both the DOJ and FBI ‘failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law’ when it launched the Trump-Russia investigation,” informed Fox News last December.
“Durham said his investigation also revealed that ‘senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor towards the information that they received, especially information received from politically-affiliated persons and entities,’” Fox continued.
The truth is that the FBI has become frighteningly corrupt. Thus, any threat that Trump might arrest dirty FBI agents should be a selling point, as Breitbart senior editor Joel Pollak notes below.
As Showalter sums up, the FBI’s “acts were often illegal acts simply because they were political acts and the agency is not authorized to be a political agency.” True, but the real problem is us.
To quote one line of philosopher C.S. Lewis’ explanation of modern woes’ etiology (The Abolition of Man, 1943), “We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” For sure. We elect the people who forge the FBI, and as we descend into Third World levels of virtue, we slouch toward Third World standards. It’s as easy to understand as it is hard to remedy.
