Controversial Cabinet and Agency Picks—Part Ten

Victor Davis Hanson

Kash Patel/FBI Director

Andrew McCabe, the interim FBI director who followed James Comey and preceded Christopher Wray, by his own admission repeatedly lied under oath to both the FBI’s Inspection Division as well as to the Office of the Inspector General. Only AG Bill Barr’s wrong decision not to prosecute McCabe saved him from a likely felony conviction and worse.

McCabe, remember, also reportedly voiced his “concerns” that Trump was involved with the Russians. And he connived with then-acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in anti-Trump schemes that led to the latter’s offer to wear a wire and entrap then-President Trump. Their idea apparently was to interview/talk to Trump. And in the process, they might get lucky and elicit something crazy and incriminating to go forward with a 25th Amendment effort to remove him—in sum, a veritable coup attempt.

Rosenstein reportedly told McCabe, “I never get searched when I go into the White House. I could easily wear a recording device. They wouldn’t know it was there.”

Given all that, why would anyone take the now media-persona/CNN “analyst” McCabe seriously, when he blasted the Patel appointment with the following screed?

The installation, or the nomination I guess we should say at this point of Kash Patel as FBI director, can only possibly be a plan to disrupt, to dismantle, to distract the FBI and to possibly use it as a tool for the president’s political agenda.

So, McCabe is now talking about the dangers of a “political agenda”?

What is more disruptive of and distracting to the FBI than brazenly lying under oath repeatedly to federal officials, after being caught illegally leaking confidential FBI investigative information to the media?

McCabe’s successor Christopher Wray is the current FBI head. At one point he threatened to resign as director if forced to fire McCabe (promises, promises, promises…). Wray has three years left on his scheduled 10-year term. But under his direction, we have witnessed the FBI surveillance of traditional Catholic groups, parents at school board meetings, and pro-life protesters, despite an absence of evidence that any of these concerns were violent much less terrorists.

The FBI, again while Wray was Director, conducted a performance art, SWAT-like raid, a first in presidential history, on ex-president Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, which descended into searches of the private closet space of his son and former First Lady Melania Trump. Note the FBI conducted nothing similar at any of Joe Biden’s far less secure stashes, at which for 30 years as a senator he had improperly stored classified files. And to incriminate Trump, the FBI photographed the files sloppily strewn on the floor, although the files were stored in boxes when they arrived.

The FBI also served as a virtual Biden family, scandal-retrieval service. The FBI conducted a predawn raid against James O’Keefe, then director of Operation Veritas, in failed hopes of finding O’Keefe with the “lost” incriminating Ashley Biden diary (the one, remember, in which Ashley blamed some of her instability (“hyper-sexualized @ a young age.”/”having sex with friends @ a young age”) on her prior inappropriate showers with her dad Joe (“showers with my dad (probably not appropriate).”).

[As a footnote: Why would a father shower with his daughter at any age? And why do the Bidens do such strange, and so often sexual things—Joe’s blowing in the ear or on the hair of young girls and calling out teens during his speeches; Jim Biden posting nude selfies of himself; Hunter…enough said; and Ashley’s and her dad’s showers…?]

And, of course, there was also Hunter’s lost .38 revolver, tossed by his widowed sister-in-law and paramour into a dumpster. The pistol was retrieved by police and turned over to federal authorities after a passerby had rummaged it out of the bin. (And why do these Bidens lose laptops, diaries, and handguns? Why do they disclose/photograph/expose their sexual habits [in this context, do we remember a female former Secret Service agent complaining that guarding Vice President Biden meant having to watch him prance in front of her while nude at the pool?])

Under Wray, the FBI since 2019 possessed Hunter Biden’s laptop and knew it was genuine—and yet remained mum at the very time “51 intelligence authorities” were claiming it had the hallmarks of Russian disinformation operations.

Or was it worse than that, given the FBI was colluding with social media to suppress news reports that it was genuine, a fact that had already been established internally by the FBI?

In other words, Wray’s FBI—learning nothing and forgetting nothing from the fired James Comey’s FBI that had intervened in 2016 to injure the Trump campaign—during the 2020 presidential race was actively working to weaken the Trump reelection effort.

How? By leveraging social media companies not to report, or allow to be reported, on their platforms news coverage of the laptop that the FBI knew from their own internal investigations was both accurate and embarrassing to the Biden campaign.

A post-election TIPP Insights poll (TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics), to the furor of the Left that sought to discredit Trump, found that had voters known the laptop was genuine and its incriminating information about the Biden family authentic, they might have voted differently—and in enough numbers to change the election result.

The FBI then under Wray, one could argue, sought to change the course of American history, in ways that if not illegal, were clearly unethical and went far beyond the FBI’s legal purview.

(To be continued…)