Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Current FBI Director Kash Patel is closing down the agency’s Washington, DC, mothership office and moving at least 1,500 employees out of the DC area to regional offices.
The decision was not just Patel’s.
During the Biden Administration, it was determined that the 50-year-old Hoover building headquarters was structurally decrepit. More germanely, no prior FBI director had ever explained why nearly a third of the FBI workforce was centered in offices in Washington, far from where most of the serious crime in America occurs.
The news is welcome for reasons well beyond the safety of agents in an apparently unsafe headquarters.
It is no exaggeration to state that most of the FBI scandals of the last decade were born in the Hoover building headquarters, suggesting that the agency had long become top-heavy, politically weaponized, and deeply embedded in and compromised by the Washington apparat.
Former FBI Director, later appointed as special counsel, Robert Mueller ran a media-driven, 20-month, 40-million-dollar legal circus chasing the unicorn of “Russian collusion.” His left-wing legal team—replete with political conflicts of interest and scrubbed cell phones—was dubbed by the obsequious, giddy left-wing media as the “army,” “untouchables,” “all-stars,” “dream team,” and “hunter-killer teams.”
When called to testify about his investigation that had found no Russian-Trump collusion, Mueller implausibly denied any knowledge of the Steele dossier or FusionGPS. Yet they were arguably the very catalysts for his own special counsel appointment.
Two of his Washington FBI investigators were fired—the amorous Peter Strzok and Lisa Page—who had co-texted a deep personal antipathy toward Trump, the object of their investigations, and a desire to see him not become president, referred to as an “insurance policy.” Note that either the FBI or Mueller’s team also mysteriously lost the requested recorded texts and calls on the duo’s phones.
Mueller’s successor, James Comey, outdid his predecessor’s congressionally sworn amnesia. Now in the news yet again for allegedly threatening the president with an “8647” tweet, Comey, while under oath to a congressional committee, stonewalled questioning by claiming he did not remember or could not answer on some 245 separate occasions.
Somehow in 2016, Comey—suddenly acting as both an investigator and a de facto federal prosecutor, despite clear conflicts of interest—managed to interfere in the 2016 campaign by finding Hillary Clinton likely guilty of, but somehow not indictable for, a number of felonies, from unlawfully transmitting classified files to destroying subpoenaed evidence.
Comey also lied to the president that he was not a subject of his own ongoing FBI-directed investigation of Trump.
Comey hired Christopher Steele as an informant and thereby helped to birth Steele’s fabrications.
Comey, through a friend, leaked to the New York Times his own private conversations with the president, recorded on his own FBI device no less.
He set up National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and bragged about how easily the naive and ambushed Flynn foolishly spoke to his FBI investigators without an attorney.
His successor, interim director Andrew McCabe, was a kindred leaker and political partisan. He was fired for lying to federal investigators on four occasions, three times while under oath.
McCabe’s successor, Christopher Wray, infamously oversaw FBI agents spying on parents at school board meetings and supposedly also monitoring “radical traditionalist” Catholics.
Wray’s FBI conducted the now equally discredited Mar-a-Lago SWAT team raid on ex-President Trump’s personal residence. The performance-art operation was supposedly designed to find rumored mountains of improperly stored classified files. Despite all the leaks and fake news about troves of secret and classified dossiers, in the end, agents carted away 13,000 documents to find a mere 102 that were deemed classified—some 0.7 percent of what they confiscated.
In a now-infamous photo of the document trove released by the FBI, Trump’s classified papers were haphazardly strewn across the floor with nearby covers emblazoned “Secret” in red rubrics.
Agents later admitted the photos did not reflect the actual position of the documents when they had arrived, but were scattered over the floor and photographed by the FBI, along with the covers that they had brought along to the raid as photo props.
The FBI then showed far less interest in investigating Joe Biden’s three-decade-long illegal possession of classified documents, stored in at least three unsecured locations—and only revealed when the Biden White House had appointed a special counsel to investigate Trump for what Biden himself had done for far longer, with less security and with continued impunity.
Washington FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was indicted and convicted of doctoring a FISA application document in order to deceive the federal court into granting surveillance over an innocent but framed Carter Page.
FBI chief counsel James A. Baker, likewise Washington-based, allegedly was deeply involved in trying to shop the spurious Steele dossier to the media on the eve of the 2016 election.
In general, the Washington FBI sought to warp both the 2016 and 2020 elections and might arguably have affected either outcome. Besides finding Hillary Clinton likely culpable and then improperly exonerating her, later in 2020, the FBI sat tight and silent on the Hunter Biden laptop after authenticating it as genuine.
Yet almost at the same time, kindred ex-intelligence authorities—the now notorious “51 former intelligence officials” —rounded up by former CIA interim director Mike Morrell at the prompt of then Biden aide and soon-to-be Secretary of State Antony Blinken—brazenly lied to the public that the laptop was a likely creation of Russian intelligence.
This disinformation campaign, launched by the 51 “former” intelligence agents, included some who were still on the federal payroll as contractors. Their intent was to arm Joe Biden in the upcoming October 2020 presidential debate with the lie that the incriminating laptop (again confirmed in secret by the FBI as genuine) was fabricated by the Russians. And the ruse worked perfectly in deceiving the American people on the eve of the election.
Note as well that the FBI embedded agents in social media concerns like Facebook and Twitter to partner in censoring news by deeming it “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Yet, in truth, their jobs in the so-called “Twitter Files” scandal were better defined as suppressing any news considered problematic to the then-2020 Biden campaign.
Many FBI agents later rotated over to high-paying social media companies after their collaboration, among them former FBI general counsel Baker, who was then subsequently fired by the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk.
The list of ethical, moral, and legal misadventures at the top-heavy Washington FBI office could be easily expanded.
But suffice to say, the closure of the J. Edgar Hoover building and the dispersal of the toxic Washington-centric FB hierarchy is welcome news.
Hopefully, this historic closure will also mark the end of the most sordid and decade-long chapter in the history of a once-great agency.
And not one of the perpetrators of the whole 2016-2020 failed stings has received what they deserved. Prison. Funny that.
Remember that Sr Agt Mark Felt, who was running the FBI’s day to day operations during Nixon’s presidency, admitted that he was Deep Throat. He leaked information to journalists and arranged the coup to take down the President.
The FBI’s role in trying to take down Trump was nothing new, almost 50 years later.
Too soon to celebrate the dispersal of the DC FBI clam. Care must be taken to prevent them from becoming cancerous seeds that infect FBI field offices across the country.
The bad apples need to be investigated, prosecuted and if found guilty, face the highest penalties permitted under the law to prevent future political misadventures.
I+still+cannot+read+these+on+the+app.++I+have+to+go+to+the+website.
Everyone in the military and all commercial employees working with classified NASA and military contracts are required by law to have lenghty background checks investigated by the FBI prior to being awarded a classified clearance.
Elected persons in Congress and the Executive Office and all their associates are exempt from background checks and are automatically awarded security clearances.
A boiler worker on a nuclear US Navy aircraft carrier undergoes more scrutiny that of your low-life US Representative on the Hill.
This miscarriage of justice on background investigations is inversely proportional to the level of authority.
The above is why ignorant voters twice voted for an undocumented alien and a jibber-jabber word-salad chef from Jamaica, both or whom are constitutionally-ineligible for the Executive Office. Tis-the-season-for-treason in DC (District of Communists).
perfect+monument+to+Biden%E2%80%99s+FBI+styled+in+what+is+known+as+Brutilist+Architecture%2C+criticized+for+its+cold%2C+imposing%2C+and+sometimes+intimidating+appearance%2C+absent+from+%22equal+justice+for+all%2C%22+the+original+inscription+found+on+the+Department+of+Justice+building.+%0ATed%2FMilwaukee
Thank you. We got this fixed. Jennifer Hanson
I thought that the only reason that they were building a new HQ campus was they had run out of closet space in the old building.
In the past I was a regular listener of Dan Bongino’s podcast and he often said the FBI was corrupts and needed an overhaul. Note he is working together with Director Patel to get it done. My hope is that they can do this quickly to sood’s shenanigans in future elections. I also hope my comment satisfies other readers and they don’t find any mistakes! ☺️
“…13,000 documents to find a mere 102 that were deemed classified—some .007 percent of what they confiscated”
this is 0.7% Not .007%
Your point still stands — i’m just a stickler for details
There is an ethos in DC that is easily observed but difficult to describe and that explains the improprieties you discuss. An aspect of that ethos is the bizarre steps taken by Jim Comey to scuttle the candidacy of Donald Trump in 2016, and the efforts to kneecap his administration when he was elected anyway.
Comey believes that he was doing the right thing in his efforts, and that he knows better than the average American who should run the country. This perspective is fundamentally anti-democratic.
It also violates the Constitutional structure of our country.
It is as certain that Comey will never apologize for his abuses of power as it is that DC is incapable of punishing him.
The+only+way+to+fix+it+is+to+shut+it+down+period+and+start+over+no+trust+will+ever+be+gained+until+they+arrest+prosecute+and+imprison+the+agents+that+set+up+innocent+people+not+promoting+them+or+just+moving+them+around+
Many years ago I was hired into a small and dysfunctional government field office. The dysfunction and bad attitudes and behaviors seemed to stem from a succession of poor managers and lack of higher office attention, and was firmly entrenched. There was a high percentage of ‘bad apples’ and obstructionists. When one of them was replaced, the rest of us looked forward to a better situation, at least in that specific function. Over a couple years, I observed that the replacements typically and gradually fell into the same patterns as their predecessor.
Some writers have referred to this pattern as being ‘…as though a metaphysical behavioral demon permeated the walls…’.
A friend who was a professional counselor referred me to a body of research work on organizational culture and change. The short story is, an entrenched dysfunctional culture in an organization is self-perpetuating. Old staff tend to unconsciously expect the same behavior of the new member as from the predecessor, and relate to and treat the new member as they did the old. The new member tends to then react to and absorb the cues and treatment received, so the culture persists. A highly effective technique is to upend stagnant and unacceptable culture through physically dispersing the individuals into a significantly revised and reorganized one.
The reorganization of the FBI would seem to be a good thing to try.
Moving the FBI Headquarters out of the sewer is good news.
However, it’s a little like closing the barn door after the horse left. The damage from so many years of contamination in DC and believing that suddenly the contamination will cease to exist seems overly innocent even sophomoric.
“far from where most of the serious crime in America occurs.”
THEBARON@ENTER.NET beat me to the punchline. VDH is usually right, but in this case he needs to revise that statistic!
Looking forward to getting more legitimate/honest FBI officers for California where much illegal activity happens especially in state government but none is exposed. Am fortunate to live near a new FBI office in Roseville.
How about Whitey Bulger?
I think the FBI has been corrupt from the beginning when J Edgar Hoover was director. Perhaps the front line agents are not corrupt, but only those with a tendency to corruption are promoted until the top levels have been distilled to pure evil. I pray for Kash Patel and Dan Bongino
Continuing
At the time of this criminal behavior people were losing their homes and City fees were rising exponentially. AS of this writing the money has never been recovered or returned to the enterprise funds from which they were embezzled. Additionally all of the 660 properties have been off the tax rolls for over a decade since they are City owned causing a loss of tax revenue the Citizens were due.
To say our system is broken and the Fox owns the Hen house is not new.
All Americans need to know that Laws are merely suggestions, the criminals run the system.
If we don’t want to prosecute, o well, live with it.
I have little hope we can ever fix broken America, it is everywhere.
Respectfully, Chris L
Dear VDH
I have had a distaste for the FBI long before all the current collusion and criminal acts were brought forward.
In 2012 I was an elected official in the city of Cape Coral Florida, six members of City Council and “government employee’s” embezzled 13.1 million dollars from the residents of the City by using funds that were by statute to be used for water, sewer and stormwater enterprises. They embezzled the funds to speculate on real estate and bail out a connected individual. The Bank of Pennsylvania held the properties and went so far as to imbed a bank employee as a Cape Coral City employee. The bank employee ran a fixed bid project for the 660 properties and 90 days after her employment the fix was in and the City bid, bought, and acquired the 660 properties. A mere 30 days later she resigned and went back to work for the Bank of Pennsylvania. She knew the buy it now price and no other bids were ever entertained.
Myself and the then sitting Mayor went to and worked with the FBI and SEC for several months. We took several boxes of evidence and it was a slam dunk conviction if anybody cared.
The FBI and SEC investigated and found that yes they had violated many laws, problem was they did not care to charge ” incorporated Cities with such minor crimes”. The SEC transferred the investigators out of the area to kill the SEC investigation. One of them told me so to my face adding that someone has enough pull to derail the case and investigation.
Dear Victor: As a long time loyal fan, I truly hope when judgement day comes for these ‘traitors’ that my father, stepfather and my Uncle Joe who fought in the Pacific theatre are the ones handing these Benedict Arnolds their passports to hell! There are many more that should be added to the list including, in my humble opinion, the top traitor and his wife, Joe Biden.
I still believe, the still alive and well, Obama-Soros Cabal, have been behind much of the Traitorous Subversive Activity. Obama Bin Ladin has been better than ” Slick Willy” at avoiding any repercussions of aberrant and criminal behavior. Hitlary was certainly a main beneficiary of all this corruption.
The crimes VDH recounts, perpetrated by FBI leaders, weren’t peccadillos but downright acts of treason with Mens rea. We’ve heard little or nothing about Pam Bondi’s current activities. Does she have the stomach (or inclination) to prosecute them as such, or is she another Bill Barr?
Professor,
I remember not long ago one of your podcasts where you analyzed and suggested very common sense solutions to restoring the integrity of the FBI. I specifically remember you suggesting moving agents and the HQs to Red states where staffing could come from ordinary citizens and agents could be refocused from politics to crime prevention. Also moving staff from DC into more rural communities would enhance the quality of life for agents and staff. It appears at last some in the current administration are listening to someone with a lot of wisdom and a historical perspective who represents the adage “Those who refuse to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Thank you so much for your patriotism, sharing your wisdom and positivity.
Brilliant analysis of the FBI’s sordid deeds.
It will be less likely for the FBI to be connected to a political party, if their physical location is moved out of DC.
Stalin and Beria would be proud!
When they dig up the foundation – whose bones will be discovered? QUICK! Get Geraldo! There may be a vault.
I agree with the comment about changing from ‘serious crime’ to ‘violent crime’. D.C. Is one of the world capitals of serious crime. The Hoover building is the epicenter.
It’s not the building
It’s the people
It’s time for Article lll Section 2.
It’s almost never the building
Half of these government employees could be released without any significant loss of government services. They fabricate work or simply go through the motions of appearing busy to justify their positions and ultimately cash in on their ample pensions. Worse yet, they engage in nefarious political activities to consolidate power.
“…far from where most of the serious crime in America occurs.”
It might be more precise to say, “far from where most of the violent crime in America occurs”, Vic.