Former FBI Director Christopher Wray joins Jemele to discuss his time at the agency and what the FBI needs to do in order to regain trust from the American people and regain their confidence in the agency's ability to do its job.
00:01:31.840You think of the serious problems we have, Brian, with human trafficking, 30,000 people in this country illegally who have been convicted of rape or murder.
00:01:41.580This is where the FBI should be applying its resources.
00:01:48.060And the culture of the FBI on the seventh floor needs to be changed.
00:01:53.720And that has to have a kind of a reckoning.
00:01:56.380You know, you can you can cure the cancer without killing the patient.
00:01:59.260And that's exactly what needs to happen at the FBI.
00:02:01.380With Pam Bondi, who understands how to go after fentanyl problems, who understands how to use the Department of Justice and prosecution of these cases, with a functioning FBI that is not focused on politics, that is actually focused on crimes that are happening in neighborhoods that are destroying lives.
00:02:20.500That's kind of the thing that needs to happen.
00:02:23.140And it's somebody who has been out there and put bracelets on people and done investigations from stem to stern.
00:02:30.000I mean, I think that helps because you understand how you get agents refocused to their purpose.
00:02:35.920And there's a lot of agents that want to get back to work.
00:02:38.420The thing about if you talk to President Trump on or off camera, he'll say to you, I don't want to blanket criticize the FBI because he knows the agents.
00:02:46.380And there's a huge difference between the agents out in the field, 35,000, and the ones that are in the building.
00:02:52.260The Andy McCabe's of the world that clearly had a huge problem.
00:02:55.800Peter Strzok had a huge problem with Trump as president.
00:02:58.820And we saw the laptop being dropped off with Biden as president.
00:03:03.040I don't want to go over the mechanics of that.
00:03:04.920But the fact that there's people at the FBI that would look at a laptop and just keep it quiet till after the election.
00:03:12.820How do you get rid of a culture that's almost waiting for somebody to challenge it?
00:03:20.260I know how to challenge it and how to refocus them.
00:03:22.640And some of this and that cultural rot has got to go.
00:03:26.360Any personal animus that somebody would have politically that is still engaged in doing investigations is in the wrong business.
00:03:33.140You know, the FBI, when I was in the FBI, we didn't have these problems because you never I didn't even know have what my the political affiliation was with everybody on my organized crime squad.
00:03:42.180I couldn't tell you, you know, you had some ideas, but nobody talked about it.
00:04:11.000If agents are really willing to get back to work, there's plenty of places they can go to get back to work and doing the things that made the FBI the premier law enforcement agency in the world.
00:04:22.860But boy, does it need leadership and it needs to clean out the rot that's happening in the senior levels of the FBI as we watch it happen today.
00:04:30.080What do you make of the combination here?
00:04:32.260Because that's kind of been the struggle is Trump wants someone who can get confirmed by the Senate.
00:04:36.740I mean, especially given what played out today.
00:04:39.060But also he wants someone who is going to go in there and do what he wants.
00:04:43.560And he's been encouraged by a lot of people on the right to put Cash Patel in.
00:04:47.880What would a combination of that look like, do you think?
00:04:50.680So in my estimation, Caitlin, no part of the FBI's mission is safe with Cash Patel in any position of leadership in the FBI and certainly not in the deputy director's job.
00:05:04.160So just as an example, the deputy director's job in the FBI is unique because, of course, the director is a political appointee and the deputy director is typically a senior FBI agent.
00:05:16.880Somebody spent their entire career learning about the FBI.
00:05:20.680Understanding its people and doing its work.
00:05:22.940So the deputy director actually runs the FBI on a day to day basis.
00:05:27.840You're essentially the chief operating officer.
00:05:30.360I can tell you from my own experience, there is no way I could have successfully performed in that role without having spent the first 10 years of my career doing criminal work in the FBI and the next 10 years doing national security work.
00:07:05.560Okay, and welcome to Friday, 22 November, Year of the Lord, 2024.
00:07:15.920Important, I think, discussions, one might even say fights all over with Treasury and this issue about recess appointments.
00:07:27.220Of course, you have both inter-squad scrimmages going on, let me say, inter-squad scrimmages or fights.
00:07:38.240And then you've got huge battles against the resistance and up on Capitol Hill.
00:07:42.020We're going to walk through all of it as we try to drive the narrative and assist the transition here for President Trump's, you know, massive, incredible victory.
00:09:03.660In what universe does this make sense for President Trump as the chief magistrate of the United States in the MAGA movement overall, in America First overall, Jack Posovic?
00:09:16.120Steve, I got to tell you, that Mike Rogers interview this morning on Fox News was probably the best one I've ever seen.
00:09:52.020You have been weighed and measured and you have been found wanting.
00:09:57.380OK, this guy was all in on Russiagate.
00:10:01.160This guy was all in on the wiretapping of Trump Tower the first time.
00:10:06.020Who knows with if Mar-a-Lago is being wiretapped right now?
00:10:09.020I don't even know, but I wouldn't put it past any of these guys.
00:10:12.480And Mike Rogers is sitting there the entire time hanging out with James Clapper, hanging out with John Brennan, sitting next to General Michael Hayden of the NSA.
00:10:36.980It was Devin Nunez after we won Devin Nunez, right?
00:10:40.520I think I think took over here or Rogers, one of the senior guys.
00:10:43.760That's why he was in bed with these guys from the beginning.
00:10:46.360Devin Nunez became the chairman of the House Intel Committee and actually started to dig into the truth about what was coming together in terms of Russiagate and in terms of James Comey.
00:10:58.180By the way, it was Mike Rogers who came up.
00:11:31.120And by the way, we what do we find out now?
00:11:33.900And Solomon's got the reports and Lee Smith and some of the other guys have the reports that this was even going on before they had the Steele dossier, that the Steele dossier comes up later because they heard that Comey was looking for reasons to investigate Trump.
00:11:48.900OK, so let's go back and let's let's be serious here for a minute.
00:11:52.980These guys are trying to take out the populist nationalist movement.
00:11:58.860Mike Rogers is someone who played footsies and patty cake with them the entire time.
00:12:04.780So, yeah, they're all slipping and sliding on the couch over there on on Fox this morning.
00:12:08.600But look, I'm not buying it because I've got the receipts and because, yes, I actually watched the great Caitlin Collins show last night.
00:12:16.860Oh, that was a wonderful show to watch.
00:12:18.600And who do I see up there praising and extolling Mike Rogers?
00:12:22.240It's Andy McCabe, Andy McCabe, who was fired, by the way, not fired because of his politics, fired because of his lies, fired because of his corruption and fired because of his actions.
00:12:37.500That's why he was fired three days before his pension.
00:12:39.400And let's go back, by the way, Steve, you just you just buried the lead there, Steve, because when Devin Nunez was made House Intel chairman ahead of Mike Rogers, who did Devin Nunez appoint to write the memo to be the lead investigator into Russiagate?
00:13:11.340When I was down and grilled for 25 or 30 hours in the skiff, Paul Ryan had removed Devin Nunez from head of the committee, a committee the Republicans controlled, and put Trey Gowdy in charge with the Republicans.
00:13:27.780This is Paul Ryan, put his bitch Trey Gowdy in charge and let Shifty Shift and Swalwell run it.
00:16:46.880He served as an FBI agent for several years before he went off on his political career.
00:16:50.900He, in his capacity in the House, I think the strongest qualification in my own opinion about Mr. Rogers is the respect and awareness and knowledge that he has for the intelligence community, for the work they do, for the seriousness of that work, for how those secrets and that sensitive information needs to be protected.
00:17:17.300So in all those counts, I think Mike Rogers fills the bill pretty well.
00:17:21.880The thing about, if you talk to President Trump on or off camera, he'll say to you, I don't want to blanket criticize the FBI because he knows the agents.
00:17:30.620And there's a huge difference between the agents out in the field, 35,000, and the ones that are in the building.
00:17:36.460The Andy McCabe's of the world that clearly had a huge problem.
00:17:39.660Peter Strzok had a huge problem with Trump as president.
00:17:42.880And we saw the laptop being dropped off with Biden as president.
00:17:47.120I don't want to go over the mechanics of that.
00:20:21.380If one of the worst absolute people is attacking Kash Patel, is terrified of Kash Patel, doesn't want Kash Patel in there, opening up documents, unsealing things, finding out what you've done in your FBI archives.
00:20:37.580That's why they got the big shredders out there right now.
00:20:41.480And look at what Kash Patel was able to do when he was just the investigative director of the House on the House side of the House Intel Committee.
00:21:19.740He helped out the same type of people that Steve Bannon is talking about here in Danbury Prison that the FBI went after, wrongfully accused or trumped up charges or went after on the barest of circumstances and went after them, barest of pretexts.
00:22:52.740I think it was somebody named Donald J. Trump.
00:22:54.640Donald J. Trump who ran ahead of Dave McCormick in the Collar counties of Philadelphia, by the way.
00:22:59.240When everybody said he couldn't do it, it was Donald Trump who won the suburbs.
00:23:03.240It wasn't anybody else, and it certainly wasn't Rupert Murdoch.
00:23:08.000James Murdoch had a fundraiser for Biden.
00:23:11.320It's reported in Woodward's book, and it has not been – the Murdochs have not come out and said it's wrong.
00:23:15.020In October 22, when we're in a dogfight to take control of the house from Nancy Pelosi, he has a fundraiser for those guys, they're neoliberal.
00:23:24.600They play both sides, and they sucker in the right.
00:23:27.540But this thing they did today on Rogers exposes them 100 percent for what they are, okay?
00:23:34.640And we haven't seen – I want to thank Dan Scavino.
00:24:00.400We've got to salt the earth around the Rogers situation.
00:24:03.460And, look, it's not that Mike Rogers is not an okay guy and he ran for Senate, and we kind of supported that because it wasn't a primary, and President Trump thought he could win in Michigan.
00:24:25.060Now's your time to prove it because McCabe's going down, Comey's going down, Ray's going down, Merrick Garland's going down, Lisa Monaco's going down.
00:24:35.220Why do you think they're reporting that Morning Mika is running down to Mar-a-Lago?
00:30:21.280And I don't think that they care about whether there will be some shrapnel or some ancillary damage related to that.
00:30:29.460And so I think that's something that people should be alarmed about.
00:30:32.580And I think it's a clear-eyed assessment of what the incoming administration wants to do.
00:30:37.240The second part of that is sort of the more interesting part for me, right?
00:30:40.380Because the Democrats then get put in this box, right?
00:30:44.540And I think it's one of the things that they struggled with during the election was Democrats and us, never-Trumpers, anti-pro-democracy types, are always in the position of having to defend these institutions and be the institutionalists and be someone that's like, we should keep the administrative state.
00:31:01.600It's like, well, the administrative state's not that popular, for starters.
00:31:04.560These elite institutions, many of them, the military says, but others aren't that popular.
00:31:08.100And so finding a way to talk about what Millie just talked about, about how, yes, we need to reform, not destroy, I think that's a big challenge for the rest of us in the coming years.
00:31:20.240Jeff Rosen and a bunch of other officials threatened to resign when Trump tried to put in Jeff Clark in 2020, who was also going to push the big lie.
00:31:27.880So I think she has more management experience.
00:31:56.900I've talked to current Justice Department officials before this was announced, and they were all hiring lawyers.
00:32:02.160Do you think, I mean, given the record of what she's done and what she said and, you know, sort of where her loyalties lie, do you imagine that that's going to have a tangible result on the staffing at the Department of Justice?
00:32:19.380Do you think that there's going to be an exodus, a significant exodus, if someone like Pam Bondi is the head of the DOJ?
00:32:25.040With Gates, we did not hear about a significant exodus, and he was much more of a sort of in-your-face, you know, person who, like, you investigated me, now I'm going to investigate you.
00:32:35.340I don't think people are going to leave, and you're hearing this in different government departments, that they're going to stay, they're going to follow rules, they're not going to violate, you know, procedures are not going to violate the law.
00:32:52.820There could be a special counsel who would be appointed by Trump and by Pam Bondi, if she's confirmed, that would carry out long investigations.
00:33:00.940And another thing they're pushing at heart is sort of firing.
00:33:03.380There's a belief that there's all these liberals embedded in the career workers who work for Republicans and Democrats.
00:33:09.200You know, I haven't found that in my reporting, but they could be trying to force out a lot of those people.
00:33:15.100But many, many people, they don't think they'll be convicted.
00:33:17.380You know, Jack Smith, they didn't do anything improper, but they're expecting long legal battles, more congressional investigations, and they're lowering up.
00:33:28.860Yo, they don't think they'll be convicted.
00:33:33.640The reason they don't think they'll be convicted is that it'll be, they'll have to, a lot of these have to take place in Washington, D.C., and of course, with these juries that are 99% progressive left-wing Democrats, all made up of government employees, are people that suck on the government tit here in the imperial capital.
00:33:53.660That's their only, that's with these radical judges that ought to be cleaned out of the D.C. circuit, right, and the D.C. district judges, which is the most corrupt judiciary in the nation.
00:34:06.420They don't think they will be convicted.
00:34:11.140Didn't say they haven't done anything wrong.
00:34:51.680We're going to hit it with a blowtorch.
00:34:53.840They're going to fight, and they're going to fight hard.
00:34:56.900Jeff Clark, and one of the best ways we got it is this magnificent, and it's already controversial.
00:35:02.100Pence and these guys are already coming out.
00:35:03.560You're seeing all the great thing about a process like this, it exposes all the rats, right?
00:35:09.420So walk me through first what you just saw there with McCabe and all these reporters saying, oh, my gosh, over at Justice, they're all worried about this.
00:35:18.800You need people over there that cannot just shake up that building because it's a systemic problem.
00:36:15.660It needs to be restructured so that woke Democrats are not running all parts of it and running it to run political vindictiveness operations, trying to disproportionately destroy conservatives and MAGA and populists and religious people around the country.
00:36:34.100And there's evidence that they were doing all of those things.
00:36:36.820We need an audit right when the Trump administration comes in of all of their political enforcement cases coming out of their public integrity units, both in DOJ's criminal division and in the FBI and how they work together.
00:36:52.680And I want to tell you about, you know, a dangerous idea I've seen floating around in conservative circles of trying to, you know, say that you can get better FBI accountability if you only place it under a duumvirate.
00:37:10.480So specifically in this instance, it's a proposal to put part of the FBI under the supervision of the assistant attorney general for the criminal division and part of the FBI under the supervision of the assistant attorney general for national security.
00:37:25.420And, Steve, I know that you are a student of history like I am, and you know that none of the Roman duumvirates worked out very well.
00:37:35.200They only lasted, you know, less than a decade, the first one with Caesar, Pompeii, and Crassus, and then the second one with Octavian failed as well, right?
00:37:49.120What we need is the full-on medicine of the unitary executive.
00:37:53.000The president is in charge of the executive branch, and there needs to be a pyramid up to him.
00:37:58.260You know, just like he's the person where the ultimate buck stops on his desk, as Harry Truman said.
00:38:03.580There needs to be someone for whom, you know, the buck ultimately stops in each of the cabinet agencies and the key components like the FBI.
00:38:12.560So, you know, what they want is they—
00:38:17.860I want to make sure the audience understands this.
00:38:20.620In this unitary executive theory, right, it's not trying to make—they're not trying to make it supremacy over the legislative or judicial.
00:38:30.640But inside the executive—remember, the Constitution lays out he's the chief executive of the government, he's the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and he's—wait for it, the chief magistrate and the chief law enforcement officer.
00:38:46.040I understand the MSNBC, they want to make that some moderate-to-left-wing attorney general like Merrick Garland and some—curtain.
00:38:54.820These are these post-Watergate kind of ideas that seeped into the system so that the Democrats could run the town.
00:39:01.100Right now, what Brennan and McCabe and these guys talk about is a check and balance inside the executive by the deep state and the administrative state.
00:39:25.760Clark, isn't that the problem we have?
00:39:27.200The permanent government thinks they have a check over—this is why we are the true believers in the democratic process.
00:39:34.780And they actually believe they're anti-democratic to their core because they think they have a check on the executive branch side against the chief executive, the commander-in-chief, and the chief magistrate.
00:39:46.560A guy called the president of the United States, Jeff Clark.
00:39:49.980Yeah, Steve, our constitutional structure is to have three branches of government, the president who is the only branch that is one person.
00:39:57.740Then there is Congress split into two houses to protect liberty, and then there are the courts to decide particular cases in the application of law to fact.
00:40:08.940But what they have done with this administrative state, which started in the progressive era, the theorizing for it, and people like Woodrow Wilson, and then really metastasized under the New Deal era, and then got to the point where it's really out of control after the Nixon administration.
00:40:26.640And then they started not even doing changes to the Constitution or the statutes anymore.
00:40:34.800It is an idea that this fourth branch, which they have functionally created, is co-equal to the president.
00:40:41.160Or in reality, you know, as you can tell from watching these people like McCain and John Brennan, you know, John Bolton, et cetera, they think that this fourth branch is actually the superior to the president.
00:40:53.520That the president, they want to reduce the president to what, you know, Woodrow Wilson wanted to reduce it to, except for, you know, his transitional era trying to get there, where it's kind of a ceremonial office.
00:41:06.400That it, you know, is kind of a presider-in-chief, but not the chief magistrate, not the chief executive, not the commander-in-chief.
00:41:14.720The military should really be ruled by the likes of, you know, the Mark Millies that flit around.
00:41:20.320And this is not the system the framers gave us.
00:41:22.600In order to have the energy and dispatch and control and accountability that the system, you know, gives us, because the president, he has direct legitimacy across the entire country because the people vote for the electors who put him in office.
00:41:38.040All of the career bureaucracy, you know, the 99.9% of all the people who are GS, XYZs, whether, you know, 10, 11, 12, et cetera, up to 15, or the SES, all of these people are not elected.
00:41:53.000They're all accountable to the president, and the president has to direct them, and they just try to create so many different systems.
00:42:03.320Using their new modern, you know, political science ideas, they try to frustrate the system of the Constitution that the genius framers gave us.
00:42:16.780We got the whole thing on the recess appointments, but I also want to talk a little bit more about this fourth branch of government, the administrative state and its rogue element, the deep state, about how they've really created something that has its own courts.
00:42:31.340It has its own ability to execute, and it has really its own ability to legislate through rules.
00:42:37.720It's an entire government within a government, and we're at war with that, and we're going to take it down, okay?
00:42:45.320We're going to take it down like Carthage.
00:42:48.000We're going to take it like the Romans took Carthage down.
00:42:50.420We're going to take it down, and we're going to salt the earth around it.
00:43:40.260Back with Jeff Clark on the war against the administrative state next in the War Room.
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00:47:14.140They're defenders of an imperial system.
00:47:16.240That our founders and the revolutionary generation fought against.
00:47:21.000And they also had enough wisdom to understand with the potentiality of North America that it could lead to empire.
00:47:32.300And you had some guys like Hamilton, who's probably the most brilliant of them all, that, hey, maybe he was thinking maybe this is not a bad deal.
00:47:40.920Maybe we ought to just copy what the British are doing but do it our way.
00:47:51.200Talk about the fourth branch, the administrative state, because what they've created since the progressive era but really since the New Deal and World War II is in broad daylight, the fourth branch of government does everything.
00:48:40.080The administrative state and the deep state, which are closely allied, and I'll talk about the differences between them as I see it in a second.
00:48:48.800But, look, I'm also a student of Latin.
00:48:51.360And so, given how you started this segment, I have three Latin words for you.
00:49:00.180And there were speeches on the Senate floor in their republic era where that was how each senate speech was ended in order to ensure that that which was such a threat to the republic was overthrown, destroyed.
00:49:16.100We need to get back to the unitary executive system.
00:49:18.760And accountability is one of the main reasons why, right?
00:49:22.380If you have, you know, agencies and all these career people and it's not clear where the lines of accountability are, it always turns into a kind of this situation, right?
00:49:32.100What, you know, where is the person who actually made this decision under the P?
00:49:46.640There's one Supreme Court case that has frustrated that more than anything else.
00:49:50.860And it's led to the fusion of all three sets of powers, the executive power, the legislative power, and the judicial power in one agency.
00:50:00.920It's a case called Humphrey's Executor.
00:50:03.560And it was decided, you know, to try to, like, brush back the New Deal, ironically, and the so-called four horsemen of the apocalypse,
00:50:11.700who were standing in the way of the New Deal, they thought that by trying to keep in power a conservative head of the Federal Trade Commission
00:50:19.700and not having to be removed by Roosevelt and replaced, you know, by a leftist, that they were doing good for the country.
00:50:26.020But in reality, they gave the administrative state all the tools they needed to create these things called independent agencies.
00:50:32.880And it's what led to this fusion of three powers, which the framers and Montesquieu, the originator of separation of powers theory,
00:50:41.840recognizes the very definition of tyranny if you can fuse all those three powers in one.
00:50:46.480So, the FTC, yes, it has the power to pass new regulations.
00:51:43.960Because we've still got the work I had you come on for, which is this massive analysis you've done of how President Trump could be the driver of the action in regards to recess appointments.
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