00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk Show, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is now talking about its collapse and demise, a deep and fair conversation.
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00:01:31.000Joining us now is Thomas J. Baker, author of the excellent book, The Fall of the FBI, how a once great agency became a threat to democracy.
00:02:10.000The good we can maybe get to later, but the bad and the ugly interest me the most.
00:02:15.000Yeah, I don't want to, I didn't want to be too much of a downer, so I did put that good stuff in there.
00:02:19.000And the good stuff reflects to the present ugly.
00:02:22.000For instance, in the past, the emphasis with the special agents and the training and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, how important that was.
00:02:32.000A lot of the things that we were taught, we saw that they were ignored in the Russian collusion investigation and in several incidents since then.
00:02:41.000The Durham report validated an awful lot of what I said about the ugly.
00:02:46.000I had the benefit when I was writing last fall of having, and it was available to everybody online, of Durham's two indictments of Denchenko and of Sussman.
00:02:59.000And he really laid out quite a case in that.
00:03:01.000Of course, nothing like the 300-page Durham report, which showed eventually, ultimately, the contention of my book that there was absolutely, absolutely no justification for opening the Russian collusion investigation, nor the succeeding obstruction of justice investigation, which was mainly handled by the special prosecutor, Bob Mueller.
00:03:25.000So let me ask you, to what extent are the current leadership of the FBI, Christopher Wray and his lieutenants, what do they see their role to be?
00:03:33.000Because I think you're obviously you're right.
00:03:35.000There's some legitimately great work the FBI does when they go after child sex traffickers, they go after money embezzlers, you know, foreign spies.
00:03:43.000All that stuff is legitimate, and I hope it continues.
00:03:45.000What drives me nuts is the, and, is the overreach, the spying, the FISA abuse, the political persecution, obviously going after selective prosecutions.
00:03:57.000What is, in their own words, do you think, how does the FBI leadership view themselves?
00:04:03.000Because they look awfully political with their decisions, their motives, and their actions.
00:04:09.000And every time one of these, and you elaborated on some of them, one of these incidents happens, ultimately, it seems that the bad apples are let go.
00:04:19.000They're either fired, as Comey, Struck McCabe, were fired.
00:04:23.000Two of the agents involved in the Governor Whitmer kidnapping fiasco were let go.
00:04:30.000Two of the agents involved in the gymnas case were let go.
00:04:33.000All of these bad things that have come to light, culminating last fall when an assistant agent in charge of the Washington field office was walked out the door at the end of a Friday afternoon when it came to light very clearly that he had been involved in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop investigation.
00:04:53.000And in each and every one of those instances, Director Ray says in so many words, well, the bad apples are gone.
00:05:00.000And he refuses to look at the underlying problem of the culture of the FBI.
00:05:06.000That's the problem why these things are happening.
00:05:40.000In response, Director Ray said, none of the people who were involved in that are with us any longer.
00:05:48.000Do you have any faith that the FBI can be restored to first an institution we trust, and then, of course, more importantly, one that's actually doing legitimate work, not acting as a Democrat political super PAC?
00:06:04.000It's a hard job to change culture, but it can be done.
00:06:07.000The first thing that has to be done is to recognize that there's a problem and then to reform it.
00:06:14.000Hopefully, in two years, we'll have a new attorney general, a new director, and that'll get on its way and be done.
00:06:22.000In the meantime, there's still a role for Congress to play.
00:06:26.000The cultural change, really, the FBI has to do itself and recognize the need for it.
00:06:30.000And there are more and more people speaking out.
00:06:32.000More and more people are leaving the FBI in the recent year or two who are speaking out about this.
00:06:39.000But the Congress has a role to play too, particularly, you mentioned Pfizer abuse.
00:06:43.000Congress can legislatively correct a lot of that.
00:06:47.000So let's get into some of the, here's another question for you.
00:06:51.000From your experience, how much of this is a DC bad apple problem and how much of this has metastasized into other field offices?
00:07:01.000Is this a cultural issue or is it mostly stemmed from Washington, D.C.
00:07:06.000Well, initially, and a lot of people, myself included, thought it was mainly centered in Washington.
00:07:11.000But the fact is that since this cultural change, which I can go back to and explain that a little bit further, but since this cultural change has happened, a new cadre of individuals, intelligence analysts, have risen to the fore.
00:07:27.000They don't operate in the constitutional guidelines that special agents are trained into.
00:07:32.000And I've had people in the current FBI, working-level agents, tell me that these intelligence analysts are driving the agenda.
00:07:40.000So they're the people come up with, there's no kind way to say it, these crackpot ideas, such as targeting people who like a particular flag, like the Betsy Ross flag, Or the targeting of Catholics who prefer to worship in the Latin language.
00:07:59.000There's crazy ideas, and those people are all over now.
00:08:05.000And that's where a lot of these problems are coming from.
00:08:09.000But all of that is part of the package of the cultural change, which was started by Bob Mueller and then exacerbated by the poor leadership of James Collins.
00:08:18.000So just to repeat that, though, was the cultural change that Bob Mueller turned the FBI into an intelligence operation, not a law enforcement organization.
00:08:29.000And that happened, as I believe you know, because you're very well informed on this whole history.
00:08:35.000But Mueller became the director of the FBI just a few days before the September 11th attacks, which happened on a Tuesday.
00:08:43.000The following Saturday morning, he was summoned to Camp David to meet with President George W. Bush, and he thought to give a report in the investigation.
00:08:53.000And what had happened in just those three and a half days between the Tuesday attack and the Saturday morning is the FBI did what it does best, investigate.
00:09:04.000And in those three and a half days, they had identified all 19 hijackers, their connections, their financing, their travel, everything about them, the connections going back to Al-Qaeda.
00:09:14.000And when he was done with his report, George W. Bush just looked across that long oak table at him and said, I don't care about that.
00:09:22.000I just want to know how you're going to prevent the next one.
00:09:25.000And Mueller told us after that, he resolved he was bound and determined to change the culture of the FBI, and that's the word he used, from a law enforcement mindset to an intelligence mindset.
00:09:38.000That had a lot of unintended consequences, and most of them were bad.
00:09:44.000I think it's worth repeating how much of our politics and our policy and our language really changed and goes back to 9-11.
00:09:54.0009-11 was so dramatic that what came next, in some ways, we had no idea what we were inviting in.
00:10:01.000We were changing agencies, creating new ones.
00:10:03.000We were recalibrating laws and customs.
00:10:07.000And I think one of the lessons is: hey, when you're in panic, it's not always the best time to change what has already been proven.
00:10:15.000Panic is legitimate, not the best time to do big decisions.
00:10:19.000Because look at what we're dealing with now.
00:10:21.000We are dealing with 20 years, 22 years later, an agency that is so off the rails based on your wonderful book.
00:10:28.000The book is The Fall of the FBI: How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy.
00:10:44.000Pro-life legislation, supporting pro-life candidates, but you have to simultaneously do the other thing.
00:10:49.000I believe you actually have an obligation, which is to support women in need and babies in need that are at risk of being aborted.
00:10:57.000Look, when you introduce a girl to her baby by providing an ultrasound, you're giving her the truth at the most critical and important time in her life.
00:11:06.00085% of the time when they actually see the baby, they choose life.
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00:11:46.000I think the world of pre-born, I give money financially.
00:11:50.000And every one of you that are pro-life, I believe you have a duty and an obligation to go to preborn.org slash Kirk and give as you can, give your best gift or call 833-850-2229.
00:12:12.000So let me ask you, when do you think the fall began?
00:12:17.000I mean, your history of the FBI goes all the way back to the assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan.
00:12:23.000Was it prevalent in the 80s or 90s, or was it really that kind of turning point of Bob Mueller changing the fiber and the DNA of the FBI?
00:12:31.000Oh, it was definitely the turning point when Bob Mueller changed things.
00:12:35.000Before that, the agents, we were so grounded in the Constitution.
00:12:40.000I mean, that is what we live by, the first 10 amendments, particularly the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment, that some people see as a break or a handicap to law enforcement or police enforcement.
00:12:52.000But we were told by our legal instructors to embrace the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment.
00:12:57.000Don't see them as an obstacle, understand them.
00:13:01.000And we were given a pocket copy of the Constitution and told to keep it in our breast pocket.
00:13:06.000And one of our instructors told us when you're interviewing an American or when you're searching someone's home, if you have that Constitution in your pocket, it's going to be very hard for you to go off the track and do something wrong.
00:13:21.000It may sound corny to some today, but that was the mentality.
00:13:25.000But then Bob Mueller set about to change the FBI away from a swear-to-tell-the-truth law enforcement organization to an intelligence organization.
00:13:34.000And the difference, Charlie, in culture is profound.
00:13:39.000In a law enforcement organization, people are working every day when the day comes that they're going to have to stand up in court and raise their right hand and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth before a judge or jury.
00:13:56.000That's quite different than an intelligence agency that deals in deception and deceit and just chases after intelligence.
00:14:04.000In law enforcement, everything's in a straight line.
00:14:06.000There's a complaint or a crime committed, and you go in a straight line to try and find the perpetrator and try and convict the perpetrator and solve the crime.
00:14:16.000In intelligence, you just go round and around in a circle.
00:14:19.000You just keep gathering more and more intelligence going around in a circle.
00:14:23.000And that's why we have these crackpot ideas today coming out of the Bureau to investigate Latin Mass Catholics and to look at mothers and fathers at school board meetings.
00:14:34.000It's all just in this no boundaries intelligence chasing process.
00:14:43.000There are three events that can stand out in FBI history.
00:14:46.000And I'm wondering how that falls into your history and your book, The Fall of the FBI, and how it might have changed maybe an us versus them mentality.
00:14:59.000Those three things stand out as far as domestic law enforcement situations that resulted in a less than ideal circumstance, right?
00:15:07.000Ruby Ridge, which was, I believe, up in Idaho, which resulted in somebody dead.
00:15:11.000And then Waco, which I think we can all say was probably poorly handled in a variety of different ways.
00:15:15.000And then finally, of course, Oklahoma City.
00:15:18.000Leading up into the fall of the FBI, did these events mean anything to you, or are they just kind of blips on the radar in the history that you account in the fall of the FBI?
00:15:26.000Well, I remember all three events rather well.
00:15:30.000I was overseas when two of them occurred and we even in the legats around the world were getting leads and responding to them.
00:15:49.000There was a always there was a problem in coordination and communications.
00:15:54.000Hopefully, a lot of that has been straightened out between agencies.
00:15:59.000Also, the training was always very, once I said about the Constitution, that you did not shoot, you did not use firearms, you did not use deadly force unless you felt your own life or the life of someone else was in danger.
00:17:02.000I think it, because it's when you get to September 11th and the whole paradigm changes and shifted, and some people would say for a good reason, but then, oh, as you said, because people were in a panic.
00:17:16.000But at the end of the day, changes were made that really do now, in retrospect, jeopardize our liberty.
00:17:24.000Not to mention, I believe in the 90s was the centennial park bombing as well in Atlanta, Georgia, with Eric Rudolph, who was on the run, which was a little bit of a PR issue for the FBI.
00:17:38.000I want to tell you guys about something every single one of you can benefit from, and you guys need to change.
00:17:43.000It's who we use when we go to get mortgages.
00:17:54.000And I didn't want to go to those woke banks.
00:17:55.000I, you know, I did previous, my last mortgage we did, it was with a woke bank, and they were just, they were bureaucratic and they donate the BLM and the gay agenda and all that stuff.
00:18:05.000And I said, what can I do to actually, and I said, of course, duh, hello, andrewandtodd.com.
00:19:41.000And again, these other banks that I deal with, it's like, here's 955,000 pages to sign and they don't call you back and they don't work weekends.
00:19:48.000I had a problem with one of the things on the process because it was one thing that wasn't filled out.
00:19:52.000And they respond on a Sunday within minutes.
00:19:54.000You're trying to get a response from a woke bank on a Sunday.
00:20:56.000Yes, that's about when I left, in fact.
00:21:00.000And what happened, the Patriot Act, and some of that's been modified too.
00:21:05.000But after September 11th, other laws were amended and modified.
00:21:08.000And then the rush and the pressure of the days, people didn't notice at the time.
00:21:13.000And one very significant one was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which John Durham in his report spends a lot of time on and which was clearly abused during the Trump collusion investigation, or of course hurricane is the code name.
00:21:30.000So the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Pfizer, was first passed and put into operation in 1978, and it had two specific aspects to it.
00:21:41.000It was to be used only to gather intelligence, not to gather evidence for prosecution, and it was only to be used against foreign agents resident within the United States.
00:21:55.000Now, you can guess who those were diplomats and similar.
00:22:00.000And after September 11th, the act has been modified numerous times, and now it can be used against U.S. persons, which includes not just U.S. citizens, but legal aliens and U.S. corporations.
00:22:16.000And it was really, we can see the abuse of it with specificity in Crossfire Hurricane, where they had four Pfizer warrants over the course of a year targeted at this individual, Carter Page, who at the end of the day had nothing to do with anything and was doing nothing wrong and was not an agent of Russia or anybody else.
00:22:38.000Yet he was subject to the Pfizer surveillance, very intrusive surveillance.
00:22:45.000It's more intrusive than people imagine.
00:22:48.000People think of simple wiretapping, but with Pfizer, they monitor all your communications.
00:22:53.000So today that means your emails, your texts, your instant messaging, everything.
00:22:59.000And unlike years ago, when a wiretap was ongoing from that moment forward, the way information today is stored in the cloud, once you have a Pfizer warrant on somebody, it looks back at information in the past.
00:23:35.000And there's a requirement with Pfizer reporting to the Pfizer judges in Washington.
00:23:41.000It lags about a year or two behind, but the numbers are reported.
00:23:46.000So in the first couple of years that it was put in action in the late 70s, early 80s, there were only a couple of hundred Pfizer warrants a year.
00:23:55.000You could almost, and it's a secret, but you can almost guess where and who most of those were on.
00:24:02.000Then by September 11th, it jumped up to 1,000.
00:24:06.000And now since then, it's 2,03,000 a year.
00:24:09.000And we now know from the Inspector General, the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, who looked at some of this stuff in the wake of Russia Hurricane, we now know that there were hundreds and hundreds, if perhaps thousands of these warrants are directed against U.S. persons.
00:24:29.000And with almost, and what animates me and our audience, though, is the lack of accountability to the actual police officers, quote unquote, with the badges that abuse it.
00:24:42.000And so the Durham report was obviously, you know, very clear, but to date, there has not been anybody that is serving prison time for violating these laws.
00:24:55.000These lies and this abuse has real material harm, not just to the agency's reputation, but also to the continuation.
00:25:04.000And then Bob Mueller being appointed a special prosecutor for the Russia stuff, LART.
00:25:08.000So this stuff grows and grows and grows.
00:25:10.000And the truth is able to circle the globe 10 times before, I mean, the lies are able to circle the globe 10 times before the truth ever gets out of the gate.
00:25:19.000So do you think these people will ever be held accountable for what they have done?
00:25:25.000In terms of prosecution, probably not.
00:25:28.000What happened in a lot of cases, Charlie, I'm not disagreeing with you because some of it, in my mind, was a violation of the law.
00:25:36.000But what a lot of it was, and Durham is clear on this too, was an abuse of power.
00:25:41.000In other words, when you look back at all the things that happened in that Russian pollution investigation, take General Flynn and others.
00:25:48.000They were unmasked when their names came up.
00:25:52.000The people who did that had the authority to do it, but it was an abuse.
00:25:57.000And in the Pfizer warrant, which Durham makes clear, was based mainly on the steel dossier.
00:26:04.000And he also makes clear that by the time he got looking at it, we knew everything in the steel dossier was phony belonging, just made-up stuff.
00:26:12.000And what he found out in doing his interviews of people up and down the chain of command was that a lot of people suspected there, or suspected at the time, there wasn't enough probable cause, but yet nobody, apparently, nobody spoke out at that point.
00:26:29.000So it's a combination of an abuse of authority and a lot of really slipshod work.
00:26:38.000So let me ask you about some of your colleagues that you served with or might still be there.
00:26:46.000What was the reaction amongst your friends or people that served when the Durham report came out?
00:26:52.000Well, for the most part, and the people that I talked to, it just reinforced what they already knew or suspected.
00:26:58.000And I've talked to several agents, working-level agents, actually, who have left in the past year or so, and one or two who are actually involved in aspects of CrossFire Hurricane.
00:27:09.000And they were kept in the dark about a lot of things along the way.
00:27:14.000That was another thing that Bob Mueller put in place and Comey kept this compartmentalization, just like an intelligence agency.
00:27:23.000Everybody talked to the people on the right and the left of them.
00:27:26.000With this centralization and compartmentalization that Mueller put in place, people didn't know.
00:27:33.000They just knew what their one little assignment was.
00:27:36.000They just assumed, as I did in the past, that there was some legitimacy to this.
00:27:43.000And I remember one conversation was related to me by one of the two people who were involved in it between the agent in charge in the Washington field at the time and the agent in charge of the New York office.
00:27:54.000And they were hearing bits and pieces of it, but they didn't have control of it because it was all being run out of headquarters, which was highly irregular.
00:28:03.000And they just said to each other, which I would have said too, well, they must have more because what they saw, they didn't see enough for an investigation, and they just assumed they must have more.
00:28:14.000Well, it turns out they didn't have more.
00:28:17.000But that's what you get is, and once again, Comey and Mueller are responsible for this, centralizing everything so you eliminated all the levels of independent review that you had in traditional investigation, where you had a case agent, then the field supervisor above the case agent, then the special agent in charge of that office.
00:28:37.000Those layers of review before the case went to headquarters.
00:28:40.000In the first fire hurricane, you had somebody, a deputy assistant director like Struck, opening the case, and then the next day flying to London to conduct the first interview himself.
00:28:57.000And it seems as if they either never thought they would get caught or they didn't care or they thought the ends justify the means and or a mixture of all those different things.
00:29:09.000And when you have dirty cops, it really ruins their reputation there.
00:29:22.000It breaks my heart to even discuss these things.
00:29:25.000I mean, I'm not taking any form of happiness in this.
00:29:29.000The Durham Report did validate a lot of stuff in my book.
00:29:33.000And I really think the more people who read my book, the better off our country will be, because there'll be more people agitating for change.
00:29:41.000This is still a democracy, and people, a lot of people expressing their voice can have an impact.
00:29:48.000They can get the book on Amazon.com or at Barnes ⁇ Noble or wherever.
00:29:53.000And I really think people need to read it.
00:29:55.000As I said, people need to read the Durham Report.
00:30:38.000It is an emphasis on equity, not equality.
00:30:41.000And it is imperative that we crush the idea pathogen of critical theory, postmodernism, post-structuralism, subjectivism everywhere we possibly can.
00:31:06.000There was somebody on the Supreme Court.
00:31:07.000He's either Sandra Day O'Connor or Rehnquist, big difference, who said, pornography, you just know it when you see it, is just one of the great quotes ever.
00:32:14.000But if you do not question the diagnosis, then you're going to allow these power-hungry people to run over you.
00:32:22.000So a takeover of a country through woke tyranny happens in two parts.
00:32:27.000The first part is they have to misdiagnose and then they put forward a quote-unquote remedy to their misdiagnosis.
00:32:36.000So Larry Fink is on the poor remedy or the damaging remedy side of the equation, play cut one.
00:32:45.000It's just, you have to force behaviors.
00:32:49.000And if you don't force behaviors, whether it's gender or race or just any way you want to say the composition of your team, you're going to be impacted.
00:33:15.000Behaviors across the entire firm in every region have to be similar.
00:33:21.000And every citizen of the firm has to understand what is acceptable behaviors and what are unacceptable.
00:33:28.000Now, you can lead yourself to believe that, that we have to force companies, again, force companies, gender, race, and all this, if you actually believe that there's this massive systemic problem.
00:33:40.000That's why it's so important to go after the root of the flawed logic.
00:33:45.000The false premise will create a misleading, misdirected trajectory where we are so far out of the barn.
00:33:53.000All of a sudden we're talking about reorganizing our corporations, all based on a lie.
00:33:57.000And this is why Tim Scott running for the presidency, I am in full support of, not for him becoming president, but if he does nothing more than goes after the idea pathogen of America being racist, we then can deconstruct and fight Larry Fink on trying to change our corporations.
00:34:18.000You have indicated that you don't believe in systemic racism.
00:34:22.000One of the things I think about, and one of the reasons why I'm on the show is because of the comments that were made, frankly, on this show, that the only way for a young African-American kid to be successful in this country is to be the exception and not the rule.
00:34:33.000That is a dangerous, offensive, disgusting message to send to our young people today that the only way to succeed is by being the exception.
00:34:43.000So the fact of the matter is we've had an African-American president, African-American vice president.
00:34:47.000We've had two African Americans to be secretaries of the state.
00:34:50.000So how do you beat Larry Fink imposing ESG?
00:34:54.000You go after the premise that it's built on.
00:34:56.000ESG loses power if you're able to disprove and disempower the entire premise they have, which is America is systemically racist.
00:35:06.000Climate change is looming catastrophe.