James Galeano is a 25 year veteran of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and served as a supervisory special agent. James is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, served as an infantry officer, served with the 10th Division Division of CBS News' Mountain Mountain Mountain News' Law enforcement division, and was a member of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), a counter-espionage unit. James has been in the FBI and DOJ for 25 years, and has been involved in the fight against the Deep State for decades. He has been a special agent with the Joint Special Operations Division of the FBI, and served in the Counter Espionage Division at the Joint Interrogation Agency. James served as the Director of Operations for the Joint Defeat Organization, a JIEDDO unit.
00:06:14.100I want to believe that the people that did the actual work of the essentially triage and the redactions are operating in good faith.
00:06:22.100But, sir, as you well know, having experience in dealing with government officials, the red tape and sometimes the partisanship, unfortunately, gets in the way.
00:06:31.100Yeah, I've noticed that more than a few times over the course of my career and with greater velocity and frequency nowadays.
00:06:43.520I want to turn to the idea that this memorandum verifies what William Barr said, which was there is no presentation for obstruction of justice.
00:06:53.920That's what he said in 2019, not long after he had been appointed the Attorney General of the United States.
00:07:03.640And Mueller himself makes it very clear that there was no underlying crime.
00:07:10.060There was no Russian collusion that he could in any way obstruct because there was no underlying predicate for it.
00:07:22.120And, again, we have a partisan issue that with Congress, Adam Schiff and his megaphone going after Trump day in and day out, the Marxist Dems.
00:07:35.880It's just it's been an ugly six years in which four directors of the FBI have, with quite clear evidence, lied to the American people and or Congress.
00:07:49.500It's it's it's a stunning, a stunning six years.
00:07:54.240And meanwhile, the guy they're persecuting politically, they being the Department of Justice, the FBI, the deep state have, in point of fact, been the perpetrators of wrongdoing, not their intended victim.
00:08:11.760Yes, sir. Well, you know, and I'm sure your listeners, because I'm guessing they're pretty educated and erudite crowd know that in the FBI's history, we've been around since 1908.
00:08:25.160J. Edgar Hoover took over as a 29 year old in 1924, and he helmed it, gosh, 48 years under eight presidents from Calvin Coolidge all the way to Richard Nixon when he passed away in 1972.
00:08:38.960I served under four of the eight Senate confirmed FBI directors, and I had my differences with all of them.
00:08:46.800I knew some of them better than others because I served as on their protection details with the FBI's hostage rescue team.
00:08:55.060I'm dissatisfied here. Now, having said that, I came into the FBI in early 1991.
00:09:01.400Interestingly enough, during William Barr's first tenure as the attorney general under Bush 41, and I always felt like he was a straight shooter.
00:09:11.200Didn't always agree with him, but always felt like he called it straight.
00:09:14.300You are right in how you look at and how you how you frame the six years of the crossfire hurricane Russian collusion investigation.
00:09:26.080I'm supremely disappointed. I think a lot of the agents and the people in the mid-level management positions acted in good faith.
00:09:34.620But, sir, we know their names, the James Comeys, the Andrew McCabe's, the Kevin Kleinsmith's, the Peter Strzok's, the Lisa Page's, and now the Timothy Tybalt.
00:09:45.820We know the names of these folks now through whistleblowers and obviously through four, I believe, inspector general reports.
00:09:52.880And it's damning. It shouldn't indict the entire agency.
00:09:56.780I believe the entire agency is good. But, Lou, I'll leave you with this one and close it this way.
00:10:01.780When I left the FBI in 2016, I believe the American public held the FBI in the 95 percent favorability realm.
00:10:11.480Rasmussen Reports just last week put out a poll that suggests that 53 percent of Americans, sir, do not trust the FBI.
00:10:22.880You know, I think it breaks all our hearts because we looked years ago now at the FBI as the essential law enforcement agency and also for its national security role.
00:10:41.360But that has that has been, it seems, long ago.
00:10:45.360And I don't know whether or not we will ever recover from it, whether the FBI will recover from it.
00:10:50.940But the raid on Mar-a-Lago, I truly believe, and I said this on this show, I don't believe America will ever quite be the same after the FBI raid on the president's offices in Mar-a-Lago.
00:11:05.240The FBI, I do not believe, will ever be regarded in the same way, nor the Department of Justice.
00:11:28.040I think the American public has a short memory.
00:11:31.740And I think that agencies that are inherently good but that suffer under poor leadership for a time, i.e., the federal beard investigation in this instance, I think you can recover from this.
00:11:44.380You and I are both old enough to remember COINTELPRO and the wiretapping of Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders, the black bag jobs.
00:11:53.720Jared Goover was an amazing director and did a lot of wonderful things.
00:12:00.200He also did some things that we all look back on and go, yeah, the FBI was wrong for doing that.
00:12:06.800I'm hoping that this is a period like that and that we will recover.
00:12:10.200But, Mr. Dobbs, I believe it's going to require new leadership.
00:12:14.400The FBI director is a political appointee, and he or she gets a 10-year term, which allows them to overlap any presidential administration.
00:12:26.240We need a cleaning out at the top, and we need changes in the seventh floor at FBI headquarters where promotions are not part of a meritocracy.
00:12:34.680They're part and parcel of a system that a lot of us retired FBI agents believe is broken.
00:12:41.840In that regard, and I make no mistake, I want the FBI to recover from this as quickly as they possibly can, but I don't want it to be an exercise in public relations.
00:12:53.440I want it to be an organizational, absolute organizational reform that makes it so we will not see a repetition of this ever again.
00:13:06.920And as you say, I agree with you 100%.
00:13:09.440It will take a significant change of leadership.
00:13:13.280The Governor Whitmer case, for example, has shown up now with, again, the FBI framing victims rather than, and in point of fact, participating in the plotting of a crime with their informants, with undercover agents.
00:13:33.280Two of the defendants in the case found not guilty, largely because of the fact that it was entrapment.
00:13:43.120Two others just recently have been found guilty, but they had different roles.
00:13:47.060Your thoughts about why the field officers, and in fact, the head of the Detroit field office, I should say, parenthetically, is now the head of the D.C. field office, which was involved, obviously, in the raid on the president's home offices at Mar-a-Lago.
00:14:06.440Your thoughts about how we got to this point where it is so, it is just outrageous what the FBI is being found to do.
00:14:18.080They are being revealed to be greater perpetrators, more numerous, and frankly, more guilty than those that they have been seeking to prosecute politically.
00:14:31.560Yeah, so let me unpack that for the listeners.
00:14:35.040So, I served as an FBI undercover agent for about 10 years in the drug realm, in the gang realm, in the organized crime realm.
00:14:46.240Let me just give a quick definition to the listeners about what actually, what you meant by saying governmental entrapment.
00:14:52.060So, entrapment is when we, meaning the government, and those acting on behalf of the government, lure somebody, an individual, into committing a crime that they might not have been originally predisposed to commit.
00:15:05.040So, we can't go up to an innocent citizen and say, hey, I want you to rob a bank, I'm going to give you a bunch of money to do it, and then they do it.
00:15:12.500If we're acting in the capacity of a government agent, we've now put that into an otherwise unassuming innocent person's mind, and the law specifically states we're not allowed to do that.
00:15:23.320The mission case that you referred to was fraught with problems, and I don't know the individuals personally.
00:15:30.260I know them by name, but I did not serve personally with them.
00:15:33.380I know that there was an undercover agent that had a number of issues in his personal life.
00:15:38.260I know that some of the supervision of the case has been subjected to some scrutiny in regards to what was allowed to happen.
00:15:45.640And, Lou, I'll say this, and let me preface it by saying this is Jimmy Galliano private citizen supposition, but someone who knows the FBI inside and out spent fully one half of my life in the FBI, retired at age 50, I spent 25 years in the Bureau.
00:16:02.840I think right now there is such an emphasis on trying to prove that domestic terrorists and white supremacists hide behind every rock and every tree that the Bureau is going out of their way to kind of, I think the term is confirmation bias, prove what the Attorney General and prove what this President and the political party that's in power right now is insisting.
00:16:29.200Look, Lou, I can't stand white supremacists.
00:16:32.240I think if you're a bigot and a racist, I don't care if you're on the far left extreme or the far right extreme, if you do anything in furtherance of that, you should face justice.
00:16:41.940But I think we live in a period of time now where the government in power is so bent on proving that far right extremism is just as much of a threat as far left extremism, that they're going to do anything to make that case.
00:16:57.500And, Lou, I think the Michigan case is a perfect example of that.
00:17:00.980And I think that your analysis is exactly correct.
00:17:06.440It comports to the information that we are getting in secondhand, I will put it that way, from the whistleblowers.
00:17:15.680And I must say about whistleblowers, James, the whistleblowers that have stepped forward, at least 14 of them, with Congressman Jim Jordan, with Senator Chuck Grassley and Senator Ron Johnson, we don't know how many more, but the substantial number.
00:17:32.280For the first time, I am hopeful that that reform we were talking about of the FBI is possible, because I've had to say at various points over the course of the past several years.
00:17:42.920There was a time where I would say, but there are good people in the rank and file, but the silence has been deafening, and their willingness to go along makes me wonder about how strong the will is to protect law and order in this nation on the part of the FBI.
00:18:03.060It took six years, but I have to tell you, thank God they are finally stepping forward.
00:18:09.780Your thoughts about those whistleblowers and how important they are.
00:18:13.160Look, I mean, there are whistleblower protections in place for a reason, and whatever the wrongdoing is, those folks need to be protected.
00:18:25.540It's happened going back, I mean, almost, you know, in perpetuity, but in my recollection, back to 9-11, when there were some FBI agents that blew the whistle that the Bureau didn't take seriously the fact that there were some Middle Eastern students in the United States
00:18:41.280who were taking flying lessons with no interest in taking off or landing, just in keeping the plane upright in the air, and apparently it was ignored, and so they came out, they were protected.
00:18:53.400In this instance, you're referring to folks that are pushing back right now, and it's interesting.
00:18:59.600I'm sure you're familiar with the case of William Jefferson, who was a congressman in Louisiana that a number of years ago was arrested by the FBI for corruption,
00:19:09.580and I believe we found like $90,000 in quote-unquote cold cash inside his freezer at his home.
00:19:16.780The case agent, Lou, on that case was Timothy Tybalt.
00:19:22.520He's the same case agent who then moved on up the ranks and is the one that two weeks ago, while he was in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
00:19:31.580Director Christopher Wray, FBI Director Wray, stated he was deeply troubled by the allegations that suggested that Mr. Tybalt, prior to the 2020 election,
00:19:43.960had quote-unquote slow-walked the Hunter Biden laptop.
00:19:48.460So these are the kind of things that I appreciate now.
00:19:52.280I understand that Senator Grassley and Congressman Jordan and a number of whistleblowers have come to them,
00:19:58.660and they are obviously getting that information from them to determine whether or not was the FBI overreacting to 2016,
00:20:08.320and James Comey stepping in front of the microphones, and what some people have accused him of,
00:20:12.620altering the election, putting his finger on the scale because he was talking about a case that was not adjudicated,
00:20:19.840but it might have influenced the election.
00:20:21.840Was this an overreaction in the other direction, sir?
00:29:39.260Yeah. And we have seen it not smell right for six years, haven't we, James? There is no question
00:29:45.820about the integrity of the FBI. It has none. There is no question about the political corruption of the
00:29:52.580Department of Justice. It is rampant and pervasive in the Department of Justice. We do know
00:30:00.500that they have lied, tried to frame and overthrow a president from the latter half of 2016, while
00:30:08.520President Trump was then a candidate, right through to the current to this present day. And it makes no sense
00:30:16.260to anyone what is happening here until you think about who is the outsider and who was opposed to
00:30:23.660everything in the establishment of both political parties. It is it is an outrage against decency as well
00:30:33.980as law and this Constitution. And this administration has demonstrated it has no regard for either. I just can't
00:30:42.140even imagine why there has been no accountability for a single individual over the course of the the Russia hoax,
00:30:52.160Russian collusion, all of it, six years of it, which has been one attacked after another, relentless over six years. How is it that that could happen?
00:31:06.660Your best guess. Well, I think a part of it and the only thing and I know you were speaking in the macro sense and not the micro, but the only thing I'll push back on Lou is I do not believe when we say the FBI is corrupt, people think that the good men and women who swear no to uphold and defend and protect the Constitution and are out there doing the hard work every single day putting themselves in harm's way. And many of them become martyred because they get killed while they're performing their duty. And they're out there doing the hard work every single day putting themselves
00:31:31.660in harm's way and many of them become martyred because they get killed while they're performing their duties on behalf of all of us. Many people think that if we say that or suggest that as you did, that we are smearing them. And I don't think that's your intent. I believe that you sense that the vast majority there are 36,000 FBI employees, 12,000 sworn FBI agents. Now to put that into into context, the NYPD, the New York City Police Department in New York City has 36,000
00:32:01.66036,000 police officers, the FBI only has 12,000. So one in three, and they're scattered across the globe, and obviously across the 50 states in the in the United States. So I don't believe that's the problem. What I believe the problem is, is I mentioned it at the top, the confirmation bias that goes on, where you have young, hallow, sycophants that are promoted that shouldn't be that go to headquarters, and then they surround the king, the emperor, and
00:32:31.640they basically agree with whatever he or she says. And a lot of these cases, and mid-year exam, which was the Hillary Clinton email case, crossfire hurricane, which you referenced, which was the case into, quote unquote, Russian collusion. And the, I'm pretty confident that the Hunter Biden laptop case, they're worked out of the FBI headquarters, seventh floor where the bosses are. Those cases need to be in the field.
00:33:00.040And that's the problem. They're being, we're running this from a centralized command instead of having the experienced folks do it in the field, Lou. That's something that has to change.
00:33:09.900It has to change. And by the way, it's also an affront to the American people in so many ways. Not only the loss of integrity and respect, the loss of integrity that results from the FBI's, those in the FBI who violate the law and the rights of citizens, they are supposed to serve.
00:33:32.780But it is also a loss of respect for them on the part of the American people. And as you said, we're, more than half of the American people do not respect, and that's putting it kindly, the FBI.
00:33:48.220There is a huge problem. But they are ignoring, the leaders of the FBI are ignoring the oversight. Absolutely. Laughing in the faces of the congressmen and senators who are to provide oversight for the American people.
00:34:04.000They've become so powerful, they've become so powerful, they can thumb their nose at anyone in the government who wants to question anything they do.
00:34:11.780And by the way, I've been under surveillance by federal agents, and I can't speak specifically whether it was the FBI, but I know that they were federal agents surveilling me, wiretapping my home.
00:34:26.680There's no question about it. There's no question about it. And I have no animus. I, you know, it's just the way it is.
00:34:34.420But to think that this is going on, I have to, I have to get to a point here where I want to take up the issue of the Patriot Act after September 11th, and what it has wrought, and whether or not in your judgment, the National Security Division of the Department of Justice and, and the FBI need to be just broken away from the FBI and DOJ.
00:35:05.100Wow. All right. So you're, I hope we have a little bit of time for this.
00:35:10.480Your question here is, it's a great one. And I think my career kind of bookended what you're talking about, because 9-11 was a seminal moment for the FBI, and obviously for America. I mean, that sounds like a stupid statement. Of course, it was a seminal moment.
00:35:26.800But for the FBI, there were some discussions amongst, you know, on Capitol Hill, whether or not the FBI should be broken up into essentially what the Brits have with an MI5 and an MI6 handling domestic intelligence and international intelligence, and whether or not the old school G-Man, the FBI that I joined, where I cut my teeth under
00:35:56.800the FBI, who were Hoover-era agents, where we went after public corruption, we went after gangbangers, we went after drug dealers, we went after bank robbers, we went after pedophiles.
00:36:08.100Well, the Bureau was essentially reshaped under Robert Mueller. He came in, I think he was appointed FBI director. Lou, I think it was seven or eight days before 9-11. So he kind of had to hit the ground running.
00:36:20.920And he made some decisions in real time. And I can't fault him for that. It's easy in hindsight to look back and say, should have done this or should have done that. But to your point, if your question is, Jimmy, should the agency be broken apart?
00:36:34.780Yes, I tend to think that the old school working, you know, criminal violations, that FBI is a different FBI from the one that is completely intelligence driven, part of the intelligence community, and has to look beyond the shores of America, and has to kind of be part of that community that includes the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense and DIA and NSC
00:37:04.780and all those on all those acronyms. Yes, I think that that would help because I think that the agency is at war with itself. It is their internecine battles going on every day between the people that still want to go out, find the crime, fix the crime, prove the crime and send those people to jail. And people that are in the more esoteric, you know, you know, the kind of counterintelligence realm, the counterterrorism realm, where cases don't last a year or two,
00:37:34.780they can last 10 years, they can last a decade or more. So to your point, to sum it up. Yeah, Lou, I think that makes sense. Do I think defunding the FBI, which Marjorie Taylor Greene said two days ago, makes sense? No, that's silly and unserious. Do I think that the FBI could be reformatted, broken up? Yeah, probably should have happened after 9-11. But I think it was a different time. And I'm not going to blame those folks then. But yes, I think a reshaping and a reformatting should occur.
00:38:01.640Well, I'm glad to hear that. And I agree with you. And certainly, I wouldn't judge what was done in the days, weeks and months after September 11th, because like most Americans, I was filled with outrage and anger. And yes, I'll say it, bloodlust.
00:38:22.200For any who were responsible for taking the lives of those 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and in the field in Pennsylvania.
00:38:33.960But since then, we have learned much, and we should be applying it. It's a reason, by the way, James, I have said, I've called for the removal of the National Security Division from the FBI,
00:38:49.280to have those people reassigned, if they have acted with absolute integrity, and if not, to be absolutely removed from the federal service.
00:39:03.260So I'm glad we agree on that. And I have to say, I agree with you on just, you know, I will say nearly everything.
00:39:11.680I agree with you on everything that you've said, except those things, of which, of course, you argued with me.
00:39:20.120That's fair. You did it civilly, sir. No complaints.
00:39:23.380Well, say back at you. James, we always give our guests the last word here. And please, your concluding thoughts.
00:39:32.040Lou, first of all, I appreciate what you're doing.
00:39:33.640And I think that's what makes this country great, is the fact that, you know, we're moving into an era where people don't just listen in, you know, to music in their cars while they're on their commutes.
00:39:44.140They try to listen to become informed, whether they agree with the host, or they disagree, or they agree with the guest, or disagree.
00:39:51.280I think platforms like this, look, I worked at CNN for four years.
00:40:00.220Everything is a soundbite, and you have 20 seconds to hit it or quit it and make your point.
00:40:06.640I appreciate mediums like this, where people like you that have the platform allow folks like me a chance to flesh things out that are more nuanced than a soundbite.
00:40:16.780So thank you, sir, for what you're doing.
00:40:18.760Keep doing it, and I appreciate you for what you do.
00:40:22.680James, thank you very much for those kind words.
00:40:24.720And I have enjoyed our conversation immensely.
00:40:28.700I hope you'll come back soon, and we can continue our discussion, our conversation about what is of immense importance to this great country of ours.
00:41:07.600Tomorrow, our guest will be a great American, James Comer, serving the nation in Congress, the ranking Republican on the powerful Oversight Committee,
00:41:16.200who is a Republican leader in the fight against corruption in our federal government.