When I was in high school, a teacher once accused me of something I didn’t do. There was a cafeteria food fight, and to break it up the teacher had, in front of the entire room, blamed me for starting it. I hadn’t.
The teacher’s reputation never recovered, and he left his job soon afterwards. He’d dishonored himself.
I thought of this after reading the news that President Trump is “purging” the FBI. From NBC News: “Several top FBI executives promoted by former Director Christopher Wray were told Thursday to resign or retire or they would be fired, according to multiple current and former bureau officials. The purge of senior officials includes about a half-dozen ‘executive assistant directors,’ who are some of the bureau’s top managers overseeing criminal, national security and cyber investigations. They are career civil servants, meaning they can't be fired without cause.”
Trump’s gutting the FBI, cleaning out the people who came after him with the bullshit Russiagate hoax and other attempted hits. The media’s flipping out about the house cleaning. What they don’t realize is that by trying to decapitate Trump the FBI made it extremely difficult for the organization to solve crime. If a witness or suspect is convinced that the law enforcement talking to them is corrupt, it’ll alter how that witness or suspect behaves. It’s like my high school teacher. Once he’d falsely accused me, no one trusted him ever again.
This is why my own interrogation by the FBI was so harrowing. In the fall of 2018 I was at the center of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation war. A woman named Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault while in high school. Ford also claimed that I was in the room when it happened. It closed down after an FBI background check—the seventh—into Kavanaugh over the last week of September. As part of the background check I was asked to voluntarily come in and talk to two agents. I did.
I had two layers of stress to deal with. The first was the circus surrounding me. The second was the idea that the FBI was corrupt. On September 18, just two days after Blasey Ford broke her story in The Washington Post, the Hill reported that President Trump was bent on exposing what he called a “corrupt” FBI. John Solomon reported that Trump “said Tuesday he ordered the release of classified documents in the Russia collusion case to show the public the FBI probe started as a ‘hoax’ and that exposing it could become one of the ‘crowning achievements’ of his presidency.” It would be revealed that FBI director James Comey wrote seven memos summarizing his interactions with President Trump, and then sent one of them to a personal friend and lawyer, directing him to leak the contents to a New York Times reporter. The leak resulted in the appointment of a special counsel to investigate President Trump.
A 2019 Inspector General’s report torched Comey for creating the memos of his conversations with Trump and using those memos to trigger an independent council investigation into Trump’s supposed ties with Russia. From USA Today: “Today's report documents how Comey brazenly violated federal and FBI policies regarding his disclosures. Top FBI officials told the IG that they were ‘shocked,’ ‘stunned,’ and ‘surprised’ that Comey would leak the contents of one of the memos to a reporter. The IG concluded: ‘The unauthorized disclosure of this information—information that Comey knew only by virtue of his position as FBI Director—violated the terms of his FBI Employment Agreement and the FBI's Prepublication Review Policy.”
When I talked to the FBI, I wasn’t just rattled from the endless delays the Democrats kept imposing in an attempt to make me break down (lethal opposition researcher Ace Smith put it best: "Ninety percent of mistakes are made by people making emotional decisions under pressure.”). Or the increasingly ridiculous horror fiction that was spread in the media, stories about drugs and gang rapes and fights on boats. Or the threats of extortion that came over the phone.
There was an additional piece: the idea that the FBI under Comey was dirty. If Trump was and the bureau had framed him, and the action had been dictated from the top, that meant that they could do anything they wanted to me. The FBI notoriously spied on and sent threatening letters to Martin Luther King in the 1960s. If they could do that to King, and Trump, what could they do to me?
It’s very hard for an organization to come back from something like that without a total house cleaning. Imagine the FBI is investigating a terrorist cell and working hard to win over a potentially friendly witness who can help their case. The witness is about halfway willing to talk to them, but something’s holding him back. After all, this is the same organization that went after Trump. They could easily do the same thing to him.
The only way out of that kind of reputation damage is a complete purge. Unfortunately, this will also affect the good FBI agents. As it turned out, the agents I spoke to in September of 2018, a man and a woman, were courteous, professional, thorough and empathetic. We met at the new FBI field office in Manassas, Virginia. I’d asked to do the interview outside of D.C., where the media followed my every move. Even so, when I arrived in Manassas a creepy looking van pulled up in the parking lot just opposite the FBI entrance and then screeched to a halt, cameras leveled on me. The media was here.
Before the interview one agent told me, “This will either take seven hours or three hours.” I was baffled at first, until I figured out that a shorter interview meant that you were telling the truth—more time meant drilling down through a lot of lies. My interview lasted exactly three hours. After the final FBI background check on Brett Kavanaugh came out, Sen. John Kennedy said the following about the report’s conclusions, which revealed the motivations of the criminals who tried to destroy us: “If you think this was about [liberals] searching for the truth, you ought to put down the bong. This is not about the truth. This is about gamesmanship and power [and] politics. It’s that simple.” Kennedy added that “the FBI asked Dr. Ford’s council to submit additional evidence, and they refused.”