The Incredibly Unself-aware FBI
EXCERPT
...This brings me to the revelation-inducing episode about the FBI. The show featured a plastic garbage bag found in a display at the Newseum in Washington, DC. The bag, we discover, was the crucial piece of evidence that led to the discovery and capture of probably the most damaging spy in American history - Robert Hanssen. Hanssen had been a mole in the FBI working for Russia for 20 years, passing reams of Top Secret documents to the Soviets, exposing countless classified US government operations, and getting our own spies killed.
Hanssen, coincidentally, was a top agent in the FBI’s counter-espionage division, just like Peter Strzok. And like Strzok, he was considered very bright and very arrogant. He was a rising star. The similarities between Hanssen and Strzok are striking. Strzok was the incessantly texting, hard-charging, Trump-hating FBI counter-espionage agent who was central to the whitewashing of the Hillary email server abuse investigation and helped concoct the bogus Trump-Russia collusion investigation. And just as Hanssen was cheating on his wife with prostitutes, Strzok was cheating on his wife with fellow anti-Trump conspirator, FBI attorney Lisa Page.
Here’s where the plastic garbage bag comes in. Hanssen had used it to pass classified documents to his Russian handlers and left two fingerprints on it. The FBI, knowing it had a spy in its ranks thanks to a Russian turncoat, located the bag during its hunt for the spy and found, to its shock, one of its own top spy-hunter’s fingerprints on it, those of Mr. Hanssen
Similarly, Peter Strzok gifted us with a trove of text messages he exchanged with Ms. Page that have helped unravel one of the other great treacheries in our country’s history - the effort to carry out a coup against a duly elected President, Donald Trump.
The unself-awareness part of our story is the fact that the FBI actually donated the incriminating plastic garbage bag from its Hanssen investigation to the Newseum for display purposes, as though the FBI is gloating over the fact that it captured a mole that had been operating under its nose for 20 years. Even Hanssen was stunned by the FBI’s incompetence, saying to the agents who arrested him, “What took you so long?”
Did the FBI hierarchy not realize that the Hanssen disaster should have been a great source of embarrassment to them? Will the FBI one day donate Peter Strzok’s cell phone to the Newseum if Attorney General Barr finally concludes that Peter Strzok was a traitor on the order of Robert Hanssen? (Oh wait. That won’t happen, as the FBI infamously destroyed Peter Strzok’s - and Lisa Page’s - government-issued cell phones, in another act of hubris.)
Mark