Posted on 05/30/2002 11:30:22 AM PDT by Kermit
This week I heard author Ron Kessler say the FBI "disintegrated" under former FBI Director Louis Freeh.
I happen to agree with Kessler.
But I would like to ask, where was Kessler all these years? And the Washington press corps? And Congress?
During the '90s they mostly hid under a rock, timid as they were to challenge the political takeover of the FBI by the Clinton White House.
Any reasonable person knows that Sept. 11 didn't happen in a vacuum.
Current FBI Director Robert Mueller claims that nothing could have been done to prevent 9-11 and that the FBI has no culpability. He also has tried to suppress criticism of the bureau.
All of this proves that Mueller is the wrong man to head the FBI at this critical juncture. An honest person needs to take the helm and begin fixing the FBI's problems.
And the FBI's problems began when President Bill Clinton, for the first time in American history, fired the sitting FBI director, William S. Sessions.
Clinton took this act on July 19, 1993, the day before his deputy White House counsel Vince Foster was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head in Fort Marcy Park.
In a written statement to me soon after the death of Foster, Sessions explained the reason he was fired: He opposed the White House's politicization of the bureau.
For decades the FBI had jealously guarded its independence from the White House and political parties. But Clinton abruptly ended that independence.
Remember when the Clintons got caught illegally and improperly using the FBI to investigate their perceived enemies in the White House travel office, in an attempt to justify their takeover of the office staffed by career civil servants?
The Clintons had little remorse using the FBI as a weapon. As Mrs. Clinton said at the time of the Travelgate affair, if the Clinton White House was opposed, their enemies would have "hell to pay."
And such was the case of Billy Dale, the head of the White House travel house, who was hounded by FBI agents, indicted on trumped-up charges and then had to spend millions to defend himself. Later, a jury would take minutes after his Soviet-style trial to declare him innocent of all charges.
The Travel Office and the Vince Foster case were just the tip of the iceberg.
During the '90s the Clintons turned the FBI into a veritable Gestapo. It became their protection squad helping them to cover up a litany of scandals and controversies: FBI Filegate, TWA 800, FBI Labgate, Ruby Ridge, Whitewater, Waco, Chinagate and a litany of smaller scandals that should have led to Clinton's removal.
Certainly the rank-and-file members of the FBI were never in bed with the Clintons. The field personnel, as we have witnessed with people like Gary Aldrich, Coleen Rowley, Frederic Whitehurst and Robert Wright, have demonstrated the great bravery of our G-men.
But the leadership of the FBI has indeed been corrupted.
It began with the firing of Bill Sessions and the installation of Judge Louis Freeh as Clinton’s FBI director.
Freeh, a Republican, was also an ambitious yes man who would do anything to appease his masters at the White House.
He spent eight years playing a Mutt-and-Jeff routine with the Clintons, bad-mouthing them all over town to keep credibility with the Republicans, but acquiescing to their every wish at the bureau.
Within a year of Freeh taking the helm, he had removed, fired or transferred almost the entire senior leadership of the bureau from the FBI's executive committee.
At the same time, and for the first time, he brought in political appointees to run the FBI. A veritable coup had taken place in our government. As a senior prosecutor on the staff of Kenneth Starr told me, "Control the FBI and you control the country."
The Clintons had their hatchet man at the bureau. Freeh quickly moved the FBI away from its traditional investigative law enforcement role to one that reflected the Clintons' politically correct agenda.
For example, veteran agents who were catching white-collar criminals and terrorists were transferred to the District of Columbia's police precinct to help solve murder cases. Still others were placed on cases involving carjackings.
Freeh believed that veteran FBI agents, with decades of investigative experience, were a waste. He had hundreds of the bureau's most senior agents and FBI teachers transferred from their posts back to field offices. The chain of FBI expertise handed down from one generation to the next had been broken.
All of this and more was known to those journalists who covered the FBI during the Clinton years. But no one said a peep.
And the destruction of the FBI was apparently mirrored by almost every other law enforcement agency in Washington.
The media can't stop slandering and bashing J. Edgar Hoover, as great an American as there ever was one, but I am still waiting to hear about what happened to the FBI under Bill Clinton and Louis Freeh.
A product that might interest you:
FBI whistle-blower tells how the Clintons helped cause 9-11
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Clinton Scandals
Media Bias
War on Terrorism
The next attack goes on Bush's account.
New politics, just like the old politics.
Does character count, or just political character?
BTW, Hillary still has those FBI files, right?
Louis Freeh was in way over his head. Incompetency ran rampant in the Clinton era. The Clintonistas were effective in compromising the integrity of the FBI the same way the destroyed the integrity of the Janet Reno Justice Department ... place second rate people at the helm of an agency and control is assured.
A ridiculous statement on the very face of it. But very typical of a bureaucrat playing the CYA game.
But what else can one expect from an organization founded by a psycho (Hoover) and whose supposed fame is merely a creation of PR experts? Any area of crime the FBI addresses gets worse, not better. It's more profitable for them. That's the main constant at the FBI.
Clinton kept all the FBI files right through the scandal, and the news media never even bothered to ask if he had returned them. It can be safely assumed that before bill & hill left the White House all of the FBI files hit the copy machine, and that there are at least two copies.
One of the main reasons the felonious twosome escaped jail was blackmail. They will not relinquish the power and protection these files give them anywhere on this side of the grave.
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
The Who
Some sure are being fooled again.
And about J. Edgar Hover.....he had a MILLION enemies in Washingto and yet nary a PEEP was ever said about dressing in a dress until YEARS after he died......so WHY would not his enemies have taken pictures or done an article r even HINTED at this behavior. I don't buy it.
Under Clinton, things got worse: the FBI called in Delta Force to exterminate the terrorist threat in Waco, Texas.
So fearful of losing bureacratic supremacy for United States Counter Terrorism, the FBI as a matter of policy refused to investigate state sponsored terrorism in the cases of WTC bombing 1 and the Oklahoma City Bombing, where they had a plant in a nearby racist camp who said he thought something might be going down.
The problems started in the late '80s...
I feel like it started before that even. Just my POV.
...to exterminate the terrorist threat in Waco, Texas.
Some real "terrorists" there I tell ya. /sarcasm
Love your choice of words.
I was speaking specifically to the overlapping of the CIA and FBI when it came to international/domestic counter-terrorism when I mentioned the problem began in the late '80s...there is a specific Executive Order from Reagan that gave the FBI lead jurisdiction in all things terrorist on American soil...
In 1992, correct.
Clinton changed the basic purpose of the FBI and turned it into a political agency.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
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