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Jan. 29, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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Aaron Maté : The Costs of Shunning Diplomacy.
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, January 29th, 2024.
A dear longtime friend of mine, a woman whose work I have admired for many years, Colleen Rowley, will be with us in just a moment.
She is a former special agent, a career special agent for the FBI.
If only her warnings had been accepted, my, how the world would be a better place.
She'll tell us what's wrong with the FBI and can it be tamed?
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Thank you for coming back on the show.
I want to talk to you about the cultural defects in the FBI from speaking with you in the past and from my own observations.
I think there are several FBIs.
There's the political FBI that does whatever the politics of management.
There's the surveillance FBI, which has gotten into the business of predicting crime.
There's the sting FBI, which has gotten in the business of creating false crimes and arresting people.
And then there's the traditional old-fashioned FBI, which does the hard investigating work to gather evidence lawfully for federal prosecutors to use when they prosecute federal crimes.
Yeah, I think you've nailed it.
There is a big tension between, always has been between, FBI headquarters, which is in the so-called belly of the beast and more inclined to become politicized and actually run by careerists who actually took...
We took on a bit of a hard time on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. for a lot of reasons.
It was considered a bad job to go to Washington.
And it was not respected by the field.
There's a lot of, I can tell you a lot more about that tension, but, you know, when I joined, we all joined the old-fashioned FBI.
We were kind of like, we watched those Ephraim Zimbalist Jr. things, we watched Dragnet, just the facts, ma'am.
And we wanted to recover child victims of kidnappings, solve Ponzi schemes, the whole gamut of what the FBI does in the field.
That's why we joined.
And along the way of my 24 years, I did see not only agents who always grumbled about FBI careerists meddling, sometimes creating terrible snafus in investigations.
There's a whole bunch of horror stories that are largely buried where headquarters tried to micromanage an agent's case.
And, of course, you get to the point of 9-11, and that is, frankly, the epitome of what I'm talking about here, where Carrera's supervisors at headquarters did not allow the FBI agents in Minnesota,
who knew that there was a terrorist plot, to the extent, I'm just going to repeat this, I say it a lot, but people still don't know.
The acting supervisor in Minneapolis in late August, at least two weeks before 9-11, is on the phone with an FBI supervisor.
And he's trying, desperately pulling his hair out, trying to get headquarters to take this multi-page probable cause over to the Department of Justice as an emergency request for a FISA in order to further investigate the terrorist suspect that was already under arrested in Minnesota.
And he's tearing his hair out and he says...
Don't you know, this is a guy who could fly into the World Trade Center.
That was said on, I think, August 28th of 2001.
And of course, you know, and I know of other things.
This went on for actually, what, three, four weeks before 9-11.
Why would the brass in Washington have resisted even examining the evidence gathered?
Uh... Judge, we don't have more than a few minutes, and it's a little complicated because there was, there actually was the so-called legal wall between intelligence gathering and criminal investigation.
Okay. And so that was a problem, but I will also tell you that the careerist, the careerist attitude, I testified to the Senate Judiciary about this in June after my memo went public.
Senators Grassley and Leahy both requested that I testify to the Senate Judiciary in 2002.
And one of the main things I brought up was the careerism problem at FBI headquarters.
Because once you get into this, again, the belly of the beast, all power mongering going on in Washington, it's very easy for you not to do the job and to basically want to rise up.
You want to climb the ladder to become someone like a Peter Strzok, for instance, or an Andy McCabe.
You want to do this because now when you become 50, you can go through the revolving door and make a lot of money.
It was always, it became, even after 9-11, more of an incentive, but already existed.
And I think careerism was a major problem.
Again, this ties in, very much ties in with this nomination of Kash Patel to become the new FBI director.
All right, before we get to Kash Patel, and if he is confirmed, I hope he stays as the old Kash Patel and doesn't change.
But before we get to that, how did the FBI get into the business of predicting How did they get into the business of capturing keystrokes on mobile devices without search warrants?
Well, there's a lot of reasons for that, too, and I'm going to have to come back on if you're asking me to explain these complicated questions.
You're always welcome here, Colleen.
You've been my friend for years.
The thing that started right after 9-11, immediately, because there was a pre-agenda to launch these perpetual wars and to also empower more of an imperial presidency.
Actually, this is unconstitutional, but John Yoo, who was embedded in the Department of Justice, wrote a series of memos, and basically he said, you know, the Bill of Rights, that's not real constitution, freedom of speech, and one of the things...
He said was, now that we're in a so-called emergency, we can wiretap it.
Well, they signed emergency court orders at the time right away in order for Ashcroft to allow emergency monitoring.
This later got parlayed into the 702 and other things that became more firmly embedded.
But right after 9-11...
Now, Mueller, from the FBI standpoint, he was under pressure after really failing to prevent 9-11.
And, you know, he covered up the fact that people like our agents in Minnesota knew that there was terrorism.
He covered up the Phoenix memo.
He covered up the fact that the CIA had not told the FBI that hijackers had come into California.
This was all covered up by the FBI Director Mueller.
He went out in public afterwards.
And he said, there was no way we could have prevented 9-11.
No one would have had any information.
This is the same Bob Mueller that investigated Donald Trump, the same human being.
Yeah, he's a typically good soldier.
He believes that you have to protect the institution even though...
One week before 9-11, all of the legal counsels, 56 legal counsels like myself in the FBI, were mandated to give ethics training to our agents.
And the main thing of that ethics, the main point of the ethics training, was never cover up the facts.
Never pervert justice.
In order to protect the FBI.
That was the main point of the ethics training.
And then I saw Mueller walk out in front of cameras afterwards and basically lie to the media.
Now, he was under a lot of pressure, in all fairness to Mueller.
He was under pressure from a lot of directions.
And one of the directions that you mentioned is why he ordered to round up the...
He basically put out this directive that allowed 1,000 innocent people to be rounded up in New York City.
None of them were al-Qaeda terrorists.
And they were rounded up.
Some of them were put in jail for a year.
They were beat up and everything else.
And then Mueller tried to cover that up.
He went along with all of the illegal stuff that John Yoo was promoting at the time.
And also, I want to say one other avenue of pressure.
You can kind of feel sorry for Mueller.
Because he was only director for one week, and he had no idea of these things ahead of time.
He was only the director for a week.
And after 9-11, Bush and Cheney and the rest of them were threatening to basically end the FBI, split it in half.
They said, well, you know, your intelligence was so terrible, why don't you just split up?
And so he was under all this pressure, and basically he knuckled under to Bush and Cheney on all, even the Iraqis.
How does the FBI decide who to target when it creates crimes, when it engages in a sting?
These aren't even crimes.
They're fake.
The person may think they're about to commit a crime, but nobody's harmed, nobody's in danger, there is no victim, and the FBI swoops in in the end and claims to be a hero who saved us.
Yeah, and that, of course, was the pressure after failing to prevent 9-11 to show that you can prevent future terrorist attacks.
It's not possible.
This is that old movie where they can, you know, look into a crystal ball.
It's not possible to do that with any accuracy.
But what you can do, easily enough, is coerce and entrap vulnerable people to, you know, with a fake bomb or something to say, look, you want to bomb this place?
Here's a thing.
And press the button.
And they did this.
There's a book written about it by Trevor Aronson.
They did hundreds and thousands of entrapments.
It's largely done through very con-artist informants that are picked and paid lots of money.
Some of them were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But they don't pick people that were just really, you know, sincerely be listening in, in case a plot is developing.
That's fine.
That's the line.
So, yes, it's very legitimate to employ informants and say, keep your ears open.
If anyone, you know, stands up and says, we're going to do something bad and bomb a place or whatever, we want to hear about it.
That's very legitimate.
But what the FBI ended up doing was...
Recruiting and then using a lot of so-called, I would call them whitey-bolger informants.
These are people that, not for starters, yeah, they might be telling you one side of things, but they also have agendas, and they also, because they get a lot of money, are very good at...
Persuading vulnerable people to do things.
And it's not that hard.
The targets, again, you said, ask why are they picked?
Well, one of the reasons they were selected, a lot of these people were simply vulnerable.
Either addicted to drug or alcohol, or they were vulnerable, mentally vulnerable.
But the other way that some of them might have been picked is that they had all of this...
Got it.
Got it.
Kash Patel, who, from my observations, shares your views and my views and the views of people watching us now about the Fourth Amendment and about the Constitution.
Can he be expected to maintain those views on the job?
And if so, is he going to have to get rid of senior management and the FBI, which hardly embraces those views?
Well, when I first heard that Cash Patel was nominated in early December for FBI director, I didn't know that much about him, but I quick looked up and I saw right away that he was calling.
And this is why I wrote a piece.
It was called Kash Patel makes some good points.
Now, I'm not endorsing him on all levels because he may well hold views that I don't agree with.
I don't know.
But the three good points that I tried to write about were he called, number one, for transparency.
And this kind of dovetails with Trump now releasing the JFK files and other things.
What the 9-11 Commission later concluded was transparency was the answer.
That was the solution to preventing more terrorist attacks.
High brass, I mean I should say, hierarchy in the FBI who claimed they didn't even read their own memos.
So there was no sharing of information even within agencies, let alone between agencies, and most importantly with the public.
The 9-11 Commission said that if the arrest of the terrorist suspect in Minnesota had happened, 9-11 could have been prevented.
Just that alone.
But instead of that secrecy, After 9-11 especially, excessive secrecy because they were doing illegal things.
And so when Kash Patel called for transparency, I said, whoa, wow, that will make a huge difference.
He also called for decentralizing the FBI.
Putting the agents back in the field to do the work and so many hundreds and thousands of them sitting around shuffling paper in Washington, sometimes actually hampering investigations and which the field agents are all well aware of.
I thought that was important because Not only does decentralizing the FBI, where the work is done, not so much in Washington, but in the field, that actually would naturally depoliticize.
So when you saw after 9-11, and of course, especially in the last, what, the last two administrations, three administrations, this really incredible politicization.
I mean, when you saw that, I said, actually, the one thing that could depoliticize the FBI, the McCabe's and the Strzok's making up Russiagate lies.
One of the things that they could do would be to send the work back to the field and stop empowering the Peter Strzok's and the McCabe's in Washington, D.C. And the last thing I thought was really needed that Kash Patel called for was...
Gaining back the trust of the public.
You know, the Ephraim Zimbalist Jr. and the other movies are never correct.
It's always the public who comes in with a tip.
You know, Bernie Madoff would never have been caught if somebody hadn't come in and said, hey, look, this guy's cheating everybody millions of dollars.
And so when you lose, when an FBI investigator loses the trust of the public, guess what?
The real work is going to suffer.
And that's where Kash Patel, I hope he, when he's being grilled by the senators, I hope he kind of, I hope he emphasizes this, these things, because these will appeal to all FBI agents,
retired like myself, but even current ones, who join for the right reasons.
Ken Kash Patel.
Rid the FBI of the culture that has infested it since 9-11 of get the evidence first and worry about the Fourth Amendment later.
Can he get rid of that culture?
Well, you know what they say, you know, I don't know, I don't think Trump invented the term blob, but that blob in Washington, as I said, that politicization, it's a largely kabuki theater that goes on, and it entails corruption.
That's the problem.
And that blob spread to the FBI.
And we saw it in those emails of Strzok and his lover, Page and McCabe and Comey.
All the things they did.
All of that, again, that terrible stuff they made up in order to try to control Donald Trump.
And you know what?
It was wrong.
There's been all of the inspector generals and even Robert Mueller to some extent.
Has tried to get the truth out about this, but still it hasn't happened.
We still see it going on in Washington.
Well, maybe Patel can help us get to the bottom of all this.
I just hope he has the courage and personal integrity after he's sworn in that he seems to have manifested beforehand.
Colleen Rowley, it's been a pleasure, my dear friend.
Would you?
I know you're very popular because I see what the viewers are writing in.
Would you come back and visit with us again?
Yeah, and if you ask me a hard question, I'll try to prepare myself so I can say it in 60 seconds.
But yeah, it's complicated.
But Kash Patel, let me just say, he has some great background for this.
He was a public defender for a few years, and he unraveled a lot of that Russiagate.
We should be happy that he's investigating.
Yes. Well, we'll see.
Hopefully he'll make it through, and hopefully he can do in the job what he has stated from the sidelines.
Colleen Rowley, you're a great human being, a great American.
Thank you for joining us.
I hope you'll come back again soon.
Okay. All the best.
Wow. What a terrific, terrific interview she gave us, and I hope she does come back again soon.
Remaining today at 1 o'clock.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs at 2 o'clock, Colonel Douglas McGregor at 3 o'clock, Phil Giraldi.
Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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