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Oct. 27, 2021 - Rudy Giuliani
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Former Undercover FBI agent, Marc Ruskin, Discusses the Purging of Our Bill of Right | Oct. 27, 2021
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Hello, this is Rudy Giuliani, and I'm back with another episode of Rudy's Common Sense.
Today we're going to take a look at something I know is disturbing many, many Americans because I get a lot of calls and I get a lot of emails about this and a lot of questions about it.
And that is, it seems like there's been, almost since the beginning of the pandemic and probably even before that, a concerted attack on our Bill of Rights.
Our rights have been limited.
changed, trashed in some cases,
some of it coming from the pandemic, some of it from other reasons. Well, just
last week in the Epoch Times, an author by the name of Mark Ruskin, here's the article
you can see, I have it all marked up, wrote an excellent article
in which he laid out, it's called A Purge is Starting with the Bill of Rights,
and he laid out in a way that I haven't seen as succinct and as powerfully yet
this purge or attack on the Bill of Rights.
Now he certainly has the background to do this.
He certainly has the background to do this.
Mark is a 27 year veteran of the FBI.
He's written a book called The Pretender, which is about his life undercover in the FBI, which is
quite harrowing, as you know.
He also was an assistant district attorney, a prosecutor in Brooklyn.
He was a legislative assistant to a man I would very much like to have around now, who I had great affection for, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
We could really use his voice now.
And he's also an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
And the book The Pretender is published by St.
Martin's Press, a very, very strong and important publishing house.
So this is a man who's in a position, having been an agent with the FBI under the most difficult, stressful circumstances, a prosecutor, now a professor.
Well, Mayor, first, let me thank you very much for inviting me to be here.
very thoughtful man. This is someone who really can bring some clarity to what I know is troubling
a lot of us about what's going on with these rights that, for example, our right of free
speech and our freedom of religion. So let's begin. Mark, it's a great pleasure to have
you here. Thank you.
Well, Mayor, first, let me thank you very much for inviting me to be here. It's an honor
to be talking to you.
Well, if you would, I laid out a little bit of your career, but if you just go through
what you've done, and then we'll get right to the article and your concern about what's
happening to these rights that are... I mean, it's almost unthinkable that these rights
would be put in any kind of jeopardy.
Well, you know, I'll start off by saying that, you know, having worked in the criminal justice system for over three decades, and then having prior to that Uh, how government operates close up, you know, my work on the legislative staff of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was my first serious job out of college and prior to law school.
So I got a chance early on to see, you know, what goes on to making the sausage, which is government and how you don't want to know what, what that is generally speaking.
But, uh, So I was somewhat disillusioned at an early age and not naive after that experience.
And essentially being disillusioned with the political situation is kind of what pushed me into becoming an assistant district attorney.
I wanted a job which was not politicized, as you understand as a prosecutor yourself, but that is strictly involved with enforcing the law objectively And independently.
And then from that, moving into the FBI, and three decades later, moving over now, and being more of an observer than a participant.
I've been writing a column for the Epoch Times now for several years, and my columns generally focus on the Bill of Rights, on the Constitution, and what I have observed over the years from my different positions, As it has evolved, or maybe I should say devolved, uh, in past years and to, to the situation where it is, uh, today, you know, and you, you refer to the first amendment.
The, uh, the first amendment is particularly striking in terms of, of how the rights that we enjoy that, and that preserve our freedom of expression, our freedom of religious association.
have been slowly been shifting almost unnoticeably.
And in the past several months, this year, I've written a few columns because I've been a little bit actually overwhelmed by the movements that have been occurring on the within the government and in the private sector as well.
And in the column that you refer to now that you that I wrote last week, I tried to pull together The difference things as to the different rights under the Bill of Rights, which have been adversely affected over the past couple of years, the, you know, getting to the First Amendment, you know, I had noticed, for example, with First Amendment scholars, you know, academics, law professors, 20 or 30 years ago, they would have universally 100% defended
virtually absolute freedom of expression.
They would not tolerate government intervention in the expression of ideas and beliefs.
And a couple of years ago, I attended another symposium at Fordham Law School, and was kind of shocked to see that there'd been a big shift in the academic world, that now fully, I would say half of the professors We're supporting what Herbert Marcuse called repressive tolerance.
Marcuse was a socialist, very left philosopher at the end of the 20th century who advocated free speech.
And I studied him in law school.
And when I read him, you read him initially, you think, well, these ideas are very good.
He's saying that Speech should be tolerated, and it's very important to a free society to have the interchange of ideas.
However, then he moves on and says, however, that ideas which are harmful to society, of course, must be regulated.
And that's when you get to where we are getting to today.
Who decides what ideas are harmful?
So if we begin with free speech, which is probably where we should begin, free speech and freedom of religion are probably the two cores of our republic, our democracy.
So when I grew up, to me, one of the things that I respected most about liberals, and I don't know I'm probably talking in the 60s and the 70s was their fierce defense of free speech.
For example, the classic ability to say that the Nazis, if they demonstrate, should have a right to express their... I'm not even sure I agreed with that, but they should have their right to express their viewpoint.
And then I can remember they were guided almost by a very, very firm principle that your dedication to free speech was tested Not by allowing people to say what you agree with, but to defend people fiercely who you disagree with.
That that was the best test of whether you had freedom and free speech.
So, from what you're talking about with Marcuse, and now, it's almost just the opposite.
People can make their own judgments about what people are allowed to say and not say, and then either cut them off or censor them or cancel them.
How did that change take place?
I mean, that's a totally different I accomplished a lot in 2020 exposing the truth, establishing the relationship with you, working tirelessly for America.
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Welcome back.
Well, you know, there's a reason that the First Amendment is the First Amendment.
It's not the 10th Amendment or the 25th Amendment.
It's the First Amendment because the framers believed that this was so integral to the functioning of a free society and to the avoidance of shifting and moving towards a totalitarian society That they put it first and foremost, the freedom of expression of ideas and the freedom of religious association.
The shift, while it's accelerated in the past couple of years to a mind boggling rate, I suspect started more than 20, 30 years ago with the entry into academia of many of the radicals of the 70s.
You know, the individuals who made up the Weathermen, And the students for democratic society, the, the, the hard left radical groups started to move into legitimate, you know, quote, quote unquote, uh, enterprise into academia and into, I would suggest also into the civil service and into the private sector.
So now you've had 20, 30 years have gone by.
These individuals are now the, uh, Uh, tenured professors at universities, they're high level civil servants in all of our federal agencies and in state agencies.
And they've accomplished, you know, uh, they've reached high positions in the private sector.
So now they can wield influence and power.
And with the shift in the elections now with the, such that the, the, uh, you know, the Democrat party has, essentially unchallenged majority in every sector, I mean,
in Congress and in the executive, now they can exert the authority that they've been building
over the decades.
Now, that's quite a difference.
That was never a point of contention between Republicans and Democrats.
Free speech was a given.
I would say maybe liberal Democrats were more more protective of it.
Conservative Republicans may have had slightly more of a view that things like Nazis and communists maybe should be curtailed somewhat.
But generally, the fundamental principle was accepted by all, except maybe the most radical, that the right should have the right to say what they want, and the left should have the right to say what they want.
And it gets worked out, I guess the expression is, in the marketplace of ideas.
In fact, the more ridiculous something you're saying is, the better to express it, because it'll be rejected.
That was the thinking I think we grew up with in law school, when you and I were as young as some of these radicals are now, right?
And it was almost a given.
It was almost a... It was something that it was almost... It would have been impossible for me back then to conceive of where we are now.
Right, it's mind-boggling, really.
And the, like I said, the shift has been a subtle one, but, you know, a few decades ago, when the Nazis, neo-Nazis, wanted to march through Skokie, Illinois, which is a suburb of Illinois.
And they wanted to march, it was a Jewish neighborhood, and they wanted to march in uniform, in Nazi uniforms.
Who were their attorneys who defended their right to do that?
It was the Civil Liberties Union.
The American Civil Liberties Union defended the neo-Nazis, which I believe was the correct thing to do, and they marched, and this was a left-wing attorneys' group, civil rights group, that was defending them, based on the belief that They should have the freedom to express their ideas, regardless of how offensive these ideas are.
And as Justice Louis Brandeis of the Supreme Court had pointed out, that sunlight is the best disinfectant.
And letting these people walk around in their silly uniforms was the best way to ridicule them, not to embolden them or to strengthen them.
And so now, fast forward 30 years, and we're now in the year 2021.
And what are we seeing?
We're seeing that a shift where now there's an intolerance on the left.
You do no longer see the ACLU defending freedom of expression.
And what we see is a subtle change in the terminology that is being utilized to recharacterize or mischaracterize individuals who dissent from The prevailing dogma.
And here's what I think is, and this is something that I realized when I was listening to Director Christopher Wray's testimony a year ago.
And he stated in sworn testimony that the major problem that the FBI was dealing with, and so far as domestic terrorism is concerned, is white supremacist groups.
At first I thought, what is he talking about?
I've been an FBI agent for three decades.
I remember the white supremacist groups from the 1990s.
And one of my closest undercover friends, as you know, I was an undercover agent for 20 years.
One of my friends who looked very Aryan, he specialized in infiltrating Aryan militias, like the Aryan Nations and so forth.
Approximately when was this, Mark?
What period of time, so we can get a sense?
Throughout the 1990s.
In the 1990s, okay.
Yes, and his name is Mike German, and Mike is also a published author, and he has blonde hair, very blue eyes.
He looks like the, you know, an Aryan, a model for the Aryan... So he's perfect for undercover work.
It was perfect undercover work for that particular role.
And he was very brave and he was very good at it.
And he infiltrated many of these groups.
These groups were prosecuted, investigated by the FBI, prosecuted by justice, and overall dismantled.
And today, I suggest they really are an insignificant threat.
And when Christopher Wray testified to that effect, he didn't provide any data.
He didn't provide any reports, didn't provide any statistics.
Instead, he made a conclusory statement that this was the issue.
And no reference to Black Lives Matter, no reference to Antifa.
And then a year later now, a few months ago, we hear Attorney General Garland Essentially stating the same thing.
I mean, he was virtually repeating Christopher Wray's testimony, again, with no data to support his conclusions.
And then I realized, and this is part of what I've written in some of my columns, especially one that you referenced from last week, is that what's being done is there's been being a subtle change of the definition of what is a white supremacist.
And I suggest it's meant to tarnish Individuals who dissent from the current views which are officially sanctioned.
So individuals who are not racist, they're not supremacists of any kind, are being labeled as white supremacists.
And obviously we all agree that white supremacists are terrible people.
And they should be investigated and they should be prosecuted.
I think you and I would both agree with that.
But when you change the definition of what a white supremacist is, to include everybody
who disagrees with you, you've watered down the term and now it ends up becoming meaningless.
We'll be back with our interview with Mark in a few moments.
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And now we'll continue with our Very interesting interview with former FBI agent Mark Ruskin.
Well, you know, Mark, it's hard for me to understand, and both of those struck me in the same way.
It's hard for me to understand how Christopher Wray or the attorney general could possibly even say that when you consider that last year we had one of the biggest outbreaks of riots and I think 25, 26 people murdered, dead.
Thousands of people injured.
400 police officers sent to the hospital.
Police officers assassinated.
Black Lives Matter going into communities.
And almost always violence would follow.
They never had a peaceful demonstration.
It all turned into violence.
And they consistently chant, pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon.
And then they wonder why people are incentivized to kill police.
They're telling people to kill police.
Now, you have all that.
To me, at least, it's almost a no-brainer that both Black Lives Matter and some of these other organizations are domestic terrorist groups.
They actually have blood on their hands.
Then I look at the people that they arrested on January 6th, and what they did was terribly wrong.
But they're mostly a bunch of clowns.
I mean, they don't appear to have long criminal records.
They didn't fire a shot.
I swear they look to me like idiots.
Dangerous idiots, but not dangerous to the continuance of our government.
So where does that data come from?
You look at murder in America.
I mean, I know the statistics on murder cold.
That was how I reduced crime, because I was a statistician from the days back when I used to put out the FBI report when I worked for President Reagan.
It always struck me that these statistics could be useful as a management tool, not just as a historical tool.
Crime, murder... I mean, in New York City, 8% of the murders are done by white people.
So white supremacists are not committing the murders in New York and Chicago that are shocking the nation.
So where?
And then we have a record increase in overdoses in drugs, which would be a great concern.
Fentanyl is a killer.
It's coming from China through Mexico.
It has a national security aspect to it, domestic.
There are so many things that threaten us.
Tell me from the point of view of an FBI agent, how does an FBI director say that?
Is he politically told to say it?
When I was an FBI agent, we essentially directed our efforts based on data.
So, you know, again, I worked, as you know, primarily as an undercover agent for 20 years.
There are very few full-time undercover agents.
May I ask if you can answer whether you're on the criminal side or the counterintelligence side?
What I specialized in was an investigative technique, not in the substantive area.
So most FBI agents work in the substantive area.
What I specialized in was an investigative technique, not in the substantive area.
So most FBI agents work in the substantive area.
They'll work drugs for their whole career.
Or they'll work white-collar crime.
Sure, that's what I'm used to.
Or organized crime.
Those are the ones I probably had the most to do with.
The guys who... I'm going to tell you a funny story later that you'll appreciate as a former agent.
But yeah, they were the guys who made my career.
Both the police and the FBI guy and the DEA guys.
I mean, they really got in.
Right.
Into the mob.
And your success was legendary at the time.
But it was based on their work.
Right.
Well, and based on your leadership as well.
But while most agents work in a substantive area, my specialty was the undercover technique.
So I worked in every area.
I worked organized crime cases.
I worked drug cases.
I worked white collar cases.
I worked a commodities fraud case on Wall Street.
Uh, in 1990, then I was assigned to the U.S.
Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and worked in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay as a liaison officer for four years.
And then I came back and started doing undercover work again in New York and worked both, uh, criminal and counterintelligence cases.
And I worked a lot of false flag cases, false flag cases, like the one last week, Well, I worked those cases.
was a John Tobey was arrested for selling secrets or trying to sell secrets to
someone he believed was an intelligence officer from another country was really
an FBI agent. Well I worked those cases I worked for several years posing as an
intelligence officer from a hostile country or different hostile countries
and I would meet with wannabe traitors either in the military or in you know
So you were really...
So you're really where counterintelligence joins criminal.
Right.
It wasn't just pure gathering of information.
On the other hand, it wasn't just purely criminal prosecution.
It was a combination of both.
Right.
And those were fascinating cases.
Of course they were.
Wow.
And they really gave me a chance to push myself to my limit.
So you left the Bureau in 2012.
Did you ever feel, because I'll tell you my answer at the Justice Department if you want, did you ever feel any kind of real political pressure to pursue something that you thought was being pursued for the wrong reason or not to pursue something or to say something that would fit the accepted political theory of the day or the administration?
You know, the only time ever that's happened to me was while I was in the district attorney's office, actually.
I was hired by Eugene Gold, but he was replaced by... I work with Eugene Gold and, of course, Heinz was a very, very close friend of mine for a long period of time.
And they were great prosecutors.
In the interim, Elizabeth Holzman was a prosecutor.
I did work with her for a short period of time.
It was not as fulfilling.
Although I did start a cross-designation program with the district attorney's office in Brooklyn.
I got some of the best people from there.
Really good people.
Great prosecutor.
Sometimes, you know, Morgenthau would never do cross-designation, meaning come over and be an assistant U.S.
attorney, and we'd do the case together.
We'd bring both officers in.
But I did it very, very successfully with the Bronx, with Marola, and with Joe.
And one of them went on to be the National Security Advisor to President Bush.
Wow.
I worked in the Economic Crimes Bureau as a prosecutor and there was one case where I was told to back off for political reasons.
I was just a lying prosecutor.
Sure, sure.
But not in the FBI?
No, never in the FBI.
No, I would have found that...
Impossible in the FBI.
I mean, I never felt it as an assistant U.S.
attorney.
I felt it a few times as U.S.
attorney.
I was once brought a case on Elizabeth, not Elizabeth Holtzman, I was once brought a case
on a person who was running for political office and I felt that it was being done
purely for political purposes.
And I just put it off.
I said, I'm not going to do it now.
I'll look at it later.
And it turned out to be a totally frivolous case.
But here I was.
I was appointed by Ronald Reagan as Associate Attorney General.
I became U.S.
Attorney in the Southern District of New York.
So by that point I was sort of an identified Republican and close to Ronald Reagan.
And I never felt any political pressure.
I even recommended a special prosecutor for my boss, Attorney General Meese, when I didn't want to.
I didn't want to.
I didn't think he was guilty.
That's why I hated that law.
But the law required that you had 90 days to disprove the crime.
I was able to do that for Director Allen.
I was able to do that for a couple of people, disprove the crimes that we didn't have, but I couldn't do it in Meezer's case.
I couldn't disprove it.
I could have made believe I did, but I didn't.
So we had to have a special prosecutor appointed.
Of course, he was found to be Innocent, although some people in that scheme were prosecuted.
It was the WEDTEC situation.
I mean, Congressman Biagi got convicted.
We convicted him in that situation.
But Meese was not involved in it.
A friend of his was doing the common thing of selling his name without telling him.
And Meese was about as straight a guy as you're going to meet.
And I knew that, and I had to do it.
And I never felt any pressure.
I mean, he's a good friend of mine now.
He understands.
And then, a few years ago, I was G-Man of the Year.
The FBI Association of Retired Agents made me G-Man of the Year.
So to see the Bureau at the top—I know it's not the agents—to see the Bureau at the top taking these positions, it almost breaks my heart.
I'll give you some background on that, Mayor.
ICE was entered on duty in the FBI in 1985.
And I retired in 2012.
And so I served under several different presidents.
And I worked a lot of public corruption cases.
I mean, that happened to be an area that I was interested in.
And one of the things that impressed me about the Bureau was that we investigated both sides equally.
So I worked on a number of cases where the subjects of the investigations were prominent Republican Elected officials and several cases where the subjects were prominent elected Democrat officials, and it made no difference.
Yeah, I had a supervisor.
He's passed away now.
Craig Dotlow, who was very involved in selecting the cases and together we would plan the scenarios for the undercover operations.
And I don't recall once ever working with him were the subject of what party the individual belonged to ever came up. It was strictly what
crimes are being committed and how do we best put together a case that will be successful
in terms of prosecution. So I, now, when, when I, when the Bureau started to shift from being
an objective and independent federal police agency to becoming politicized.
Initially, I refused to believe it.
I was in denial.
Probably I was too.
And because to me, I couldn't imagine the Bureau being politicized.
It's just unimaginable.
However, you know, now I've come to accept that under The direction of Director Comey, the agency has had started to shift and being influenced by political considerations.
And as you've pointed out, the important distinction to make is that this only involved upper management, you know, the C-suite, the J. Edgar Hoover building, which is FBI headquarters.
It's the seventh floor.
The seventh floor is where all the director, the assistant directors, that's where they all have their, you know, their big palatial offices.
And that's where the cancer exists.
In the field, it's totally different.
The FBI field agents are the best people in the world.
I miss being an FBI agent because I miss working with other FBI agents.
I'm sure you did.
In the FBI and in my book I point this out and I kind of try to give a window into what's going on behind the scenes at the FBI but the FBI has two cultures.
There's the management culture and there's the field agent culture and they're very different and they kind of have a quasi adversarial relationship almost where you have FBI field agents want management just to keep their noses out of their cases.
And management sometimes doesn't fully trust the field agents.
You know, that manifested itself in 2016 when Comey finished his investigation of Hillary Clinton.
Very, very unusual and strange investigation where he wrote the report three months before he interviewed her.
It was clear that Obama had made statements that she wasn't going to be prosecuted, right from the top.
And then you had that strange meeting between Clinton and the Attorney General.
And then he gives that statement, which I don't ever remember.
Maybe you can remember a situation like this.
I never remember an FBI director giving a press conference in which they described in great detail the evidence against someone they weren't going to prosecute.
It was almost like a summation.
He gave a summation in a criminal trial.
And he gave such a good one, I thought he was going to indict her.
I mean, I know Jim really well.
And at that point, I was beginning to start to realize he was a very different kind of guy than I remembered.
But when he went through that recitation and I was sitting there listening to it, I said, Jim, that sounds like a summation.
Of all the crimes that you committed, destroying emails, smashing up hard drives with hammers.
I mean, these are the things that we use traditionally in a criminal trial to show consciousness of guilt.
That's how we prove intent.
And all of a sudden, he says, there was no evidence of intent.
And I went crazy in my chair.
I said, didn't I teach you anything?
That's how we prove intent, idiot.
Destroying evidence, false statements.
We can't prove what's inside the mind.
The actions prove the intent.
And then he went all the way the other way.
Now the field agents in New York rebelled.
And I know that.
And I've actually had to be interviewed about this because I think they were hoping that some field agent complained to me and therefore they could fire him.
But I got all the complaints from the former agents.
Who I was very close to.
All during that campaign they would tell me that people in New York are going crazy.
That was a fix.
And that's what caused that mix-up at the end when they found Wiener's laptop that had all the classified material on it and Comey reopens it.
And I remember then Donald Trump, later President Trump, I wasn't with him on this occasion.
I was with him almost always, but I was gone for about three hours and he praised Comey for doing it.
And I called him up on the phone and I said, you're going to regret doing that because this guy's going to change his mind again.
You know, he's a weasel.
And he did.
He changed his mind at the end.
But I mean, by that time he had done tremendous damage, not just to the election, but to the whole
image of the FBI. What's he doing? First, if he had that evidence, he should have prosecuted her,
no matter who she is.
If he wasn't going to prosecute her, he should have shut his mouth, because then she doesn't get a chance to defend herself.
That's the most unfair thing in the world that you can do.
And then Mueller repeated that with his report on Trump, where they lay out 400 pages of a prosecutorial memo and don't prosecute her.
This is getting to be very, very dangerous to do that.
I mean, that's a very dangerous thing to do.
So that's when I started to realize that we have a double standard.
It's a different set of rules for Democrats and Republicans.
We'll be back with our interview with Mark in a minute.
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It's time to cancel, cancel culture.
Now we'll continue with our interview.
With regard to the investigation of Hillary Clinton and the email server and all that, one thing which was bizarre, I mean, there were many things which were bizarre about the way that was conducted.
And Comey managed to offend everybody.
He offended the Republicans when he declined to advocate bringing charges.
So everyone right of center was angry with him.
And then, just before the election, he released the laptop that you're referring to, that was her assistant's husband, Wiener.
Offended all the Democrats, got upset because it was a week before the election and she didn't have arguably time to respond.
So he managed to alienate both sides completely.
But there were a lot of things which occurred, which arguably were somewhat politically motivated.
One of them, which you'll appreciate, is normally at the end of an important investigation, It's not the FBI's job, as you very well know, to decide who to prosecute and who not to prosecute.
The FBI is an investigative agency.
We gather the facts, we gather all the evidence, and then we tie it with a nice ribbon and hand it over to the Justice Department, and the Justice Department decides whether or not to prosecute.
So why was it in this case, of all cases, that the director of the FBI is deciding whether or not Who decided that that was the way it was going to be handled?
That would be an interesting question for an investigative journalist to explore.
Because that's not the way it's done normally.
The Attorney General should have made that decision.
Or appointed someone, if she had to recuse herself, appointed a prosecutor to make the decision, not the Director of the FBI.
Now, would you say that that was the, at least from the public's point of view, the turning point?
Because since then, it seems to me, we're much more aware of the political decisions like being made by the Director of the FBI.
I never understood why the new director was so defensive and didn't just clean it.
He spent most of his time refusing to send documents over to Congress.
And the thing that I think I am most upset about is he withheld the hard drive when the hard drive, if we had it at the time, would have exculpated the president and offered a complete explanation for why he had that conversation with the Ukrainian president.
I can't imagine an FBI director.
And that hard drive has thousands and thousands of pieces of information.
But the most prominent part of that hard drive that jumps out at you right at the very beginning is the fact that Biden was substantially involved in Ukraine.
There were texts going back and forth, pictures, and that he was completely lying about that.
So the President of the United States Was perfectly justified because the hard drive supplies evidence of bribery at the highest levels of two governments.
He had a perfect right to ask the president of Ukraine, no matter whether he's running for president or not, the other guy, let's get to the bottom of this since, you know, it's been covered up for four years.
The hard drive would have offered the proof that that was a totally specious impeachment.
Now, how can the director hold on to that?
What's going through his head that makes him do that?
Has he become just a politician?
Well, you know, Director Wray, I mean, I never worked with him, but it's my understanding that
he was a friend of Comey.
He was.
He worked for Comey, I believe, in the Justice Department.
And he was part of that group that made that big thing about Ashcroft and the signing of some warrant and Ashcroft was in the hospital and Comey was going to quit like a martyr.
That's the first time I started to think, maybe there's something wrong with this guy.
He seems like a showboat.
Right.
And I think the events have proven you to be correct.
Perhaps the president was ill-advised on some of the recommendations he received regarding certain appointments.
He may have confided or trusted too much in certain insiders who provided recommendations.
To be director of the FBI after Comey, the ideal director would have been a complete outsider from the political point of view, but someone who really understood how the FBI works and from the nuts and bolts of the FBI, perhaps a retired FBI agent.
With no strong political leanings, but someone just committed to doing the right thing.
And that could have helped resuscitate the FBI's reputation.
I would suggest that for a democracy to function the way it's supposed to function, and getting back to the Bill of Rights, for the Bill of Rights to be protected, We needed to have a really truly independent and objective FBI, an objective, unpoliticized Federal Bureau of Investigation that has the capacity and the strength and willingness to investigate corruption within the government.
You know, like with Abscam several years ago, you'll recall the Abscam undercover operation where congressmen were being bribed.
If you don't have an objective and independent federal law enforcement, It's hard to have a truly well-functioning democracy.
Can I ask you, how bad is the damage to our rights?
And do you think it's connected, these things are all connected, to a desire to change basically our form of government and our economy from a basically free market to socialist, a democracy to a more authoritarian type of government?
I mean, that's a great fear that many, many people have.
This seems to follow what Marx and Engels, they almost seem to be following the playbook for take God out, take God out, infiltrate the schools and get control of the law enforcement apparatus.
That's pretty dangerous.
Well, there's certainly a tendency to Diminish the importance of the Constitution as a whole and the Bill of Rights altogether.
I mean, there have been statements by Speaker of the House Pelosi, by Hillary Clinton, as to whether or not the document, the founding document, still has relevance today, or if it's just some antiquated parchment that should be disregarded.
There is a strong.
It seems like a. At this point, it seems like hard to slow down, but a strong impulse towards diminishing the importance of the Bill of Rights and and part of the way that's being done, you know, I would suggest.
is what we talked about earlier.
By changing the definitions of what a white supremacist is, to include anybody who disagrees.
To label parents as domestic terrorists.
Domestic terrorists is a very serious thing.
Domestic terrorists should be prosecuted and investigated.
But if you call parents who attend school board meetings domestic terrorists, you're diluting the term.
Because that doesn't mean anything anymore.
If any soccer mom is called a domestic terrorist, then what's going to happen
with the investigations of real domestic terrorists?
But the point, the question is, is there a point to this?
Is this just political bickering or are they going somewhere with this?
Diminish the Constitution, change our form of government, get closer to a one-party system, and also, clearly, the economic system they're trying to change to a much more socialist-dependent system.
The framers were really brilliant people, and they understood human nature.
And human nature has governments tending, if left alone, towards totalitarianism.
So the trend, if unregulated and uninvestigated, uncontrolled, is towards a totalitarian, be it Marxist or communist or right-wing state.
That's what we're seeing happening today.
And, you know, by having the system of government with the balance of powers with the judiciary, the executive and legislative branch, the plan was to design a system where democracy would be preserved and individual rights would be preserved.
And yes, there is a tendency away from that now, because I guess things are occurring.
You have powers and power centers, which they could not have predicted, you know, 200 years ago, you know, they have.
How could they predict that there would be private sector companies, you know, like, uh, uh, you know, Twitter and, and, and Facebook and so forth that basically work hand in glove with government agencies.
You're doing what's essentially controlling freedom of expression.
If Twitter can cancel the account of the President of the United States, and if anyone whose speech they disagree with, whether it's a medical doctor whose findings they don't like, or a political figure, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, they can all cancel that individual or that group, then you have private sector entities Doing what the government is forbidden to do.
You know, the Bill of Rights forbids the government, but you have proxies now, essentially accomplishing the same goal.
So working like a hand in glove.
So, yes, there's a tendency now, a movement towards a totalitarian type of system.
And what we what we need, of course, is for the democratic forces to be in the classical sense of the constitutional democracy.
I think they may have.
They may have exposed their Achilles heel in going after the parents.
Because the reaction I see there is very bipartisan.
It's not just Republican parents or Democrat parents.
Significant number of independent parents.
Any parent, Republican, Democrat, or independent, that is sensible in any way is going to get very concerned when you take a five or six year old child and you create doubt about that child's gender, right?
Or you teach that child that America is a systemically racist country.
Meaning we're an evil country.
Parents hear that and they become very concerned then that their children are being brainwashed.
And I think that's what you're seeing going on now.
Then I think that may be, maybe I'm being more hopeful than I should, but I think that may be the answer to how this is going to get turned around.
But let's hope.
I really appreciated this conversation, Mark.
I hope we can have another one in the future.
It was a very, very good explanation of both where the Bureau is right now and the Bill of Rights.
And we're right in the middle of it and we'll have to see how it turns out over the next couple of years.
Thank you for your service to the country.
Thank you.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity.
Well, excellent article.
Keep writing.
God bless you.
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