With the FBI oozing false rumors like a rusty colander full of rancid lard, James Comey seems less like the head of the agency, and more like just another blob of grease.
“He’s got to get control of the ship again,” said Robert Anderson, a former senior official in the FBI who considers Comey a friend.
The key group of agents who actually seem to be driving this sinking ship are not in Washington …
... the Wall Street Journal revealed there was a different, ongoing feud between FBI agents in New York and career public integrity prosecutors at the Justice Department over whether there was cause to investigate the Clinton Foundation.
And all the little threads running off this group come back to the sweaty hands below one screaming face.
Two days before FBI director James Comey rocked the world last week, Rudy Giuliani was on Fox, where he volunteered, un-prodded by any question: “I think he’s [Donald Trump] got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.”
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So how did Rudy Giuliani come to know what James Comey was going to do, not just two days before Comey did it, but a day before Comey says he even got the recommendation to go forward on the case? Rudy has his insiders.
Hours after Comey’s letter about the renewed probe was leaked on Friday, Giuliani went on a radio show and attributed the director’s surprise action to “the pressure of a group of FBI agents who don’t look at it politically.”
Rudy’s apolitical heroes would be that same New York office feuding with the rest of the FBI. That office was long run by a man named Jim Kallstrom and it appears he’s not just hearing rumors, but fanning the flames.
A former top FBI official who has claimed insight into the bureau’s rank and file's outrage over the handling of an investigation into Hillary Clinton confirmed Thursday that he has been in touch with active agents after denying it in an interview published earlier in the day.
Who is Kallstrom? He’s the biggest connection between Trump and the FBI:
The man who now leads “lock-her-up” chants at Trump rallies spent decades of his life as a federal prosecutor and then mayor working closely with the FBI, and especially its New York office. One of Giuliani’s security firms employed a former head of the New York FBI office, and other alumni of it. It was agents of that office, probing Anthony Weiner’s alleged sexting of a minor, who pressed Comey to authorize the review of possible Hillary Clinton-related emails on a Weiner device that led to the explosive letter the director wrote Congress.
When Trump claimed to be raising dollars for veterans after dodging a primary debate last spring, it took prodding from David Fahrenthold to get Trump to actually hand out the cash, but it was a group run by Kallstrom that ultimately took home the prize.
... Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation, was the single biggest beneficiary of Trump’s promise to raise millions for veterans when he boycotted the Iowa primary debate. A foundation official said that Trump’s million-dollar donation this May, atop $100,000 that he’d given in March, were the biggest individual grants it had ever received.
Kallstrom’s charity isn’t just graced by Trump’s dollars. It also has Rush Limbaugh as a director and a Trump executive as VP.
As the former head of the New York FBI office, Kallstrom frequently appears on Fox where he delivers an apolitical, unslanted opinion that the criminal Hillary Clinton is constantly on the brink of being arrested and hauled away by “very angry” FBI agents dead certain of her guilt in … basically everything.
So … Comey is getting pushed around by a rogue NY FBI office—an office that’s also likely the unnamed source of all those unnamed sources over the last two weeks. The agents at that office launched their intra-agency coup with the help of a guy funded by Trump.
Jim Kallstrom, who headed the FBI’s New York field office in the 1990s … has endorsed Donald Trump for president, has suggested in past interviews that he has spoken with active FBI agents, including some working on the Clinton investigation, which if true, would mean the agents broke bureau protocol to discuss a case.
And in turn, that guy … reports to another guy.
Kallstrom, who first worked with Giuliani when the future mayor was a young assistant prosecutor in the early ’70s, was Pataki’s public safety director for five years after the 9/11 attacks and claims he was the one who recommended Comey to Pataki, who got the Bush White House to name him to Giuliani’s old job, U.S. attorney for the Southern District in 2001. Comey had worked in the Southern District for years, hired as a young assistant in 1987 by Freeh, then a top Giuliani deputy.
Is Kallstrom running the FBI from his Fox News desk, or is Rudy Giuliani running it between rants on the campaign trail? Guiliani says he knows nothing.
“I’m not part of it at all. All I heard are former FBI agents telling me there’s a revolution going on inside the FBI and it’s now at a boiling point …”
He’s not part of the war … except for the part where he knows enough to know what the FBI director is going to do before the FBI director knows.
Meanwhile, the war continues. It’s not just Clinton who has been the subject of machinations from the NY FBI faction. The right-wing staff of the office has also gone out of their way to muck up civil rights issues.