Reposted from My Substack
Jeff Sessions is a Republican. Rod Rosenstein is a Republican. Bill Barr is a Republican. James Comey is an ex-Republican. Robert Mueller is a Republican. Andrew McCabe is a Republican. Peter Strzok is a Republican. Christopher Wray is a Federalist Society Republican.
I can't say on Merrick Garland or Jack Smith, but based on their behavior I'm not sure they're Democrats. Garland sat on the obstruction, election interference and incitement charges against Trump for 2 years and did nothing at all letting the statute of limitations on Mueller's charges run out. He appointed Smith but that's about it. He's said that if Biden tried to push on Trump charges he'd resign immediately.
https://thehill.com/.../4233732-garland-says-hed-resign.../
Attorney General Merrick Garland said in an interview that aired Sunday he would resign if President Biden asked him to take action in probes into former President Trump.
“I am sure that that will not happen, but I would not do anything in that regard,” Garland said when asked on CBS News’s “60 Minutes” what his reaction would be if Biden asked him “to take action with regard to the Trump investigation.”
“And if necessary, I would resign. But there is no sense that anything like that will happen,” Garland continued.
Asked if he ever needed to tell Biden, “Hands off these investigations,” Garland said, “No,” adding that the president “has never tried to put hands on these investigations.”
So the argument that Biden’s somehow pushed Garland to pursue Trump now is patently ridiculous.
Democrats could have tried to impeach Trump for the ten instances of Obstruction of Justice that were documented in the Mueller Report - but they didn't do it.
https://www.cbsnews.com/.../obstruction-of-justice-10.../
The report says these 10 instances can be divided into "two phases, reflecting a possible shift in the president's motives." The first phase took place before Mr. Trump fired his first FBI director, James Comey, after he had been reassured he was not personally under investigation. After Comey's dismissal and Mueller's appointment as special counsel, the report indicates, the president knew he was now under investigation for possibly obstructing justice, and switched gears. "At that point, the president engaged in a second phase of conduct, involving public attacks on the investigation, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts both in public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation," the report states. Here are the 10 times, according to the Mueller report, that Mr. Trump may have obstructed justice.
- Trump tried to get James Comey to "Let Flynn go" after he had been caught illegally negotiating with Ambassador Kislyak to drop sanctions on Russia.
- Trump tried to get the NSA, CIA and FBI directors to publicly say he "wasn't under investigation" which they couldn't say legally. They all refused which led to Trump firing Comey using the excuse that been too hard on Hillary Clinton.
- After Sessions recused himself from the Russia matter because he had testified that he hadn't met with Russians although he'd met with Kislyak 3 times, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel, and Trump asked for Sessions to resign.
- Trump dictated a letter to Corey Lewandowski for Sessions asking him to limit the Mueller investigation to "election meddling in future elections" which Lowendowski asked Rick Dearborn to deliver, but he didn't.
- Trump told his aides not to disclose the emails leading to the meeting between Don Jr. and Russian lawyer Veselnitskaya where they discussed exchanging dirt on Hillary Clinton in exchange for dropping Russian sanctions.
- Trump tried to get Sessions to "un-recuse" himself and to start (yet another) investigation into Hillary Clinton.
- Trump tried to get White House Counsel Don McGahn to lie to the press about his attempts to have Sessions removed for recusing himself and not directing Mueller to investigate Clinton.
- When Flynn dropped his joint counsel agreement with Trump lawyers and gained new counsel in order to cooperate with Mueller, Trump's attorneys called his actions "Hostile" while praising Manafort as a "brave man, who refused to break."
- After Michael Cohen's home was raided by the FBI Trump's lawyers indicated he would be pardoned if he "stayed strong" and denied everything, but after he started cooperating with Mueller Trump called him a "rat" and suggested his family had committed crimes.
Ultimately Flynn, Manafort and Roger Stone stonewalled Mueller and were pardoned, Cohen who eventually fully cooperated, wasn't. All of this was Trump using his position as President to block the equal application of Justice using his ability to threaten and fire Sessions and Mueller and provide pardons to his co-conspirators.
Now part of the reason these cases weren’t pursued is because Bill Barr decided to drop them [although that wouldn’t prevent Garland from re-opening them] but then Barr also proclaimed that Mueller didn’t find any “collusion” with Russia. Cohen, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos and Alex Van der Zwann were all prosecuted and convicted by Mueller for lying under oath about contacts with Russia - but ok. Sure. Except that a judge later determined that Barr was lying.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday sharply rebuked Attorney General William Barr’s handling of the special counsel’s Russia report, saying Barr had made “misleading public statements” to spin the investigation’s findings in favor of President Donald Trump and had shown a “lack of candor.”
U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton delivered the criticism in a 23-page order in which he directed the Justice Department to provide him with an unredacted version of the report so that he could decide if any additional information from the document could be publicly disclosed.
The scolding was unusually blunt, with Walton saying Barr had appeared to make a “calculated attempt” to influence public opinion about the report in ways favorable to Trump. The rebuke tapped into lingering criticism of Barr, from Democrats in Congress and special counsel Robert Mueller himself, that he had misrepresented some of the investigation’s most damning findings.
So, yes, there was “collusion” with Russia. Specifically, Roger Stone used a contact in RT (Russia Today) to communicate with Wikileaks and told Trump that they still had emails from John Podesta that they hadn’t released yet. Then on the night that the WaPo was releasing their Access Hollywood tape of Trump saying “grab ‘em by the pussy” the Trump campaign (Steve Bannon) contacted Stone to have him tell Wikileaks to release the Podesta emails, which they did.
On October 2016, during the fraught final weeks of the showdown between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Roger Stone got word that a damning recording of his candidate was about to drop. That tape would become instantly infamous for Trump’s degrading remarks about women and his apparent boasts about committing sexual assault. “When you’re a star, they let you do it—you can do anything,” Trump told Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush in 2005, in audio published by the Washington Post. “Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Apparently sensing the cataclysmic damage the comments would wreak, Stone—self-styled dirty trickster and unofficial Trump adviser—spoke by phone to the conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, directing him to get in touch with Julian Assange, whose organization, WikiLeaks, had obtained Russian-hacked emails from Democratic Party staffers, including Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. “Drop the Podesta emails immediately,” Stone instructed, seeking to “balance the news cycle” after the release of the Access Hollywood tape. Thirty-two minutes later, WikiLeaks followed through.
Also, Trump was documented as “Individual #1” in Cohen’s case where he was prosecuted for paying off Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels for having affairs with Trump. Garland could have pursued Trump on that case as the instigator of Cohen’s illegal campaign contribution, and also the fact that Cohen had lied under oath about being involved with Russia and trying to get the Trump Tower Moscow project going, but he didn’t do it. He dropped the case. [Eventually, New York DA Alvin Bragg would take up the Stormy Daniels case, but Garland let it sit.]
Democrats didn't try to Impeach Trump over any of this. Merrick Garland didn't file charges over any of this. They could have immediately after Trump left office, but they didn't. Garland didn't create a Grand Jury, and Democrats didn't try to investigate *any* of this other than having one hearing with Mueller who basically punted the ball into their court. They didn’t pick that ball up. But they're supposedly using *every* excuse to come after Trump in order to destroy him? Apparently, not.
The only cases against Trump being pursued by the FBI and DOJ, through Special Counsel Jack Smith, are the classified documents case in Mar-A-Lago and Trump’s false claims that the 2020 Election was stolen and his attempts to steal it back using false electors. That’s it. The FBI used absolute kid gloves in the documents case because anyone else with over 100 classified documents illegally in their possession would have gone straight to jail, period. Just like Reality Winner who was immediately jailed over one classified document, or Jack Texiera who leaked classified information to Discord.
Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro and Jenna Ellis have already pleaded guilty in the Fake Electors Rico case by Fanni Willis, and there’s little doubt that his election case against Trump won’t be an easy slam dunk for Jack Smith. Many of the Fake Electors have already confessed.
A lawsuit against people who cast fraudulent electoral college votes for former President Donald Trump after he lost the state of Wisconsin in his 2020 reelection bid was partly settled on Wednesday, with the Trump allies formally stating their actions were "part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results."
The false electors also agreed they will not serve as presidential electors in future elections "featuring" Trump — the current frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. They also pledged to cooperate with investigations into the deadly Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol.
The documentation and facts behind both of those cases are exceedingly strong. As I’ve shown there are many other cases that could be pursued by the DOJ and FBI, but they aren’t doing them even though the facts are just as strong.
There is the argument that FBI Agent Peter Strzok and FBI Lawyer Lisa Page had sent text messages between them harshly criticizing Donald Trump during the GOP primaries of 2016. The GOP has used this revelation to argue that this is proof that the FBI is biased against conservatives, but the DOJ Inspector General who analyzed the actions of Strzok and Page during the Clinton Investigation (“Midyear Exam”) and Russia Investigation (“Crossfire Hurricane”) produced a different result.
The fact remains: Strzok and Page’s anti-Trump text messages during the Russian investigation damaged the reputation of an esteemed law enforcement institution. They violated remedial investigative behavioral standards by sharing their political bias on official FBI phones, and the FBI is still struggling to recover.
The rumored conclusion the Inspector General found no bias was acted upon by the FBI during the Russian investigation is great news for the FBI, but it does little to mitigate the damage inflicted by Strzok and Page.
Contrary to popular belief, it is absolutely possible to have a personal and passionate bias and still conduct an honest and objective investigation. FBI agents have biases and express their convictions. I personally investigated plenty of people who drew out of me private thoughts and statements like, “I’m going to get this guy if it’s the last thing I do,” but I never did anything inappropriate, unethical, or illegal to achieve that end. The evidence always drove the investigation.
Strzok and Page may not have liked Trump as a candidate, but as the Inspector General report and the record shows they actually pushed harder to investigate Clinton than many other agents, and they were cautious and relatively fair in the investigation of Russia compared to the information and allegations they were receiving.
In contrast, while he was President Trump tried to get the DOJ to investigate both Hillary Clinton and James Comey.
WASHINGTON — President Trump told the White House counsel in the spring that he wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute two of his political adversaries: his 2016 challenger, Hillary Clinton, and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, according to two people familiar with the conversation.
The lawyer, Donald F. McGahn II, rebuffed the president, saying that he had no authority to order a prosecution. Mr. McGahn said that while he could request an investigation, that too could prompt accusations of abuse of power. To underscore his point, Mr. McGahn had White House lawyers write a memo for Mr. Trump warning that if he asked law enforcement to investigate his rivals, he could face a range of consequences, including possible impeachment.
The encounter was one of the most blatant examples yet of how Mr. Trump views the typically independent Justice Department as a tool to be wielded against his political enemies. It took on additional significance in recent weeks when Mr. McGahn left the White House and Mr. Trump appointed a relatively inexperienced political loyalist, Matthew G. Whitaker, as the acting attorney general.
This ultimately ended up in the assignment of John Durham as special counsel who did investigate them both as well as the Mueller investigation and ultimately found that they hadn’t done anything illegal.
Special counsel John Durham found no evidence that the US justice department and the FBI conspired in a deep-state plot to investigate Donald Trump’s ties to Russia in 2016, though the report released on Monday found that the FBI’s handling of key aspects of the case was deficient.
The Durham report was sharply critical of how the FBI decided to open the counterintelligence investigation into Trump, known as “Crossfire Hurricane”, accusing top officials at the bureau of relying on raw and uncorroborated information to continue the inquiry.
Much of the criticism of the FBI in the roughly 300-page report was already known when the justice department inspector general issued its own report, which raised similar concerns but ultimately concluded that the FBI investigation into Trump was justified.
Durham did attempt to prosecute two people who he argued had been coordinating with Hillary Clinton to influence the FBI and the Steele Dossier — but both of those cases failed and both men were acquitted due to lack of evidence.
Durham had tried to allege that Michael Sussman, a lawyer working for Clinton, had lied to the FBI by not telling him about his connections to Clinton when he made allegations that a Russia server was mysteriously pinging a server owned by the Trump organization. The problem was that the allegation was true, and also, the FBI already knew about his connection to Clinton.
The first courtroom test for Special Counsel John Durham ended in defeat Tuesday as a federal jury found a Democratic attorney not guilty of making a false statement to the FBI related to allegations of computer links between Donald Trump and Russia.
The jury deliberated for about six hours before acquitting Michael Sussmann, 57, on the single felony charge he faced: that he lied when he allegedly denied he was acting on behalf of any client in alerting the FBI to claims that a secret server linked Trump and a Moscow bank with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Durham also lost the case against Igor Danchenko who they accused of falsifying allegations made by Christopher Steele.
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — A jury on Tuesday acquitted a think tank analyst accused of lying to the FBI about his role in the creation of a discredited dossier about former President Donald Trump.
The case against Igor Danchenko was the third and possibly final case brought by Special Counsel John Durham as part of his probe into how the FBI conducted its own investigation into allegations of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
The first two cases ended in an acquittal and a guilty plea with a sentence of probation.
[…]
The jury reached its verdict after roughly nine hours of deliberations over two days. One juror, Joel Greene of Vienna, Virginia, said there were no real disputes among the jury and that jurors just wanted to be thorough in reviewing the four counts.
The acquittal marked a significant setback for Durham. Despite hopes by Trump supporters that the prosecutor would uncover a sweeping conspiracy within the FBI and other agencies to derail his candidacy, the three-year investigation failed to produce evidence that met those expectations. The sole conviction — an FBI lawyer admitted altering an email related to the surveillance of a former Trump aide — was for conduct uncovered not by Durham but by the Justice Department’s inspector general, and the two cases that Durham took to trials ended in full acquittals.
Despite years of trying, the Durham investigation failed to prove that the Hillary Clinton campaign had used the Steele Dossier to plant false information against Trump within the FBI. They didn’t even present those allegations to a judge or jury, they only alleged that Sussman and Danchenko had “lied” about something or the other. They lost and failed to prove both of those cases.
And frankly, there’s little reason the FBI would have fallen for those “lies” because the FBI - at one time - was known as "Trumplandia" because they had so much support for him, and none for her.
https://www.theguardian.com/.../fbi-leaks-hillary-clinton...
Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.
Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.
“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.
This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.
When Rod Rosenstein assigned Robert Mueller as a special counsel authorizing him to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 Presidential election and any links between Russia and the Trump campaign, what he didn’t do was authorize Mueller to perform a counter-intelligence investigation which would have allowed him to investigate items like the Steele Dossier. As it turns out, other than a couple of issues it brought up involving Michael Cohen, he never looked into it. He wasn’t authorized to do so.
According a report by The New York Times’ Michael S. Schmidt, Rosenstein directed Special Counsel Robert Mueller to limit the scope of his inquiry to possible crimes, not national security threats. Rosenstein made that order without telling the FBI, which had launched the investigation because counterintelligence investigators thought Trump’s links to Russia posed a potential national security threat, the report said.
The report cites interviews with former Justice Department and FBI officials and was adapted from Schmidt’s book “Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President,” which will be released Tuesday.
Rosenstein’s alleged curtailing of the investigation came despite just days earlier ordering Mueller to examine “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government” and the Trump campaign.
Andrew McCabe, who was the interim FBI director after Trump fired James Comey and who urged Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel to take over the investigation he had launched, told Schmidt he believed Mueller’s team was looking into counterintelligence matters.
“I expected that issue and issues related to it would be fully examined by the special counsel team,” McCabe said. “If a decision was made not to investigate those issues, I am surprised and disappointed. I was not aware of that.
“It was first and foremost a counterintelligence case,” McCabe added. “Could the president actually be the point of coordination between the campaign and the Russian government? Could the president actually be maintaining some sort of inappropriate relationship with our most significant adversary in the world?”
McCabe told the Times that he would have had the FBI continue its counterintelligence inquiry had he known the special counsel was not handling it.
Andrew McCabe later got into trouble with the Inspector General's office - who recommended he be indicted - because he wouldn't drop the investigation of the Clinton Foundation against resistance by the DOJ because he went out of his way to make a phone conversation about continuing the investigation without DOJ support public. They argued his leak of the conversation was unprofessional and illegal, even though as Deputy Director he had the authority to authorize leaks of that kind. He had initially stated he knew nothing about the leak, but later he went to the Inspector General and said on tape that he had indeed authorized and implemented the leak, he claimed he’d simply “forgotten” about it.
https://www.nbcnews.com/.../inspector-general-recommends...
The Justice Department's inspector general has recommended a criminal investigation into whether former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lied to federal officials about a leak to a newspaper reporter.
McCabe was fired in March, and last week a report from the inspector general concluded that he repeatedly lied when asked about the leak of information regarding the FBI's efforts to look into the finances of the Clinton Foundation in 2016.
Legal sources familiar with the matter revealed Thursday that Inspector General Michael Horowitz recommended in January that McCabe be investigated on suspicion of lying. That same month, FBI Director Christopher Wray demoted McCabe from his position as deputy director.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired McCabe 26 hours before he was to retire, concluding that he approved an "unauthorized disclosure to the news media" and, when asked about it, "lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions."
Ultimately, McCabe filed and won a wrongful termination suit against the FBI recovering his full pension and the US Attorney assigned to work on the issue of his “lying” dropped the case.
Let me repeat that, he went through all of this frustration because he wouldn’t drop the investigation into the Clinton Foundation. He kept looking into it, even if they ultimately found nothing illegal.
Many rank-and-file FBI agents are sympathetic with the J6 Insurrectionists.
https://www.nbcnews.com/.../fbi-official-was-warned-jan-6...
WASHINGTON — A week after the Jan. 6 attack, an email landed in a top FBI official’s inbox expressing concern that some bureau employees might not be particularly motivated to help bring to justice the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol and threatened lawmakers’ lives. “There’s no good way to say it, so I’ll just be direct: from my first-hand and second-hand information from conversations since January 6th there is, at best, a sizable percentage of the employee population that felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol," and that it was no different than the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, the person wrote in an email to Paul Abbate, who is now the No. 2 official at the bureau. “Several also lamented that the only reason this violent activity is getting more attention is because of ‘political correctness.’”
The email, recently disclosed publicly in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, reflects an issue that’s been hanging over the Jan. 6 investigation since it began: the notion that there are some in the bureau who weren’t, and aren’t, particularly driven to bring cases against the Capitol rioters.
To their credit, these agents are doing their jobs to the best of their ability despite their own personal political feelings about the cases and the circumstances. The people who attacked the Capitol and brutalized Capitol and Metropolitan police in their effort to obstruct Congress and the counting of electoral votes absolutely should be prosecuted. This is exactly what we should expect from them.
But this isn’t the only instance where FBI agents have shown a partisan preference for Republicans rather than Democrats.
There was a cabal of anti-Hillary agents and ex-agents leaking information to Rudy Giuliani in 2016 - including the bit about the search warrant on Anthony Weiner's emails. Giuliani knew about it ahead of time and he would have revealed it if James Comey hadn’t done it himself first.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/under-trump-once-heroic-fbi...
By the mid-1990s the distrust and dislike of Bill and Hillary Clinton that flowed from the FBI leadership down to the rank-and-file was well established. It had been in existence from the minute Bill Clinton won the Democratic nomination to run against the incumbent, President George H.W. Bush. Rumors had begun circulating among federal agents that Hillary was rude and nasty to her Secret Service detail, and that she and her husband hated cops. There were women coming forward accusing Bill Clinton of harassment and rape. Hillary was accused of corruption at her old law firm in Arkansas.
When Hillary got ready to run for president in 2016 and was heavily favored to win, the anti-Clinton sentiment had been festering in the Bureau for over two decades, and Giuliani and Kallstrom were well positioned to exploit it. Each man had tentacles still deep inside the Bureau, and as they looked for ways to stop Hillary a sort of cabal developed that included current as well as former FBI agents.
[…]
When, in October 2016, the FBI came into possession of some Hillary emails that it had not seen previously, the threat of a possible leak from the FBI was continuing to put pressure on Comey, and just 11 days before the election he made the controversial decision to go public about the fact the emails existed, rather than their content, which proved to be banal.
Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates told Mueller’s investigators that it was FBI officials who revealed to her that Comey reopened the Hillary email case just then because “they felt confident that the New York Field Office would leak it.” And then, if Hillary won as expected, imagine the outcry if it was revealed the FBI had been sitting on the fact that they were still investigating Hillary’s emails—never mind that they had a much more sensitive counterintelligence investigation into Russian contacts with the Trump campaign.
Back in the 90's there was a book by an FBI Agent complaining about the staffers in the Clinton White House being the "people we would normally arrest."
https://www.amazon.com/Unlimited-Access.../dp/0895264064
Gary Aldrich was an FBI agent closing out his career with a stint at the White House. What should have been a peaceful exit left him shaken. Unlimited Access is Aldrich's electrifying expose of a presidential administration with a great deal to hide--and willing to put America at risk to keep it hidden.
Republican FBI head Louis Freeh in the 90's is the one who messed up the Olympic bombing case and got into his head that the security guard Richard Jewel did it. He didn't.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/dec/18/louis-freeh-is-the-real-culprit-in-the-richard-jew/
Gripping though “Richard Jewell” is, it wrongly blames FBI case agents for bullying Jewell and leaking his name to the press as a suspect. The real culprit, whose misguided intervention and stubbornness led to the Richard Jewell debacle, was Louis Freeh, then the FBI director.
When a pipe bomb exploded at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, the FBI became interested in Jewell, a security guard who had alerted police to a suspicious green backpack. Jewell appeared on TV to describe how he tried to evacuate the area before the bombing, which killed two people and injured over 100.
Citing unnamed sources, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a story saying Jewell was a suspect in the FBI’s investigation. That afternoon, FBI agents Don Johnson and Diader Rosario drove to Jewell’s apartment and asked him to come to the field office. If Jewell could clear up questions to the agents’ satisfaction, they planned to drop their interest in him.
Jewell agreed. But as the agents were reviewing Jewell’s background with him, Mr. Freeh called David W. “Woody” Johnson Jr., the FBI’s special agent in charge in Atlanta. Mr. Johnson was in his office down the hall from the room where Jewell was being questioned. With him were other SACs and Kent B. Alexander, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta.
Mr. Freeh said the agents should read Jewell his Miranda rights.
In his movie about “Richard Jewel” Mitt Romney supporter and prominent Republican Clint Eastwood crafts a film that blames the FBI for incompetence and the media for being complicit in rumor-mongering on the Jewel case, wrongly blaming him for the bombing and turning his life upside down and inside out.
But the real culprit was Republican FBI Director Louie Freeh.
As revealed in my book “The Secrets of the FBI,” Mr. Johnson pointed this out to Mr. Freeh, and Mr. Alexander told Mr. Freeh on the speaker phone he agreed with Mr. Johnson. But the director was adamant.
Robert M. “Bear” Bryant, who was about to be named deputy director under Mr. Freeh, was with the director when he made the call. A lawyer, Mr. Bryant also made the point to Mr. Freeh that Miranda rights were not required. Mr. Freeh wouldn’t listen and demanded that agents read Jewell his rights.
Woody Johnson walked down the hallway and pulled out the two agents who were successfully interviewing Jewell. He passed along Mr. Freeh’s instruction. The agents went back to the conference room and read Jewell his rights. Jewell said he would like to call an attorney, and that ended the interview.
“If we could have continued with Jewell, we could have confirmed what he told us and cleared him more quickly,” Woody Johnson told me.
Not until seven months after the incident did Mr. Freeh acknowledge in congressional testimony his own role in the fiasco. Pointing out that he had been a federal judge, Mr. Freeh said, “It is a matter of legal speculation whether a court would have ruled that Miranda warnings were required in Mr. Jewell’s case.”
Giving Jewel his Miranda rights ended the interview where Jewel would have been able to clear his name because Freeh had intervened. Consequently, the real bomber, violent anti-abortionist and LGBTQHater Eric Robert Rudolph continued his bombing spree for several more years.
In connection to his 2005 plea, Rudolph is serving consecutive life sentences at ADX Florence, a federal super-maximum-security prison in the Colorado desert, for bombing the Atlanta Summer Olympics in 1996 and an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Ala., two years later.
In between those fatal attacks, Rudolph also carried out the bombings in early 1997 of an abortion clinic in Sandy Springs, Georgia, and an Atlanta lesbian bar.
So the Republican head of the FBI, Louie Freeh, was responsible for letting a deadly right-wing anti-abortionist and homophobe continue bombing and ultimately kill more people including a police officer. In no way was this the act of Democrats.
From J. Edgar Hoover who oversaw the implementation of COINTELPRO, a secret and illegal campaign of surveillance and false evidence used against Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam War activists which led to the bugging of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s home to the false imprisonment of members of the Black Panthers such a Geronimo Pratt, and ultimately led to the government completely dropping its case against the Weathermen due to the use of falsified evidence, to the FBI Directors of today there has been corruption and partisan bias within the Bureau.
But it’s almost always been directed against Democrats and the Left, almost never in their favor.