91 Three Months Before His Death Wayne Barrett Interviewed Arch Rogue FBI Agent James Kallstrom

UPDATE: The substance in this chapter is almost entirely set. The update way at bottom perhaps can be tweaked-how much belongs there-maybe some of the Biden stuff is dated? But no big issues

As has been noted the late, Barrett spent 40 years warning the world about Donald Trump.

In vain alas. So it couldn’t have been more fitting that he passed away on the date of January 19, 2017-of all dates. The day before Trump’s inauguration. Barrett was at least spared this particular scene of American carnage.

Barrett also spent a good part of those 40 years warning the world about Roger Stone and a good part of the Roger Stone history in this book comes from Barrett-originally.

As we saw in Chapter Why the Comey Letter, Michael Horowtiz-who spent the 4 years of Trump putting the  investigation into the FBi rogue agents on the back burner-while bringing the conspiracy theories and parallel narratives of Trump and the GOP co-conspirators to the front of the line-officially tabled it after Biden came in.

He wrote a terse 10 page statement which amounted to the idea that since there were so many anti Clinton agents leaking none of them should face any accountability-even the considerable accountability of public exposure.

Among the 100 rogue leaking agents-leaking to take down Hillary Clinton-you wonder if Horowtiz spoke to Kallstrom. I wouldn’t assume so-as quite frankly there’s little reason to trust Horowtiz who’s conduct has tended to favor the Republicans since when his own false statements to the media in July 2015 led to the the NY Times original false reporting that Clinton was under criminal investigation-see Chapter The Criminal Investigation Without a Subject.

If Horowitz didn’t speak to Kallstrom-if I were a betting man I’d bet he didn’t-he should have checked with Wayne Barrett-who did. It was his last big scoop, his last major published work before God in Her tender and most excellent mercy took him before American carnage.

And if you want to talk rogue anti Clinton FBI agents, they don’t come any bigger and more rogue than former NY FBI Director James Kallstrom. He’s essentially the King of the anti Clinton rogue FBI agents-and NY FBI is its headquarters.

At one time, prior to November 8, 2016,  Kallstrom-and his BFF Rudy Giuliani-had both boasted of talking to former and current FBI agents furious that Comey had ultimately exonerated Clinton. It was to be sure quite ungrateful of them as he had hit her where it hurt-politically, which is what they were actually after too.

FN: Indeed, Barrett quotes Giuliani here:

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.”

“The other rumor that I get is that there’s a kind of revolution going on inside the FBI about the original conclusion [not to charge Clinton] being completely unjustified and almost a slap in the face to the FBI’s integrity,” said Giuliani. “I know that from former agents. I know that even from a few active agents.”

Later they both hedged-it was only former agents. But as we saw in Chapter Why the Comey Letter this was largely a distinction without a difference when you recall what Comey told Loretta Lynch in their meeting in the immediate aftermath of his Comey Letter. That many of these agents were untouchable as they were very senior and retired but simply kept coming into work anyway-the crusade to take down that woman invigorated them.

But who fits this description of someone very senior yet retired beter than Kallstrom himself-the former director of the NY FBI? Former director of the belly of the beast itself.

Barrett-again this is back on November 3,  2016 just before the election just after the Comey Letter.

“Kallstrom is the former head of the New York FBI office, installed in that post in the ’90s by then-FBI director Louis Freeh, one of Giuliani’s longtime friends. Kallstrom has, like Giuliani, been on an anti-Comey romp for months, most often on Fox, where he’s called the Clintons as a “crime family.” He has been invoking unnamed FBI agents who contact him to complain about Comey’s exoneration of Clinton in one interview after another, positioning himself as an apolitical champion of FBI values.

Last October, after President Obama told 60 Minutes that the Clinton emails weren’t a national security issue, Megyn Kelly interviewed Kallstrom on Fox. “You know a lot of the agents involved in this investigation,” she said. “How angry must they be tonight?”

“I know some of the agents,” said Kallstrom. “I know some of the supervisors and I know the senior staff. And they’re P.O.’d, I mean no question. This is like someone driving another nail in the coffin of the criminal justice system.”

Michael Horowtiz if you’re listening-but you probably are not as you’re a hack who carries the water of the Republican party; as Maddow says look at what they do:

When Comey cleared Clinton this July, Kallstrom was on Fox again, declaring: “I’ve talked to about 15 different agents today—both on the job and off the job—who are basically worried about the reputation of the agency they love.” The number grew dramatically by Labor Day weekend when Comey released Clinton’s FBI interview and other documents, and Kallstrom told Kelly he was talking to “50 different people in and out of the agency, retired agents,” all of whom he said were “basically disgusted” by Comey’s latest release.

By Sept. 28, Kallstrom said he’d been contacted by hundreds of people, including “a lot of retired agents and a few on the job,” declaring the agents “involved in this thing feel like they’ve been stabbed in the back.” So, he said, “I think we’re going to see a lot more of the facts come out in the course of the next few months. That’s my prediction.”

FN: I’d bet you anything you like that Kallstrom wasn’t guessing or even hypothesizing here but speaking from knowledge-he knew about Huma’s emails just like Nunes did-he probably knew about them before Nunes-as this was info from inside NY FBI-his former stomping grounds

Kallstrom, whose exchanges with active agents about particular cases are as contrary to FBI policy as Giuliani’s, formally and passionately endorsed Trump this week on Stuart Varney’s Fox Business show, adding that Clinton is a “pathological liar.”

So while Horowitz alluded to 100 disparate individual FBI leakers-leaking to defeat Hillary Clinton-by Kallstrom’s own lights he spoke to hundreds of such persons.

OTOH as we saw above, Giuliani actually claimed these rogue agents who forced Comey’s had were-cough-nonpolitical agents.

“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.”

Sure-like Kallstrom, presumably-who endorsed Trump-or  Bernarkd Kerik the former NYPD chief who also endorsed Trump is ‘apolitical.’

FN: In retrospect that was a very beneficial endorsement-on a value added basis tough to imagine a better investment.

Indeed, it’s fair to ask what Kerik’s role was in the Comeygate operation as he’s basically Kallstrom’s bookend-the former NYPD Chief to the former NYFBI Director the two biggest bastions of Hillary hatred.

And of course, Giuliani and Kallstrom go way back.

FN: Kerik for his part was Rudy’s handpicked NYPD Chief in late 1990s NYC

The ties that bond all these various high level officials from Trumpland  the FBI are deep and incestuous.

“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.”

Kallstrom’s victory tour this weekend also included an appearance on Fox with former Westchester District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, another close associate of Pataki’s, who complained on air that she’d been the victim in 2006 when word emerged that the U.S attorney and FBI were probing her in the midst of a race she eventually lost to Andrew Cuomo to become New York Attorney General.

Her concern about the political impact of law enforcement leaks, though, didn’t extend to Democrat Hillary Clinton. “He couldn’t hold on to this any longer,” Kallstrom said of Comey. “Who knows, maybe the locals would’ve done it,” he added, a reference to leaks that elicited glee from Pirro, who echoed: “New York City, that’s my thing!”

Maybe the locals would have done it. By locals he means his own folks at NY FBI-and NYPD. In Chapter True Pundit, we discussed an anonymous NYPD police chief who threatened to leak Huma’s emails to Wikileaks if Comey didn’t do what he ended up doing. Was this anonymous NYPD police chief Bernard Kerik?

But after the Comey Letter, Kallstrom tried to get on message as Rudy did and insist that it was only retired agents-though his heart wasn’t in it.

In a wide-ranging phone interview on Tuesday with The Daily Beast, Kallstrom first repeated his claim that he gets hundreds and hundreds of calls and emails but stressed they all came from retired agents, adding that he didn’t “want to talk about agents on the job.” Then he acknowledged that he did interact with “active agents.” The agents mostly contacted him before the recent Comey letter because “in all but two cases,” they agreed with what he was saying in his TV appearances, noting that those two exceptions both thought “I should be more supportive of Comey.”

But again, as noted above the distinction between retired and active agents wasn’t very meaningful in the FBI 2016.

When the late Wayne Barrett did reach out to him he dissembled mightily.

Kallstrom adamantly denied he’d ever said he was in contact with agents “involved” in the Clinton case, insisting that he didn’t even know “the agents’ names.” He asked if this story was “a hit piece,” and contended that it was “offensive” to even suggest that he’d communicated with those agents. When I emailed him two quotes where he made that claim, he responded: “I know agents in the building who used to work for me. I don’t know any agents in the Washington field office involved directly in the investigation.”

But this fulsome denial has holes running through it you could drive a mac truck through. Again many of the ‘retired agents’ remained active despite their nominal ‘retirement’-they were so motivated in the Hunt for Her Emails. Beyond which the the denial of knowing “any agents in the Washington field office involved directly in the investigation” may well be true but in any case besides the point-as the belly of the beast was at NY FBI where he’d been Director and in fact spent his almost entire career.

FN: If as I strongly suspect-though would be very happy to be wrong-Horowitz never questioned Kallstrom, he waited too long, alas as Kallstrom has now joined Wayne Barrett and Peter Smith in the Great Beyond-just this last July.

Later, though he acknowledged that “the bulk” of the agents on the Weiner case are “in the New York office,” even as he insisted that the “locals” he told Pirro would’ve leaked the renewed probe had not Comey revealed it were not necessarily agents.

He declined to explain why Megyn Kelly stated as a fact that he was in contact with agents “involved” in the case. Asked in a follow up email if he suggested or encouraged any particular actions in his exchanges with active agents, Kallstrom replied: “No.”

“Now, I’m supporting Comey,” Kallstrom told me on the phone, adding that he can’t do or say anything else before election day. “He can’t characterize” what the bureau has from the Weiner emails. “The FBI can’t say anything without having all the information,” Kallstrom contends, just after telling me he supports the FBI director who’s under fire for having done just that.

And I’m sure that was true then. It made sense for him to support Comey post October 28 as Comey won the election for Trump-though Kallstrom was singing a different tune before the Comey Letter.

As for Kallstrom’s ‘surprise’ here it doesn’t pass the laugh test.

And, though he predicted in September that more facts about the Clinton case would soon come out, he told me he was “surprised” by the Comey letter. Calling Giuliani a “very good friend,” who he’s seen in TV studios a couple of times recently when they were both doing appearances, Kallstrom said he thought Giuliani was more likely referring to WikiLeaks revelations or videotapes from Project Veritas when he teased big surprises to come.

I guess it’s a better lie than Rudy’s post Comey Letter claim that the ‘couple of real big surprises’ he was referencing was a new ad campaign in Wisconsin, though it’s still a lie. My assumption his pre Comey Letter statements were based on intimate knowledge-just like I assume Stone-Corsi-Smith-Prince et al had knowledge, and just like I suspect that Michael Moore at TruePundit had deep and intimate knowledge. Just like Nunes later revealed he did.

FN: Chapter Devin Nunes.

Despite his ties to Pataki, Limbaugh, and Trump, Kallstrom says he’s apolitical and has never been involved in a campaign, including Trump’s now. He says he’s a registered independent, and that the people he’s known in the FBI over all his years are as nonpartisan as he is.”

As independent as he is. Kallstrom got the comedic timing down…

Some independent, he literally endorsed Trump at the height of the campaign. Barrett then kicks the hornets nest regarding the history of the FBI. As we see in Chapter Louise Mensch, when I discussed it on Twitter Schindler’s dupes-anyone paying for that Twitter page is a dupe as I also was at the time-all came after me and Schindler blocked me-while still trying to take my money.

Then Mensch accused me of being a Russian agent.

FN: Yet I defend her in the chapter. Why? Partly no doubt because I’m kind of a great guy… But the biggest issue for me is getting the truth out about the 2016 election. While her theatrics on Twitter are pathetic-and frankly counterproductive to her own cause and the cause many of us share with her-she also has done some very good work-certainly towards the end of the election both on Comeygate. As for her work on the Alpha Bank server, while this story has been widely panned by the Savvy it still hasn’t been refuted-indeed there’s a lot of information that suggests there was something to the story and the real criticism is the way Savvy pundits a la Erik Wemple have attempted to slander it and carry Trump’s water.

Barrett then goes on to make a point that I made on Twitter that day and at many other times and here in this book but few others have made:

But, as quiet as it’s kept, no Democrat has ever been appointed FBI director. Four Democratic presidents, starting with FDR’s selection of J. Edgar Hoover in 1935, have instead picked Republicans, including Obama’s 2013 nomination of Comey, who was confirmed 93 to 1. This tally does not include the seven acting directors, who were named for brief periods over the last 81 years. For the first time in FBI history, the agency is now run by a director who isn’t a Republican, since Comey announced in a congressional hearing this year that though a lifelong Republican, having donated to John McCain and Mitt Romney, he had recently changed his registration (he did not say how he is currently registered).

Six months into his first term in 1993, President Bill Clinton tapped Freeh, a onetime FBI agent who’d worked under Kallstrom, and Freeh spent much of his eight years at the bureau’s helm trying to put Clinton in jail, even dispatching agents to a White House side room to get the president’s DNA during a formal dinner. When Freeh stepped down in 2001, shortly after George Bush replaced Clinton, he went to work for credit-card company MBNA, a giant Republican donor where Kallstrom and another top Freeh FBI appointee were already working. He’s still hunting for the Clintons, though—delivering a speech assailing them at an annual FBI office event in New York last year.

It’s not just the man at the top who’s invariably a Republican. Like most law enforcement agencies, the FBI hierarchy and line staff has a Republican bent—it’s a white, male, usually Catholic, and conservative culture.

This is why I was so vigorously advocating that President Joe fire Wray and replace him with a Democrat. I mean unless you think that 112 years of Republican rule-113 now-aren’t enough. That’s a big part of why though, frankly, on the merits, Wray has been awful in many ways-it was under him that Schiff revealed HSPCI stopped receiving regular counter intel reports on the Russia investigation. As we saw in another chapter, Schiff and Friends threatened Wray at one point with a subpoena but then Wray didn’t blink and they responded by-dropping it.

 

But President Joe waited exactly one day to assure Wray he’s staying on.

Once again making Kurt Bardella’s point that nobody fears the Democrats.

There’s no cost to calling their bluff. Not with LBJ in 1968 after his intel revealed Nixon had stolen the election with the help of a hostile foreign power-North Vietnam. Not with Jimmy Carter who for years after the Reagan-Bush campaign stole the election from him with the help of a hostile foreign power-the Ayatollah in Iran- continued to downplay the extent of it.

Not with Bill Clinton in 1993 who cancelled all investigations into Iran-Contra and all related scandals-in truth Iran-Contra was part of the larger October Surprise of 1980 then appointed Ken Starr; not with Obama in 2009 who turned down not just any prosecutions but any investigations into the abuse of the Bush-Cheney gang; and-despite everything he saw during his years as Obama’s VP over eight years and despite what we’ve seen since Kallstrom-Comey-Guiliani and Friends stole the election for Trump-not Joe Biden even in 2021.

UPDATE: Regarding 1980 October Surprise

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/01/ronald-reagan-october-surprise-carter-iran-hostage-crisis-conspiracy

UPDATE: Remains to be seen how much of the following on Biden belongs here-or anywhere. The above is on point

Indeed it’s become clear that President Joe is the opposite of a counterpuncher. Even when he’s attacked he tells his staff not to fight back. If only elections were decided on basic human decency and goodness this would be great. The reality is quite different to say the least.

And who ultimately pays the price for Joe’s alleged goodness and decency? Not him. His life is pretty great despite the fact that if he, Schumer, and Pelosi don’t figure something out soon, he’ll probably be dealing with his own impeachment hearings in 2024. No who ends up suffering for his almost congenital foolishness and gullibility are us-those who voted for him and the millions of Americans-wether they voted for Joe, voted for Trump or didn’t vote at all-who are suffering because of the failure of the Democrats to use the power we worked so hard to give them.

Maybe President Joe should have campaigned for Mother Teresa’s job, we still need a President who fights battles based on the real world.

Giuliani and Kallstrom claim that the agents revolting against Comey’s handling of Hillary Clinton were doing it because they want apoltical investigations, with all targets treated the same. But neither of them, much less FBI brass or agents, were publicly upset when the worst Justice Department scandal in modern history exploded in 2007, with Karl Rove, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and the Bush White House swamped by allegations that they’d tried to force out nine U.S. attorneys and replace them with “loyal Bushies,” as Gonzales’s chief of staff put it. Democratic officials, candidates and fundraisers were five times as likely to be prosecuted by Bush’s justice than Republicans.

Then at the top of the polls in the 2008 presidential race, Giuliani had to answer questions about it and said that he thought Gonzales should get “the benefit of the doubt,” calling him “a decent man” a few months before he resigned. “We should try to remove on both sides as much of the partisanship as possible,” lectured Giuliani. He recalled that strict rules were put into place while he was at the top levels of justice in the aftermath of Watergate limiting contact between law enforcement and political figures, a particular irony in view of the fact that he talks freely today about engaging in just such conversations on national television, oblivious to the fact that he is now a “political figure.”

The sad thing is, President Joe would hear this and declare Rudy Guiliani a wonderful and decent man because of this talk of “bipartisanship”-truly President Joe’s G-spot. Trouble is when a Biden says “We should try to remove on both sides as much of the partisanship as possible”-he actually means it but when a Rudy says it he’s blowing smoke in President Joe’s face.

That’s what all talk of “bipartisanship” and “Institutionalism” is about-both sides embrace it only the Democrats are naive enough to believe it.

Giuliani’s mentor, Michael Mukasey, who succeeded Gonzales as attorney general, appointed a special investigator to examine the U.S. attorney scandal and she concluded that no laws had been broken. It was later reported that four days before Mukasey named this special prosecutor, a federal appeals court vacated seven of eight convictions in a case she supervised in Connecticut, ruling that the team suppressed exculpatory evidence, including the notes of an FBI agent. Kallstrom contends he didn’t say anything about the blatant partisan interference then because he was “never asked to comment,” though he had been a law enforcement consultant for CBS News in about the same time frame. How he became a frequent Fox commentator now is unclear.”

The sad thing with Democrats like Biden-it seems that most Democrats at least in the Old Guard are somewhat like this though he’s particularly bad is that even after reading this they will still refuse to get it but simply hug their bipartisanship blankie even tighter.

It’s clear enough, though, why when Comey sent a note to FBI staff on Friday explaining his decision to inform Congress about the renewed Clinton probe, the scoop about that internal memo went to Fox News. Why Kallstrom gets booked to talked about the Clintons a “crime family.” Why Clinton Cash author Peter Schweitzer, caught in a web of Breitbart and Trump conflicts, would announce on Fox that he was asked in August to sit down with New York office FBI agents investigating the Clinton Foundation (with The New York Times reporting this week that the agents were relying largely on his discredited work when they pitched a fullscale probe).

UPDATE: CF this point that CF investigation largely predicated on Schweiter in context of McCabe’s leak.

This point about the unpredicated nature of the CF investigation should be made in Chapter McCabe?

UPDATE: I wrote the above back in 2021 when I had serious concerns regarding Biden’s reelection prospects. While I feel better about his prospects here in July, 2023

FN: And somewhat better about his performance though still consider his reluctance to engage in “procedural hardball”-as a major shortcoming. There’s no question we frankly would have been better off with his VP at the top of the ticket-Kamala was always my first choice in 2020; we would also be better off with Elizabeth Warren. Those were my top two choices but my fellow Dems-including many Dem women-felt Biden was the safer choice. And counterfactuals are complex-who can say wether Harris couldn’t have won? But she-or Warren-would have been far more aggressive; to say nothing of Hillary herself-it would be tough to be less than Biden on procedural matters. Obviously if both of them were unelectable-basically if even at this date women any woman is still unelectable to the top job-then Biden was the right choice.

Again as I discussed in another chapter overall I give Biden pretty good marks-like a B to a B+ though a big part of it is based on his stellar performance on Russia’s illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine.

Then too, in 2021 there was concern about the 2022 elections-“Red Wave.” Certainly the Dems wildly overperformed those dire predictions though TBH it’s arguable they were lucky. It’s clear the GOP’s hideous Dobbs ruling had a lot to do with the Dems surprise overperformance; in point of fact for many years the Dem Establishment had avoided defending abortion rights too vigorously due the Savvy narrative that the issue was too “divisive,”

it’s still far from a guarantee. Polls that show Biden up by 4 points can’t make you feel that confident when you keep in mind the GOP’s structural electoral college advantage. Biden won 2020 by 7 and that was good for only the same EC margin that Trump had in 2016 despite losing by 3 points.

And the fact remains-as noted in Chapter Leeden Manifesto-that Biden’s approval rating remains abysmal. Again while Biden is more likely to win in 2024 than not there’s not room to feel that confident about it.

None so blind as those who will not see.

Ok let’s finish by quoting Oscar Wilde again:

The best lack all conviction while the worst among us are full of passionate intensity. 

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