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The Disintegration of the FBI
Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Friday, May 31, 2002
How It Really Happened


The destruction of the once great institution of the FBI began with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992.

During the Clinton years, the FBI became a political tool and servant of the Clinton White House.

Case in point: the Clinton pardongate scandal. In August 2000, the Atlanta field office of the FBI sent a memo to bureau headquarters in Washington. In that memo was information supplied by an informant regarded as reliable by local FBI agents.

According to the source, arrangements were being made to have then-President Clinton pardon two international fugitives, Marc Rich and Pinky Green. The pardon, the source told agents, would be granted in the final hours of the Clinton administration. Along with that tip were "detailed allegations of financial payoffs to ensure the presidential actions," wrote investigative reporter and editor Paul Rodriguez, who broke the story in Insight magazine.

"At the time the FBI received this information in mid-August 2000, Rich and Green were well known to the bureau as indicted tax cheats and lavishly rich fugitives on the lam. Rich's ex-wife was a close friend of Clinton and a big-time contributor and fund-raiser for Democrats. But even to casual observers the two fugitives were not plausible candidates for presidential pardons," Rodriguez wrote.

"In Washington, the bureau simply sat on this explosive tip, which included the allegation that millions of dollars were alleged to be deposited in secret bank accounts for Clinton and others identified as involved in securing the pardons."

As NewsMax.com reported on Sept. 5, 2001, even after the actual pardons were granted on Clinton's last day in the White House, just as the informant had reported, the FBI failed to act on the explosive report. In fact, it wasn't until March, some two months later, that the bureau admitted the existence of the memo, and then only because the courageous agent who had written the memo refused to allow its cover-up to go unchallenged.

To this day, the bureau continues to stonewall on the matter, frustrating the efforts of congressional investigators to probe the buried scandal, Rodriguez told NewsMax.com.

As shocking as it is, this was simply another instance of the bureau covering up information and activities apparently deemed damaging to President Clinton and his administration.

In case after case, the bureau's prestige as the world's most efficient crime-fighting agency was trotted out to bestow official credence to stories cooked up to justify the Clinton administration's version of controversial incidents – versions that strain the credulity of even the most naïve observers.

In the end, the bureau's prestige as a reliable investigative agency whose word could be taken as Gospel truth has vanished into the same black hole into which any information inconvenient to the Clinton administration also vanished.

Here is part of the sorry record of a once valued crime-fighting agency.

The Downing of TWA 800

The FBI wrested control of the investigation into the destruction of TWA Flight 800 on July 17, 1996, from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the agency with the authority and responsibility to assume the role of lead investigative body in the matter.
One NTSB investigator complained that "overbearing" FBI agents "immediately took control, and hampered a lot of things we did." NTSB officials portrayed the FBI as "aggressive beyond propriety" and described an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust, believing that the FBI routinely withheld crucial information.



As NewsMax.com reported on May 16 last year, "This failure to share information was particularly focused on the FBI laboratory in Washington, which was characterized as a "black hole."


According to another report on NewsMax.com, New York FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom told a high-ranking New York state official that the FBI would not find that a missile shot down the plane because the American people couldn't handle it.


Kallstrom also noted that several shoulder missiles went missing during the Gulf War.


The official said the FBI also put the brakes on a speedy investigation, fearing it might hurt Bill Clinton's 1996 election chances.


Veteran naval aviator and crash investigator Comdr. William Donaldson said he had witnesses who heard George Gabrial, the senior FBI agent on Long Island and personal friend of Kallstrom, and who was a close witness of the downing of TWA 800 when on his boat, that he believed what he had observed was a missile.


The FBI knew that a crewman on a fishing boat had dredged up an object that he later said all but perfectly matched photos of a MANPAD firing mechanism agents showed him. He said he examined the object, which resembled a tin can and had wires protruding from one end. After looking at it, he threw it overboard.


The bureau fought tooth and nail to cover up the fact that testimony given by hundreds of eyewitness all but proved that TWA 800 was downed by a missile. And many witnesses said FBI agents badgered them to change their testimony.

When the NTSB scheduled public hearings into the crash in Baltimore for Dec. 8, 1997, the FBI pressured the NTSB to exclude those highly credible eyewitness reports and ban their live testimony from the hearings.


The FBI influenced the content of the NTSB hearings by pressuring the NTSB chairman to exclude any evidence of an external explosion by banning all discussion, reports, test results and eyewitnesses that supported such an event. The absence of laboratory results of explosive residues from the hearings placed total reliance on the word of an FBI crime lab with a history of inadequate scientific checks and balances.

On July 21, 1996, a safety board report states that Assistant U.S. Attorney Valerie Caproni informed Norm Weimeyer, head of the Flight 800 probe's operations group, "that no interviews were to be conducted by the NTSB." Safety board investigators could review FBI-supplied documents on the witnesses, "provided no notes were taken and no copies were made."

The FBI gathered and controlled those statements as part of its criminal investigation of the crash.
The Death of Vincent Foster

Then there is the matter of the death of Vincent Foster on July 20, 1993. His death was quickly ruled a suicide by U.S. Park Police and, later, the FBI and two Special Counsel reports.

But few people remember that the controversy over Foster's death began on July 19, the day before, when President Clinton abruptly fired then-FBI Director William Sessions. Sessions would later say he was fired because he tried to stop the politicization of the FBI.


Though the high-ranking death should have meant FBI involvement, the White House ordered the FBI out of the death investigation and the inquiry into what happened in Foster's White House office. Later, the FBI was used by the Independent Counsel investigations to rubber-stamp the Park Police inquiry.


After years of investigation and the altering of key forensic evidence, the FBI was able to claim that Vince Foster had driven to Fort Marcy Park and shot himself there.


Veteran homicide detective Mark Fuhrman told Details magazine: "If he killed himself, he didn't do it there. If he committed suicide, then someone moved him to Fort Marcy Park.

"Someone tried to stage a crime scene that is not believable in the least, and to make it work they gave it to an investigative body like the Park Police who can be ordered around and bullied," Fuhrman told Details.

But the facts didn't add up. As Christopher Ruddy noted in "The Strange Death of Vincent Foster," it was difficult to believe that Foster, a man who showed no signs of depression, did not leave a suicide note; killed himself in the back of an old park (original microscopic inspection found no evidence of grass stains or dust on his shoes); shot himself with a 1913 handgun that he didn't own and that left little evidence of blood loss and no spent bullet; and managed to neatly arrange his body, with gun in hand, after he shot himself.


Also, a key eyewitness, who came on the Fort Marcy Park scene before the discovery of Foster's body reported that Foster's car was not in the parking lot at the time. The witness would later claim that FBI agents doctored his testimony to make it less suspicious. He sued the FBI after suffering harassment before testifying at a grand jury.

Another witness, Arkansas State Trooper Larry Patterson, testified that FBI agents badgered him to change his story – that he had learned of Foster's death before the body was found in Fort Marcy Park.

The Waco Affair

The standoff between the FBI and the Branch Davidian sect headed by David Koresh ended in a conflagration on April 19, 1993, that incinerated some 80 members of the group along with some of their children. A controversy still rages over the actions of FBI agents on the scene.

There is evidence that FBI snipers fired at the compound while it was being consumed by flames. A filmmaker has videos shot at the scene that he and other experts say prove that agents were shooting into the compound. The bureau insists that what they interpret as weapons being fired into the compound is actually sunlight glinting off broken shards of glass.

Critics insist that the FBI ignited the holocaust when it sent tanks crashing through the walls of the compound building.

The FBI ignored some of its own people, who insisted that Koresh and his followers could be convinced to surrender, and went ahead with the assault that killed the Davidians.

The FBI ordered the destruction of the ruins, thereby forestalling any attempts by critics to examine evidence that would have indicted the bureau for its wrongful actions at Waco.
Ruby Ridge
On Aug. 22, 1992, on a remote ridge in northern Idaho, a weeklong standoff between white separatist Randy Weaver and federal agents ended in a shootout in which an FBI sniper shot and killed Weaver's wife, Vicky. The Ruby Ridge confrontation began a week earlier, when federal marshals tried to arrest Weaver for failing to appear in court on minor weapons charges.

It was later shown that Weaver's failure to appear was the result of a goof-up by the court. When heavily armed authorities arrived, a gun battle broke out between marshals and Weaver's 14-year-old son, resulting in the deaths of the boy and a U.S. marshal.

The FBI was called in, and a standoff developed during which time Weaver's wife was killed by an FBI sniper.

In 1994, a Justice Department investigation report of the incident revealed that the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team overreacted to the threat of violence and instituted a shoot-on-sight policy that violated bureau guidelines and Fourth Amendment restrictions on police power.


In late October, FBI Headquarters Manager E. Michael Kahoe pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. He had shredded an internal FBI critique of the agency's disastrous 1992 siege.


Kahoe, court papers charged, did not merely destroy all copies of a report that he himself had prepared; he also ordered a subordinate "to make it appear as if the Ruby Ridge after-action critique never existed."

The FBI disciplined 12 agents and employees, including Larry Potts, then the head of its criminal division. Incredibly, in the face of Potts' shoddy behavior at both Ruby Ridge and Waco, Freeh named Potts deputy director of the criminal division. After a scandal erupted over the appointment, Potts was forced to retire.

In statements given before the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Government Information, two commanders who were at Ruby Ridge fingered former FBI Deputy Director Larry Potts, at the time of the siege head of the FBI's criminal division, as the man who authorized agents to shoot on sight – a practice that, according to an earlier Justice Department inquiry, "departed from the FBI's standard deadly force policy ... [and] contravened the Constitution of the United States."

Politicization of the FBI

The outright politicization of the FBI began with the firing of then-FBI director William Sessions. In a written statement to Chris Ruddy soon after the death of Vincent Foster, Sessions explained the reason he was fired: "… at the time I left the Bureau [I stated] that I would not be part of politicizing the FBI from within or without."

Sessions was replaced by Louis Freeh, who for the next eight years danced to the tune played by Bill Clinton, using the FBI as a tool to cover up the scandals of the Clinton administration.

The FBI turned over to Clinton gumshoes confidential bureau files on top Republicans allegedly to be used to blackmail them. The action was illegal, but no one at the FBI was punished for breaking the law in the so-called Filegate scandal.

Freeh allowed the FBI to investigate innocent employees of the White House Travel Office who the Clintons wanted to replace with their own cronies. The employees were terminated although no evidence of wrongdoing on their part was ever produced by the bureau.

Billy Dale, the longtime Travel Office head, was harassed by FBI agents, indicted on phony evidence and fully exonerated by a jury that acquitted him minutes after retiring to consider its verdict.


It was shown that the legendary FBI crime laboratory had faked evidence and otherwise mishandled it. The agent who disclosed the scandal was harshly treated by his bureau superiors.

In 1997, when the Clinton administration came out against Americans having the right of encryption – sending e-mail by code to protect the privacy of their messages – FBI Director Freeh quickly fell into line, making speeches supporting the Clinton/Gore policy.

Freeh opposed the whole idea that Americans should be allowed to have private conversations. He told the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation that encryption poses a "threat to public safety," and said he wanted to forbid the use of encryption products unless they are "socially responsible," i.e., have key escrow built into them (a key held by a third party – in this case the feds).


Freeh asserted that there was now an "emerging opinion throughout much of the world" in favor of key escrow. Al Gore called it a "consensus." But there was no such consensus; nobody was pushing it except the Clinton administration.


FBI misbehavior so appalled two United States senators that they introduced legislation in June 2001 to create an inspector general post to oversee the bureau.
Responding to national concern over the lack of FBI accountability, Sens. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., charged that the FBI had mishandled and misbehaved in a series of public scandals, including Ruby Ridge, Waco, spies, crime-lab evidence fabrication, withholding documents and imprisoning innocent men on false charges in order to protect "sources."

Wrote columnist Paul Craig Roberts: "These scandals have cost the FBI credibility with the public. The two senators are trying to refurbish the FBI's image with an inspector general."


Richard Jewell, an Atlanta security guard, was suspected by the FBI of planting the bomb in Centennial Park during the 1996 Olympics. Although they had not a scintilla of evidence, FBI agents convinced themselves they had the right man.
They persuaded a friend of his to have dinner with him while wearing a wire to record all of Jewell's private conversation. They tried to trick him into waiving his rights. And they apparently leaked their suspicions to the press, stigmatizing him brutally through public accusations and innuendoes, without ever arresting or indicting him. In the end, the bureau had to write him a letter fully exonerating him of having any connection with the bombing.


In 1998, The FBI decided that the Atlanta bomber was one Eric Rudolph, a fugitive they conveniently haven't been able to apprehend despite years of trying, spending millions of dollars and tens of thousands of man-hours, offering a million-dollar reward and harassing residents of the North Carolina mountains where Rudolph was believed to be hiding.
The changes in the bureau announced yesterday will do nothing to rid the agency of the moral rot that exists at the top rungs of the FBI. Only a thorough investigation of FBI misconduct in the above cases can identify the problems that exist in the bureau's top echelons.
The real truth about TWA 800, the death of Vince Foster, the vanishing memo about the Marc Rich pardon and the facts about Waco and Ruby Ridge must be told, no matter who gets hurt. Let the chips fall where they may.

When Director Mueller was first appointed to his job, NewsMax.com called on him in an open letter to do just that. To date he has not.

At the time, NewsMax charged that "the FBI has become an agency that views its principal function as being the guardian of the federal government. And its principal weapon in protecting the interests of the government and its top executives has been the cover-up. These are the earmarks of a police state. A police agency that allows itself to become the servant of government becomes an enemy of the public it is sworn to serve and protect.

"Whatever else is wrong with the bureau – investigative sloppiness, corruption among its top executives and agents, even betrayal of country – all of this and more is a side effect of the agency's willingness to prostitute itself to protect corrupt officials of the federal government. That's where the rot began. If you really want to reform the FBI, that's where you have to start," NewsMax editorialized.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/5/30/183028.shtml