Posted on 05/31/2002 12:08:54 PM PDT by Paul Ross
Reprinted from NewsMax.com
The Coup D'état at the FBI
Christopher RuddyThis week I heard author Ron Kessler say the FBI "disintegrated" under former FBI Director Louis Freeh.
Thursday, May 30, 2002
I happen to agree with Kessler.
But I would like to ask, where was Kessler all these years? And the Washington press corps? And Congress?
During the '90s they mostly hid under a rock, timid as they were to challenge the political takeover of the FBI by the Clinton White House.
Any reasonable person knows that Sept. 11 didn't happen in a vacuum.
Current FBI Director Robert Mueller claims that nothing could have been done to prevent 9-11 and that the FBI has no culpability. He also has tried to suppress criticism of the bureau.
All of this proves that Mueller is the wrong man to head the FBI at this critical juncture. An honest person needs to take the helm and begin fixing the FBI's problems.
And the FBI's problems began when President Bill Clinton, for the first time in American history, fired the sitting FBI director, William S. Sessions.
Clinton took this act on July 19, 1993, the day before his deputy White House counsel Vince Foster was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head in Fort Marcy Park.
In a written statement to me soon after the death of Foster, Sessions explained the reason he was fired: He opposed the White House's politicization of the bureau.
For decades the FBI had jealously guarded its independence from the White House and political parties. But Clinton abruptly ended that independence.
Remember when the Clintons got caught illegally and improperly using the FBI to investigate their perceived enemies in the White House travel office, in an attempt to justify their takeover of the office staffed by career civil servants?
The Clintons had little remorse using the FBI as a weapon. As Mrs. Clinton said at the time of the Travelgate affair, if the Clinton White House was opposed, their enemies would have "hell to pay."
And such was the case of Billy Dale, the head of the White House travel house, who was hounded by FBI agents, indicted on trumped-up charges and then had to spend millions to defend himself. Later, a jury would take minutes after his Soviet-style trial to declare him innocent of all charges.
The Travel Office and the Vince Foster case were just the tip of the iceberg.
During the '90s the Clintons turned the FBI into a veritable Gestapo. It became their protection squad helping them to cover up a litany of scandals and controversies: FBI Filegate, TWA 800, FBI Labgate, Ruby Ridge, Whitewater, Waco, Chinagate and a litany of smaller scandals that should have led to Clinton's removal.
Certainly the rank-and-file members of the FBI were never in bed with the Clintons. The field personnel, as we have witnessed with people like Gary Aldrich, Coleen Rowley, Frederic Whitehurst and Robert Wright, have demonstrated the great bravery of our G-men.
But the leadership of the FBI has indeed been corrupted.
It began with the firing of Bill Sessions and the installation of Judge Louis Freeh as Clinton’s FBI director.
Freeh, a Republican, was also an ambitious yes man who would do anything to appease his masters at the White House.
He spent eight years playing a Mutt-and-Jeff routine with the Clintons, bad-mouthing them all over town to keep credibility with the Republicans, but acquiescing to their every wish at the bureau.
Within a year of Freeh taking the helm, he had removed, fired or transferred almost the entire senior leadership of the bureau from the FBI's executive committee.
At the same time, and for the first time, he brought in political appointees to run the FBI. A veritable coup had taken place in our government. As a senior prosecutor on the staff of Kenneth Starr told me, "Control the FBI and you control the country."
The Clintons had their hatchet man at the bureau. Freeh quickly moved the FBI away from its traditional investigative law enforcement role to one that reflected the Clintons' politically correct agenda.
For example, veteran agents who were catching white-collar criminals and terrorists were transferred to the District of Columbia's police precinct to help solve murder cases. Still others were placed on cases involving carjackings.
Freeh believed that veteran FBI agents, with decades of investigative experience, were a waste. He had hundreds of the bureau's most senior agents and FBI teachers transferred from their posts back to field offices. The chain of FBI expertise handed down from one generation to the next had been broken.
All of this and more was known to those journalists who covered the FBI during the Clinton years. But no one said a peep.
And the destruction of the FBI was apparently mirrored by almost every other law enforcement agency in Washington.
The media can't stop slandering and bashing J. Edgar Hoover, as great an American as there ever was one, but I am still waiting to hear about what happened to the FBI under Bill Clinton and Louis Freeh.
A product that might interest you:
FBI whistle-blower tells how the Clintons helped cause 9-11
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Clinton Scandals
Media Bias
War on Terrorism
I've asked the question before. No good answers then, either.
My belief is it is because the FBI files had all the dirt on all potential GOP enemies and the Clinton Criminal Enterprise used all this information to blackmail them.
Huh? California's Attorney General is elected by the citizens of the state and cannot be fired by the President of the United States. I expect that the same holds true for most of the other states as well.
I think he means US Attorneys.
The US Attorneys are a political appointment, included in the 'Plum Book' of 'policy and supporting positions.'
http://www.access.gpo.gov/plumbook/2000/index.html
Yes, other presidents have kept on a few attorneys from the prior administration, but there is nothing necessarily sinister about their replacement. If we don't want presidents to fire them then we need to change the rules and make them civil service appointments.
Nevermind Freeh. Klinton was the one who illegally ordered them and used them without a peep from the GOP.
For me, that single abuse of power and law without any challenge proved to me the total corruption right down to the core of not only the Democrats, but of the GOP.
1) No one achieves positions of power in this country without conducting business using the currency of corruption.
2) Everyone who seeks power completely understands that there are implicit boundaries on its exercise, encroaching on those boundaries will get you destroyed by the media, or by a corrupt application of law, or if need be, outright assassination.
3) Most every one of our reasonably large institutions of government are corrupt on a systemic level this way, all the way down to the municipalities.
4) Supporting criminal organizations is immoral, reguardless of the fact they have a flag on the wall and threaten to harm you if you do not.
5) The Federal government itself has recognized in its own report that their "Emergency powers, taken in toto, amount to an extra-Constitutional form of government" (ad lib quote). This literally amounts to an admission of illegality and subversion.
6) "Reform" in such circumstances, history shows, never comes from a voting booth.
7) Most likely, the real reason there is no public outcry (from the faction who are not sheep) is we are afraid of what the answer will be (given we would be a minority), and will be left with the option provided by Amendment number two.
Aside from my personal knowledge, how about this?:
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