On the morning after President Joe Biden’s Nuremberg-worthy speech in Philadelphia a couple weeks back, the daughter of New Jerseyan Lisa Gallagher woke her mom with some startling news.
Three armed FBI agents were at her door. “I immediately tried to throw [on] clothes. I called my husband, I was crying, my knees were shaking,” Gallagher told Fox host Tucker Carlson.
“And even though I knew I had done nothing wrong, after seeing Joe Biden’s speech the night before, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is political.’
Gallagher was right. It was political. As the agents told her, they received an anonymous tip that she had been at the Capitol on January 6.
Gallagher is a Trump supporter and has the yard signs to prove it. It would seem likely that one of her neighbors, inspired by Biden’s fiery denunciation of MAGA Americans, alerted the FBI that Gallagher was a terrorist threat.
Gallagher invited the agents in, showed them her calendar and phone to prove she was nowhere near Washington, and the agents left.
At this point, I have to wonder – what did the agents talk about on the ride back to the Newark office? Not too long ago, their office helped bring down John Gotti, and now they were going after Lisa Gallagher?
If these agents did not bitch about how they were being used, they should never have been hired in the first place.
After graduating from college, I flirted with the idea of becoming an FBI agent myself. At the time, however, the FBI was looking for accountants and lawyers, and I had no interest in being either.
That said, I had the prototypical FBI background – Irish, Catholic, conservative and police-friendly, being the son of a Newark police detective.
For years, and perhaps even today, people with similar backgrounds were, if not a majority of the Bureau, certainly a plurality.
About 10 years ago, I spoke to a group of 30 or so FBI agents, mostly retired but some still active, about my 2011 book, “Deconstructing Obama.” Almost to a person, they openly shared their distaste for the then president.
As late as 2016, retired FBI agent Jim Kallstrom, the national security expert at Fox News, roundly criticized the Clintons in the run-up to that year’s election and endorsed Trump on-air.
Kallstrom had been the FBI’s agent-in-charge of the TWA 800 investigation. We spoke a week or so before the election on the subject of TWA 800. Although he was not about to come clean on the 1996 disaster, we were otherwise on the same page politically.
What I learned in investigating the demise of TWA 800 was that, although the FBI could be used by the administration in power – the Clintons in this case, its brass participated in the cover-up reluctantly. The real dirty work was left to the politically suspect CIA.
Under Obama, the dynamics changed. The top echelons of the FBI became active political agents and eager participants in the attempted subversion of Trump’s candidacy and presidency.
A few wrists got slapped along the way, but little has changed at the top. I have to believe, though, there is growing unrest among the rank and file. The emergence of multiple whistleblowers would suggest as much.
Like all federal employees, however, FBI agents are prisoners of their pensions. They would have to be mightily provoked to jeopardize them.
Still, the agents who visited Lisa Gallagher had to feel a mounting disgust with the corruption of their once proud Bureau.
In just a few short years, the FBI has succeeded in alienating the very people most supportive of its work and aligned its fortunes with people who have historically held its agents in contempt.
There are many patriotic FBI agents. I know a few personally, but it is time for all of them to look in the mirror. What once looked like a G-Man is now beginning to look like a Geheime Staatspolizei, and that is not a good look at all.
