So where to start? Maybe the really simple or big question is, What the heck is going on at the FBI right now?

It's a really good question, and it's actually a more difficult one to answer than you would think, not because the current director is obfuscating what's going on, but because the priorities and the points which receive emphasis in terms of resources really seems to change with alarming frequency.

Now, the FBI... is somewhat by design at least in the post 9 11 era supposed to be able to do that you know you go when i was in and this is you know it's the government it's a bureaucracy it changes every five years but the general idea when i came in was everybody got the same training at quantico you learned how to be your average replacement value fbi agent You knew how to shoot and fight if it came to it.

You knew how to take somebody into custody safely.

You knew how to use the basic investigative techniques.

You knew how to interview and interrogate somebody.

And then when you graduated, you were what was called career path, which meant you got extra training in a specialized area.

Do you tell them to hang in there or do you tell them to seek greener pastures?

If you were a staff director to the Judiciary Committee or the Oversight Committee, what what would you be suggesting is the starting place for oversight?

So I'm going to start With a vague standard that I think should govern all of these investigations.

And that is if I were a congressional oversight committee, in this case, the judiciary, I would not take a single action unless I knew that it was going to lead potentially to a specified result I could execute in my branch of government alone.

Ignore criminal investigations because everybody's going to get a pardon unless maybe you could find a state crime.

Ignore bringing things to daylight just to name and shame people because many of these people have no shame.

Where I differ with some of the beliefs that have been fainted at earlier is I think they should absolutely go on a spree to impeach lower level officials.

There need to be consequences for what has happened.

I mean, if the Ukraine impeachment stands for one thing, it's that when people want to testify, the government can't really prevent them from testifying.

How worrisome is that?

I'm actually not too worried about what's going on in Alaska for both legal and prudential reasons.

First of all, the governor of Alaska has zero say in terms of whether its representatives and senators get seated in Congress.

Once the election is done and certified, He's out of the game.

He has no legal grounds to not certify this election.

And the prudential concern is that the fact that there are two individuals with the same name running in Alaska means nothing because Alaska is a ranked choice voting system.

Voters get to choose a number of candidates.

Are you worried about California?

What does that mean for the men and women who are still inside?

It means that they all have difficult choices to make, not just in the long term, but pretty much every day when they wake up in the morning.

I don't envy them there.

There is a good argument that if you are a good person and you know your limits, that you continue to do good, you continue to protect people, and when you're asked to do something wrong, you resign or you make them fire you.

But at the same time, there's a counter argument, which I admit I find a bit more persuasive the longer this administration goes on, that if you're a good person working for what has become a fundamentally corrupt organization, You're lending a sheen of legitimacy to what's become a building centered on racketeering.

And I don't mean prosecuting racketeering.

I mean leveraging crime, fraud, and what I will refer to politely as creative interpretations of U.S. law to amass power for the executive branch and to enrich its denizens.

I felt the parents' grief, but I also felt this rage and shame that all this was done in our name as Americans.

And this is DOJ's move.

I think we need to stop thinking about the Department of Justice as an organization that has maintained continuity since the days it was founded during Reconstruction.

What Todd Blanch has turned that building, that organization into, even more than Pam Bondi did, is frankly, just a mob law firm.

They work for one very special client, as the conciliarian, the godfather said, and that is the sole interest they protect.

This Department of Justice has zero interest in forwarding the goals of the Constitution.

It has zero interest in protecting civil rights or prosecuting public corruption.

It has zero interest in looking at any sort of fraud.

Why do you think they so brazenly are taking this step to try to erase the facts of this day.

I mean, i- if impacting battlefield outcomes and taking down a technological system that protects civilian life isn't acting as a foreign agent, what is?

Well, let's make that accusation a little more acute.

Let's sharpen it up a bit, because let's remember, Steve Witkoff is not a US government employee.

Jared Kushner is not a US government employee.

Elon Musk, as of now, is not a government employee.

We have essentially outsourced our entire diplomatic and defense outreach with respect to this conflict to amateurs, and not just amateurs, but amateurs who have so many conflicts of interest because of their business and personal dealings in other countries, that one of them, Jared Kushner, only got his security clearance in the first term when Trump overrode the people who were holding it back because they thought about those conflicts.

And Elon Musk was never able to get the highest level of clearance he needed to access the special access programs that are run by his own company, SpaceX.

Trump I think first tweeted that he wanted to indict Comey, Clinton, and somebody else in very early 2017 or '18.

Yeah.

Look, this is a pattern.

This is somebody who is not particularly schooled or self-educated in the institutions that make up the American government, and now that he's sitting at the top of it, he thinks he can just bend them to his will as if it was some corporate subdivision or entity he controlled through a real estate trust.

He doesn't understand checks and balances.

He doesn't understand the traditions of liberty enshrined in our Constitution, and his view is, "I sit at the top of the government." He doesn't recognize that, you know, there are other articles of the Constitution setting up different branches, and thinks he can just leverage resources in any way he wants, and that's what he's been doing.

Congress is completely absent as a check.

Mm-hmm

But how do local law enforcement start to dig into that? What is the process from here to determine the relationship to the school, the motive, and all the other questions they're trying to answer?

It's going to be a real evidentiary dig into the individual's background and into the way that the individual communicated with others in the world.

Everybody's gonna assume, obviously, that this entails social media postings, chat room commentaries, tweets, the like.

But it's so much more than that, and that's only just one manifestation of what might lead somebody to do this.

I would actually argue the most important interviews that are gonna come out in this investigation are gonna be with the shooter, shooter's parents and the shooter's peers.

You know, there is always some warning sign in these situations.

Very few people break and five minutes later go on one of these rampages.

Please

Um, it seems like all of this transpired in a, in a really, really, really compact timeline.

Yeah, that's very true.

And, you know, this is a horrible situation.

There is no way to describe it in anything but negative and heartbreaking terms.

But that said, everything seemed to have worked as it was supposed to in an emergency event like this.

The shooter was stopped with alacrity.

Law enforcement responded in a matter of minutes.

Um, the big question, uh, for investigators, I imagine, Michael, is, is, is essentially gonna be what, you know, is there a plan that they, that they uncover that this was something, uh, pr- premeditated with the intent to go to the school or something else happened that, that ended up in, in, in the shooter ending up in the school?

Um, Michael, what would your questions be in terms of the really minimal information we have at this point, but to Josh's, uh, reporting, um, something that has become a bit of a, a ritual in our country, news of another shooting, um, at or right outside a school, an elementary school this time, in Bend, Oregon?

So based on the timeline of what we've been told from the first 911 call to when police responded to when the portion of the incident involving this active shooter was resolved in his death- It seems like everyone did everything right.

I mean, it was a three-minute or less response time from law enforcement, and somebody intervened to stop the killing, whether it was law enforcement or a bystander.

But we should reflect on why that is, because it's not necessarily something we should cheer about.

There was such a quick response and such a quick execution of reunification protocols and parental notifications and the like only because this has happened so many times before in American communities large and small.

It's something we're totally inured to.

It's something for which toddlers now drill their first years in school.

Um, Michael, could this just be an instance of they were standing around, they just happened to be standing around this box?

Absolutely.

Anything is possible, and I don't want to disparage the individual characters of National Guardsmen and women who are forced to come out here for a mission that is not really defined and with goals that are not really set and with patrols that quite frankly aren't needed.

It is difficult to explain to people who do not live here in DC just how much of an occupied city this has felt like for the entirety of this administration for this very reason.

You can't go anywhere, including dropping your kids off at school, without seeing armed men walking around the street haphazardly for no real reason.

And while they might not be trying to disenfranchise people or to discourage mail-in voting, it's gonna have that intimidating effect if they're here.

So after a year and a half of seeing armed agents and guardsmen, many of the agents are masked and operating as we've seen throughout the country, you know, people are gonna assume the worst, and that's gonna undermine confidence, which, as every other panelists have noted, that's really Donald Trump's goal here, is to create confusion and paranoia about the legitimacy of this election in any way they can.

Uh, Michael, w- what i- what's going on here? Can they do this?

Now, Kimberly Guilfoyle, she was almost a member of your family.

How surprised were you to learn about these allegations? What did you make of it?

And my, my only, I guess, line of questioning for you, Michael Feinberg, is in a normal world, wouldn't she wanna know how all the other ambassadors are conducting their business?

Of course, but I think it really is safe to say at this point in this administration that we should just assume that the norm is corruption, and the real anomaly would be a deviance toward transparency and law following.

I mean, look, Kimberly Guilfoyle has been pushed out, but Tom Homan hasn't, despite very credible allegations against him.

Um, we have congressional and senatorial candidates in Ohio who have been accused of beating their spouses, who Trump defends.

We have outright white supremacists and racists whom Trump defends.

Like, the only people he will not defend are those who are what I would just say are baseline normal, moral human beings.

And my, my only, I guess, line of questioning for you, Michael Feinberg, is in a normal world, wouldn't you wanna know how all the other ambassadors are conducting their business?

Of course, but I think it really is safe to say at this point in this administration that we should just assume that the norm is corruption, and the real anomaly would be a deviance toward transparency and law following.

I mean, look, Kimberly Guilfoyle has been pushed out, but Tom Homan hasn't, despite very credible allegations against him.

Um, we have congressional and senatorial candidates in Ohio who have been accused of beating their spouses, who Trump defends.

We have outright white supremacists and racists whom Trump defends.

Like, the only people he will not defend are those who are what I would just say are baseline normal, moral human beings.

And that says something about his orbit, and I wanna point something out as well.

This isn't a bigger crisis?

Mm-hmm.

So it's not just a question of can it happen to Representative Omar.

Can it happen to Jim Comey? Can it happen to Letitia James? Can it happen to Don Lemon? Can it happen to the Broadview Six, which also included congressional candidates? This is, this should not surprise us.

It should still disgust us, but the time for shock is over, and the time to actually start fighting back is what should occur.

And I really, really hope that when this nightmare ends, there will be some accounting and reckoning, some sort of ramification for the law enforcement officials and the DOJ attorneys who are allowing this madness to happen.

I'm, and we can't... nothing to do."

Yeah, look, at a certain point it's one thing to spin conspiracy theories on podcasts or on far right news channels or on Truth Social, but at a certain point if you're trying to take away somebody's liberty, if you're actually trying to take away somebody's freedom and throw them in jail, you need to be able to convince a grand jury you know what you're doing.

You need to be able to convince a judge that your claims have some merit, and you need to be able to convince a jury of the defendant's peers that what you're saying isn't nonsense.

Many prosecutors say the office feels leaderless," this is the part I want to get you in on, "and are worried that a place once known for big drug and white collar cases has pivoted to politics, the pursuit of Donald Trump's retribution campaign." How is it affecting the safety of Americans?

Well, it's damaging it, but I, I want to almost make that statement more drastic by noting that it's not just damaging the safety and national security of our country during Trump's term, but they are proceeding in such a manner that is gonna have second and third order consequences for our federal law enforcement and intelligence communities probably, and I'm, I'm not exaggerating here, for at least an entire or maybe two generations, if not three.

And it's happening on so many different levels that sometimes it's different to take it all into one's view.

But you have the forced departure through firings or resignations under threat of firing of very senior experienced officials across many agencies.

You have the explicit politicization of agencies like the Justice Department and the FBI and ODNI and the CIA.

You have to account for the fact that in order to halt the perso- the sort of personalization of these agencies, you're gonna have to do an anti-personalization campaign when this administration is over, that to half the country is gonna look like even more politicized firings just coming from a different side of the aisle.

Our government is a mess right now.

If you had a functioning FBI and this came across your radar, what would be your chief concerns?

Michael, the disconnect to me is striking.

striking.It's a huge disconnect, and it's actually an insult to the FBI workforce in two ways.

The first, as you just said, is there has been no administration in history willing to throw law enforcement under the bus the way that this White House did with the Capitol Police and the January 6th parties.

And every single FBI office in the country worked on those investigations.

A lot of people have been fired or demoted or had their lives ruined because of events connected with those investigations that now upset the Trump administration.

So running an ad like this claiming that the Republicans are friends to law enforcement just i- is a lie, quite frankly, and insulting to everybody's intelligence.

But there's another sort of moral injury here in that this ad makes it more difficult for the FBI to do its job.

Yeah, um, Michael, I'd love to get you on, on Kash Patel making a public appeal for people to, quote, "Not vote for socialists."

[laughs]

... who have that experience but do not have the criminal records that seem to be coming with it in DOJ's new crop of hires.

You know, for a long time, getting into the Justice Department, either as a lateral transfer or as an entry-level person through the DOJ Honors Program, would be the crown jewel of a lawyer's resume.

But we're now in this weird upside-down world where somebody who is at DOJ now hoping to move to the private sector in the future is gonna find that that experience is more of an albatross than anything else, and that is entirely because the low quality of candidates they're being forced to hire, having driven everybody with integrity, experience, and independence out of the building.

Do you think it, it really, Michael, is about the fact that they don't have many other options available to them?

Yeah, and I'm gonna add another, uh, economic analogy to James' of adverse selection, which is Gresham's Law, which states that bad money drives out good.

And what's happening is that having driven out so many good people and having driven out so many... and having brought in so many bad people, they are now creating a disincentive, even for the most conservative Federalist Society-type lawyers to join DOJ simply because you're now gonna be associated with individuals who do things like hack into voting systems.

That is, you know, eventually people do wanna go work for prestigious firms after their time in public service.

Like, if anyone did anything wrong, we really think that Kash Patel is gonna find something that John Durham, Inspector General Horowitz, Marco Rubio, John Ratcliffe, Tulsi Gabbard, Joe diGenova, and everyone inside the FBI couldn't find? I don't even know that his parents think he's that special.

special.And this before, he wrote a sort of infamous memo when he was working for Devin Nunes that attempted to attack the predicate and early techniques used in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and he just got so many facts wrong that the document isn't even worth the paper it's printed upon.

But there's another part of this story that is angering my former colleagues from what they've been telling me even more than what Ken's reported so far, and that is that Patel can't do this alone.

And my understanding is the email that went out announcing this report was actually signed by the current deputy director, who is a career agent.

That's correct.

And the associate deputy director is also a career agent.

And they are now taking down and slandering the very former executives and employees who are their coworkers, who taught them, who mentored them, who promoted them, and are- who are responsible for them being in the very positions they are now.

And there is n- there's a very serious belief that the leadership of the FBI at the highest ranks, including those who have carried badges for decades, has totally crumbled in terms of integrity and are willing to put Patel and Trump's interests ahead of their duty to their oath.

I mean, you've got none other than John Solomon, who stood on the lawn of the White House and said, you know, quote, "No votes were flipped through the voting machines in 2020."

Yeah, I mean, I think we all tend to adopt a tentative posture when we're speculating about whether the administration will try and interfere with the midterms or inject chaos or outright try and overturn the results.

And I'd suggest that we don't need to be that hesitant in reaching a conclusion simply because they already did that in 2020.

We had an engineered coup to try and overturn the results of a presidential election, and everybody in charge of these efforts now in the federal government to do something similar either took part in the exact same efforts in 2020 or defended them in court as legal counsel.

So I find it really hard to try and look on the bright side and talk about all the protections we have because this really is a case of the lunatics running the asylum.

And I hope that states will stand up for themselves as Georgia did in 2020, but I'm really worried that this letter was sent is an early omen that states might not do that with the same vigor they once did, or at least there's gonna be some internal dissent when they try.

Um, I wonder what that would make you sort of prepare for on a domestic security side.

I mean, it, it's really, really tough to say.

He led me to where I want to go, Michael, which is if you have disinformation that is being echoed by the White House, by platforms that the president owns, what does that then mean for national security?

It means that we are exponentially, compared to years past, at risk for foreign disinformation campaigns.

Everybody is aware of what Russia did in 2016.

Even Marco Rubio, although he'd probably deny it now, signed his name to a report documenting massive attempts to influence the American electorate at that time.

That was a fairly sophisticated operation, but it was before the advent of AI.

The ability of AI to create deep fakes, in other words, to make videos or photographs that never actually occurred, but seems seamlessly blended into reality, is really going to be leveraged by our adversaries.

We're going to start seeing images of politicians with people they've never actually met, videos and speeches of them saying things that they never actually voiced.

Isn't it such a tell, Michael Feinberg, that the government is more concerned with attorneys, with judges who are pointing out incompetence than with their own attorneys who are demonstrating the incompetence?

Um, Michael German, what are you hearing from people inside and recently departed from the FBI about the scope of this hack?

What I'm hearing, and I'm sure Carol has heard this too, is that it is considerably worse than has been reported.

I don't have details on that, and if I did, I would not be at liberty to discuss them, obviously, because of ongoing obligations.

But this is not [laughs] good to say the least, and I wanna point out why, because there are some nuances a lot of viewers may not recognize.

The most obvious thing that could happen is now that addresses are out there, that agents and analysts can face retaliation from violent criminals for investigations on which they've worked.

And I don't want to downplay the danger of that at all.

It is a very serious possibility that people need to steel themselves for.

How are those people going to protect themselves and their families from that foreign threat?

Is that an appropriate part of an investigation to have access to data that wouldn't include the contents like this?

Yeah, it's actually one of the more pedestrian and common steps that you take at the outset of an investigation.

In my 15 or 16 years with the FBI, I probably conservatively made over 100 requests for toll records in the course of my investigations.

The statutes that authorize these requests are not secret.

They're in the open.

Some of them were voted for by Republicans currently in the chamber when they came up for renewal on the national security side.

This is a nothing burger.

Michael, last thought.

That's a mouthful.

Well, I think it confirmed one thing that most of us already knew and also illustrated something that most of us have suspected.

The first item, what we already knew, is that Donald Trump, for some inexplicable reason— adores dictators.

Perhaps he looks up to them because he hopes to be one.

Perhaps he has a very childish understanding of how power works and thinks that a projection of authority is the same thing as actually commanding respect.

But the way he treats Xi Jinping is not dissimilar from the way he treats Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un in North Korea.

This is somebody who rolls out the red carpet, as you said, both figuratively and literally, for people who are at odds with our nation on a regular basis, while at the same time demeaning and insulting nations that have been our steadfast allies for some time.

How much danger are federal agents in right now, in your view?

What is the development about the, um, FBI agents, um, communicated on the part of their lawyer mean?

So this is actually quite a brilliant motion, I think, because it puts Aileen Cannon in a trick box of having to overrule a very specious, untethered-from-the-law decision she made at the close of Jack Smith's investigation, where she said nobody can receive or talk about non-public information.

Or she can uphold her original ruling and put the Justice Department, Trump's Justice Department, in the position where it has no witnesses to actually move its case forward.

Those are the only two options for her.

And if she r- is going to show fealty to Trump the way she has throughout this entire investigation that Jack Smith was running, she's gonna need to let DOJ question those witnesses in front of a grand jury.

But it is well-established law, as James also knows, that a witness who talks to a grand jury is allowed to talk about their testimony in public.

So DOJ is in the position they can push forward, encourage Judge Cannon to overrule her earlier order, but know that all of a sudden all these scores of FBI agents are gonna be talking to a grand jury and in public about the various and manifold ways Donald Trump broke the law in retaining classified information to which he was not entitled.

So true

[laughs]

... once dismissively said of the FBI, "You're cops.

Go be cops." As if highly trained investigators are doing nothing more than patrolling an urban city street.

What his quote and what his actions in dismantling the public corruption squad at issue here and firing so many other agents misses is that agents are not fungible.

They just can't be replaced with one another.

They develop deep reservoirs of expertise.

And out of respect for their privacy, I'm not gonna mention the agents that are talked about in this article, but they had two of the most stellar reputations in the FBI's Washington field office, which is arguably the flagship office of the entire organization.

How do you, how do you put this all back on the other side of what will be one of the darkest chapters in, uh, the Trump story?