In The Guardian: 'The FBI is Trumpland': anti-Clinton atmosphere spurred leaks, sources say
Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited. [...]
The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”
The agent called the bureau “Trumplandia,” with some colleagues openly discussing voting for a GOP nominee who has garnered unprecedented condemnation from the party’s national security wing and who has pledged to jail Clinton if elected.
We should take anonymous sources with a grain of salt. But we’re talking about the same organization that actively tried to undermine the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement; the organization that ran an widespread, unconstitutional surveillance program called COINTELPRO; that surveilled and threatened Martin Luther King Jr, Charlie Chaplin, gay people and too many on the left to count.
So it isn’t too hard to believe that people in the FBI might act to further their personal political views.
And here’s the Daily Beast: Meet Donald Trump’s Top FBI Fanboy
The man [Rudy Giuliani] who now leads “lock-her-up” chants at Trump rallies spent decades of his life as a federal prosecutor and then mayor working closely with the FBI, and especially its New York office. One of Giuliani’s security firms employed a former head of the New York FBI office, and other alumni of it. It was agents of that office, probing Anthony Weiner’s alleged sexting of a minor, who pressed Comey to authorize the review of possible Hillary Clinton-related emails on a Weiner device that led to the explosive letter the director wrote Congress. [...]
“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.”
Along with Giuliani’s other connections to New York FBI agents, his former law firm, then called Bracewell Giuliani, has long been general counsel to the FBI Agents Association (FBIAA), which represents 13,000 former and current agents. The group, born in the New York office in the early ’80s, was headed until Monday by Rey Tariche, an agent still working in that office. Tariche’s resignation letter from the bureau mentioned the Clinton probe, noting that “we find our work—our integrity questioned” because of it, adding “we will not be used for political gains.”
There’s a lot more in the Daily Beast article, including Giuliani’s links to Jim Kallstrom (the former head of the FBI’s New York office) and his long-time friendship with Louis Freeh (the former FBI director and the guy who appointed Kallstrom).
Kallstrom has called the Clintons a “crime family” and Hillary Clinton a “pathalogical liar” on TV. He’s also a Trump supporter and Trump has contributed over a million dollars to a charity he runs. Many of the NY based agents on the Weiner case used to work for Kallstrom. The interview with Kallstorm makes for interesting reading as he first denies, then acknowledges receiving information on active cases from current agents assigned to those cases. As you might imagine, that violates FBI policy.
As if this election cycle wasn’t nuts enough, alongside the resurrection of the KKK, American Nazis and assorted other reactionaries, the remnants of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI seem to be rearing their head as well.