‘When all the investigations are over and Trump is gone, there will be one organization that will have suffered the most in terms of reputation—the FBI…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A former Soviet counterintelligence agent with the FBI, speaking to a group of California Republicans, said the scandals wrought by former Director James Comey and other corrupt members of the agency’s top brass may have done irreparable harm.
“When all the investigations are over and Trump is gone, there will be one organization that will have suffered the most in terms of reputation—the FBI,” special agent Rick Smith told the Piedmont Area Republican Women Federated at a luncheon in Oakland, according to the East Bay Times.
Smith described Comey as a “villain” who had repeatedly ignored the efforts of field offices to communicate with him regarding the probe into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.
Of the roughly 30,000 emails on Clinton’s personal server, Smith said 110 were classified and 22 top secret.
“Comey ignored the head of the Washington field office, who called seven times about the emails,” he said.
Although he named many of the other “bad actors” whose names, familiar to many as the subject of investigations—including the one currently underway in the Justice Department headed by special prosecutor John Durham—Smith said he thought the “conspiracy” ended at the top and that rank-and-file agents continued to do their work in good faith without partisan motives.
While some, including current FBI Director Christopher Wray, have cautioned against Trump’s recent declassification of materials allowing Attorney General William Barr and his team the access needed to investigate, Smith applauded the efforts at transparency, which could be the FBI’s only road to redemption.
“We need to find out what happened from the very beginning in order to re-establish the public’s confidence in the FBI,”he said.