FBI Director is ‘weak’ and goes along with the crazies. Excerpts from Tucker Carlson’s interview with CSP’s J. Michael Waller

In their interview aired recently, Tucker Carlson and the Center for Security Policy’s J. Michael Waller talked about Big Intel the book, and what politicization of the intelligence community means for our country and for the average American.

Big Intel was a two-year project that documents how the FBI, CIA, and the rest of the intelligence community embraced critical theory as operational ideologies, placing DEI and other political priorities over professionalism and patriotism.

The interview was much broader than that. It began with a lengthy discussion of the progressive extremist Transition Integrity Project and efforts to disrupt the 2020 presidential elections, and a similar effort being mounted today.

These excerpts, arranged and lightly edited for clarity, capture our conversation about the book.

Tucker: “So I want to ask you about the thesis of your book, Big Intel How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains. Since you’ve worked in and around this world, a lot of your life, summarize for us, if you would, how that happened, how do you think that happened?”

Michael: “This is something that J. Edgar Hoover warned about back when he was a 25 year old … Justice Department lawyer. His job was to identify and round up foreign communists, anarchists, radical socialists and deport them back to Russia. That was a job, and this was at a time of anarchist terrorist violence, where they tried to assassinate the attorney general of the United States and so forth. So you’d had a president, McKinley, previously assassinated.

Tucker: “Killed the mayor of Chicago and killed a lot.”

Michael: “He [Hoover] was the number one person in the Justice Department to fight against this Marxism and anarchism, not just the violent stuff, but the subversive parts. By infiltrating our institutions, our schools, our universities, our news media, Hollywood, legal professions, churches, you name it. He was warning his entire career. That’s why he was so reviled by the left. He was warning about this the whole time. So the FBI, as he created it, was not there simply to enforce federal laws and fight spies, but in Hoover’s idea to defend the American way of life.

“The penetrations of our institutions that he warned about became fact because he saw them happening, but it wasn’t stopped. The US kept bringing them in mainly from Europe, importing foreign Communists from Europe.

“But we didn’t require them to become real Americans. Instead, they were set up at Columbia University … to bring these Soviet created institutions, import them … to American universities, to teach the teachers and to discipline the radicals.”

Tucker: “But how do you know the CIA abroad, FBI domestically were designed and consume enormous budgets every year in order to defend us from that stuff. How did they become captured by it?”

Michael: “It was first the precursor to the CIA, during World War II … with the Office of Strategic Services and [its founder] Bill Donovan…. His job was to fight the Nazis and their allies.”

Tucker: “Yeah.”

Michael: “But he needed experts who spoke the languages [of] occupied parts of Europe and elsewhere, who had motivations, who had academic expertise and linguistic expertise. And he brought in a whole lot of Communists into this, German Communist Party members when [there were] a lot of others [Germans who opposed both the Communists and the Nazis]. When they [the foreign Communists] came in their job was to settle World War II, not on American terms, but on Stalin’s terms.”

Tucker: “Which they did.”

Michael: “Which they did. So with the Yalta Conference, with Roosevelt, that was all run by Stalin agents or Stalin supporters, and the anti-communist liberals like George Kennan were just kept out completely. And Stalin got his way on practically everything.”

“… even the CIA, to this day says one of its original intellectuals from the U.S. was Herbert Marcuse.”

Tucker: “Yeah.”

Michael: “And Marcuse was a Stalinist who then broke with Stalin, but he still became a Communist. And America imported him to become a professor in the United States to teach generations of college students, including law students, including diplomats, including community organizers. He built the theory for a lot of this stuff, and we’re seeing it now with DEI, and that’s being imposed on has been imposed on the whole intelligence community and the FBI, just like we see at every place else.”

“… People are afraid of it. They’re afraid to touch it. That’s why I’ve been writing this book. They’re saying, are they going to get you? They really think the FBI is going to somehow, you know, get me in a car accident or make me drink polonium tea or something.”

Tucker: “But does that happen?”

Michael: “Who knows?”

Tucker: “What do you think?”

Michael: “I honestly don’t know what to think anymore. I used to think it was crazy talk.”

Tucker: “Yeah. Me too.”

Michael: “The FBI wasn’t infiltrated by this cultural Marxism that has penetrated everyplace else because Hoover had defended against that infiltration. FBI was a hard target [until] really after in the Clinton administration when attitudes began to change.

“But they didn’t have a critical mass to get together, because our intelligence community was divided up into many different agencies, so it could never abuse its power effectively until after 9/11, when President George W. Bush centralized everything and created an FBI with a super management of 60 new positions at the top, and an Office of the Director of National Intelligence to coordinate 18 different intelligence agencies. So he set up a vertically powerful centralized apparatus. Something that a revolutionary like Obama could come in and politicize.

“[They] centralized the FBI now with 60 new management positions. That means you’re incentivizing the brown-nosers in the system to fight their way to the top. It didn’t happen that way before.”

Tucker: “So, you’re saying and this is what I think people who know a lot about the system conclude after a while. The structure matters. The nature of the bureaucracy drives the policy in the end.”

Michael: “And now you have an incentive system where if you don’t subscribe to all the tenets of diversity, equity and inclusion and whatever other things they’re adding on to this, you don’t have to just go along with it to be a good professional or a decent colleague. You have to actively live it. And if you don’t, that’s a mark against you in your promotion.”

Tucker: “Right? So you got to buy the trans thing 100% or you’re just not going to get a raise.”

Michael: “Yeah, and not just buy it. You have to be what they call an advocate now.”

Tucker: “An ally.”

Michael: “Yes, ally…. There you go. You got it. And, and if you’re not an ally, that’s a count against you. But what if you have moral qualms about it? Because that [moral character] is what the whole thing is about. That’s what made the FBI one of the better of the American federal institutions, was that it tried to recruit people of character…. It gave up on that a long time ago.”

Tucker: “Well, right. It’s recruiting people with no character. So what about Chris Wray? What is that? You look at Chris Wray, and he doesn’t have a background that suggests evil, but he’s obviously doing evil. It’s like how.

Michael: “He is just your typical weaselly Washington attorney who made a lot of money through the Washington game. It’s all ultimately at taxpayer expense, even if the client isn’t necessarily the taxpayer. Then he got a fancy government position. He parlayed that into a bigger interest in his law firm, and now he’s got added prestige. And then boom, he becomes a new sort of nonpolitical. Chris Christie recommended him as FBI Director.”

Tucker: “Chris Christie recommended him. Yeah. But you look at Chris Wray and you think, how can he allow this?”

Michael: “He’s just weak. You have the whole nerve center taken over by militant crazies, the management system. And then you have one very loudmouthed person with a few advocates inside the apparatus to say that we need now a senior leader for diversity, equity and inclusion. And this must be incorporated in every single aspect of FBI life.”

Tucker: “Right. And it’s a short hop or maybe an inevitable hop from there to, ‘hey, let’s control the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.’”

Michael: “The biggest case in FBI history is rounding up people who are being charged with nothing more than misdemeanors…. That’s not what the FBI was for, to hunt down people for misdemeanors. But you’re now raiding people’s homes for unauthorized assembly and unlawful parading and trespassing, and you’re running SWAT teams against them, and you’re wrecking their families, and you’re wrecking their reputations and their lives are over. For misdemeanors…. it’s to set an example and to make people afraid, to make people feel isolated and then depressed and helpless….”

Tucker: “Well, on that happy note, J. Michael Waller, Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains. Thank you very much.”

Catch the full interview here on TuckerCarlson.com.