By Marion Filler and Kevin Coughlin
It’s time for Americans to take back control of our government, a former FBI agent told activists in Morris Township on Tuesday.
“Organize. Organize. And work together,” said Michael German, now a fellow with the Liberty and National Security Program of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, and a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org
In a free-wheeling 90 minute talk and question-and-answer session organized by NJ 11th for Change, German rapped then-FBI Director James Comey’s controversial actions during the 2016 presidential election and questioned Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s record and the pace of his Russia investigation.
He also warned of an increasingly powerful and secrecy-obsessed intelligence community that invites conspiracy theories and enables President Trump and others to sow doubt and fear.
“One of the problems with what Donald Trump is doing now, denigrating the intelligence agencies, is that it’s easy for him to do that. They have not been honest. They have been so secretive. They lied about torture [at Guantanamo and elsewhere], they lied about the [warrantless domestic] surveillance programs. So how do I know they’re not lying about this?
“Donald Trump deserves to be blamed for the way he’s attacking these institutions. But these institutions have to be blamed, too, because they’ve made their own bed by demanding things without having any accountability,” said German, who infiltrated neo-Nazi groups during a 16-year career with the FBI.
By overemphasizing global terrorism at the expense of domestic crime investigations –40 percent of homicides and 60 percent of reported rapes go unsolved, according to German–federal authorities actually may be missing chances to nab terrorists in our backyard, he said.
Selective law enforcement, meanwhile, emboldens supremacists to inflict violence with a sense of impunity, German contended. He said only one person faces federal charges from last year’s deadly clash in Charlottesville, Va., where state and local police were criticized for not maintaining order.
By downplaying white-collar crime–nobody did jail time for causing the financial meltdown of the late 2000s–authorities are driving public perceptions of bias, he said.
More vigorous FBI enforcement of Trump’s dubious casino-, university- and charity operations over the years might have “saved us all a lot of heartache” now, German speculated.
Speaking out can be dangerous, he acknowledged to a concerned audience member.
“Of course there is a risk. But we have to do it. It’s the only way we’re going to take back our government,” German said, to loud applause.
Concerned about abuses of power, German became a whistleblower and left the FBI in 2004 to work with the American Civil Liberties Union.
His commentary has appeared in Time magazine. He’s authored a book, Thinking Like a Terrorist: Insights of a Former FBI Undercover Agent, and co-written the screenplay for Imperium, a film starring Daniel Radcliffe.
German’s talk on Tuesday was moderated by WNYC Studio 360 creator Julie Burstein. The event kicked off Defending Democracy, a series presented by NJ 11th for Change, a grassroots nonprofit organization.
COMEY AND MUELLER: ‘ALL HANDS ON DECK’
Statements by then-FBI Director James Comey about Hillary Clinton’s classified emails before the 2016 election baffled German.
“I wish I could understand what Jim Comey was thinking. His explanations make no sense,” he said, noting the FBI, as a rule, refrains from disparaging persons not charged with a crime.
Comey’s verbal rap on Clinton’s knuckles cost her the election, insist some Clinton supporters.
Yet German also finds it “hilarious” when Trump fans suggest the FBI sought to help the former Secretary of State.
“That family is the most investigated family in the United States,” German said of the Clintons.
More disturbing than Clinton’s emails, German said, is the matter of Russian interference.
“Here we have the Russian government attacking Democratic party campaign computers and trying to influence our election. That’s a four-alarm fire, that is all hands on deck. There is something very bad here,” he said.
“But they were so slow to react to that, it’s astonishing to me. And we’re still years out trying to put this together. What do we have an intelligence community for if it’s not to protect us from a hostile foreign nation messing up our elections? That’s a 9/11-style failure of intelligence.”
With bipartisan support and 12 years of experience leading the FBI, Robert Mueller is the “perfect guy” to unravel this Russian mystery as special counsel, German said.
Wait…nobody’s perfect.
On Mueller’s watch, the FBI looked the other way on CIA waterboarding of terror suspects and on warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens, German said.
Earlier in his career, Mueller took heat for a lackluster prosecution of BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. FBI agents referred to the money-laundering outfit as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International, German said.
Mueller’s critics in the early ’90s hinted he may have trod lightly to mask spy agencies’ use of BCCI.
German hopes something similar doesn’t happen now.
“We have to hold him responsible just like we would any other prosecutor,” he said, urging a swifter, more transparent investigation of the election.
FIGHTING BACK: ‘THEY ARE LOVELY PEOPLE’
Whatever Mueller concludes, it will be hard convincing a politically riven nation to accept his findings, German said.
“I don’t know how you put that egg back together,” he said.
Fearmongering and demonizing minorities and the media are authoritarian tools that predate Donald Trump by generations, German said.
Such tactics play into the hands of terrorists, whose goal is to expose our hypocrisy about human rights, he said.
“Their propaganda says, once you provoke the U.S., it abandons its principles and laws.” Thousands of Muslim immigrants were arrested after 9/11, “which is exactly what Al Qaeda wanted.”
To counter this, Americans must demand that their elected representatives hold government accountable, German told the audience.
If officials refuse, he said, then act locally:
Help those who are hurting. Alleviate suffering. Support local media.
“Once you do that, you’re building the fabric of society. So when someone like President Trump says, ‘The Muslims are the problem in the United States,’ you can say, ‘No, I have Muslim neighbors who I know, and they’re lovely people.’
‘And when ICE is raiding someplace and saying, ‘These people are bad people,’ you can say, ‘No, I know those people, so I can help them get attorneys, I can resist that activity.'”
Strong communities don’t erect walls separating us and them, German said.
“We should realize we’re all us, and we need to protect all.”
