“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

–Sen. Charles Schumer, January 2017

Chuck Schumer said the above quote shortly after President-elect Donald Trump criticized and mocked his “intelligence” briefers for being unprepared and for delaying a scheduled briefing on Russia for several days.

Given the FBI and CIA social media shenanigans that have recently come to light through the Twitter files that new owner Elon Musk has allowed to be released, it appears that Trump’s instincts regarding the “intelligence community” were correct.

Schumer’s statement has also proved to be prophetic, as the intelligence apparatus was clearly used in a sustained assault against both the Trump administration and the Trump reelection campaign effort. An early tell was the text messages between FBI attorney Lisa Page and FBI agent Peter Strzok, with whom she was having an extramarital affair. This exchange between the two sums up, I submit, a prevailing attitude within the Bureau:

“[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page texted Strzok.

“No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” Strzok responded.

The FBI motto is “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.” Riiiight. For these two (and many others), it was apparently “Fraud, Backbiting, Infidelity.” But they had a great role model: the (allegedly) cross-dressing blackmailer and longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. His agents once sent a letter to Martin Luther King threatening to expose his extramarital affairs if he didn’t commit suicide (as King himself interpreted the cryptic threat).

Image: FBI logo by Andrea Widburg.

That sure sounds like a law enforcement agency that values “integrity,” doesn’t it? And that is just the tip of the corrupt iceberg, carried out under the Bureau’s COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) activities.

One wonders if Musk himself is now endangered by the leaders of the “Intelligence” communities who feel threatened by Musk lifting the veil on their illegal election interference and other shenanigans. Musk has handed the story to journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, and they have been revealing the dirty deals as a multi-part ongoing story. Who knows what the rogue actors of these agencies have in store for them?

Tucker Carlson has also recently antagonized the “intelligence” community by reporting that he has a highly-placed source who claims that the reason the FBI and CIA insist on holding back some JFK assassination documents is that the CIA itself was involved in the assassination.

It’ll be interesting to see where this story goes from here.

The GOP must act in decisive fashion once it takes over the House in January. Christopher Wray, John Brennan, James Clapper, and the rest of the “Intelligence” community’s usual suspects must be put under oath and asked directly what their role has been in this debacle. The statute of limitations for the offense of lying to Congress is five years.

Clapper, for one, has lied under oath in congressional hearings before, and Republicans foolishly let the statute of limitations expire.

We know that partisan Attorney General Merrick Garland won’t pursue charges against them. The GOP needs to get their lies on record and charge them once, as we all hope, they win back the presidency in 2024. The country can’t afford to let the “intelligence” community’s crimes go unpunished again.

Michael A. Bertolone, M.S. is a past Executive V.P. of the Monroe County (N.Y) Law Enforcement Association, and a freelance writer in Rochester, NY. His eBook The War on Equality: How Equity is Destroying Our Society is available on Amazon.