Show Notes
Former FBI agent and terrorism expert Kenneth Strange says that the agency’s misguided political priorities likely caused it to bungle the New Year’s terror attack in New Orleans. Appearing on the latest episode of the Drill Down podcast, Strange said that an FBI fully devoted to its core mission could have prevented the attack.
“Just imagine if they had had the resources that had been siphoned off to the J6 investigation, or to surveillance of parents at school board meetings, or of Catholics that wanted to go to Latin Mass and all of that,” Strange told co-hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers. “If those resources were made available, then I think what happened in New Orleans might have ended up much, much differently.”
“That’s a pretty startling thing to say,” Schweizer responds. “I mean, from somebody who’s been on the inside … the core things that they are supposed to do, know, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, organized crime, they’ve shifted away from that, and New Orleans could have theoretically been prevented had they not veered off in these other directions.”
That’s exactly what Strange was saying. Strange, who spent time on the Joint Terrorism Task Force, pointed to the FBI’s early response to the New Orleans attack as indicative of an agency that has lost its way. The FBI’s assistant special agent in charge (ASAC) initially denied the New Year’s shooting and truck-ramming was being treated as a terrorist attack, despite the suspect’s having a visible ISIS flag on his vehicle. “The ASAC was overwhelmed,” Strange tells the hosts, and should never have gone out to the press conference. The killer, Strange says, was clearly an ISIS-inspired, self-radicalized individual “whose life was spinning out of control. This makes people like him vulnerable to radicalization,” Strange said.
In his new book, A Cop’s Son, Strange recalls tracking jihadists, Mexican cartels, and international perpetrators of fraud. He is not impressed by the FBI’s handling of any of the recent high-profile incidents, going back to January 6, 2021, and shares his thoughts on re-making the FBI from the ground up by listening to the “brick agents” in the offices and getting rid of the political, Deep State animals that have been running it.
The Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas, staged in front of a Trump-owned building there, Strange believes, was a “a call for help. It’s a mental illness problem. And maybe our veterans can benefit from changes that would go forward due to that incident,” he says.
The timing of the two recent attacks, lining up with the formal congressional vote certification on Jan. 6, four years to the day from the Capitol riot when Joe Biden’s election victory was certified, made media comparisons inevitable. But Strange doubts the characterization of Jan 6the event as an “insurrection,” as it has been portrayed in the mainstream media and by Democratic partisans. “It was kind of a chaotic series of events, some people trespassing, some people assaulting other people, but not what the left makes it out to be,” he responds.
But it’s the actions of the FBI, and the Justice department that controls it, that concerns him most.
He focuses on the story of Ray Epps, who was a participant during the Jan. 6th riot and has been credibly accused of having been an FBI asset. “When you look at Ray Epps, he’s out there and he’s basically causing entrapment, getting people to trespass and break the law. And he himself is trespassing, yet nothing happens to him. He appears before this tribunal and they chastise him and say, don’t do it again. But (other) people like him ended up in prison for one or two years. So, they’re just not transparent. That’s the bottom line,” he says.
“Do I think the Bureau is covering up or our government is covering up? Yes, yes, I do. I have a number of questions. One of them is about this pipe bomber. This fella that’s a pipe bomber that appears at the side of a building and all of a sudden, he’s gone. But nobody’s interested in finding out what his role was during January 6th,” he says.
Strange recalls a case he worked back in the 1990s while on the JTTF. “In Newark, we had identified a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian who emigrated to the United States and joined the military just prior to the first Gulf War. This person reached out to another country and said that he and his group would be very happy to assassinate [President George H.W.] Bush… So, of course, we got right on top of that. And in addition, we had a Secret Service agent in our group. So of course we had the nexus to work the case. What the FBI does best is to pour manpower and resources into these cases, known as ‘specials.’ In the end, we thwarted this individual, we arrested him,” Strange recalls.
“And I’m going to say one other thing… Where was Director (Christopher) Wray when all this was going on? And I ask that because I know that he was doing a ‘farewell tour’ right around Christmas and New Year’s Eve. He was visiting Western field offices, I believe he was in Colorado, and then visiting a resident agency in Cheyenne, Wyoming,” he says.
“Now I’ve been to that agency, that office, it’s a four-man office! What is the director doing there just days before New Year’s Eve? You that the jihadists focus on special dates such as New Year’s Eve, but the director is out there? It didn’t make sense, and I don’t understand it,” Strange wonders.
Schweizer quips, “I wonder if Christopher Wray is a skier?”
