Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Jack Fowler: Two former FBI officials are charged with making false statements about Hunter Biden’s laptop. That’s a headline from The Epoch Times. Two former FBI officials have been charged with making false statements about a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, son of the former president.
According to court documents unsealed on Oct. 23, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, if I’m saying his name right, were each charged with lying to Congress because of false statements they made to a congressional committee investigating how the FBI handled its probe into Hunter Biden, etc., etc.
Victor, what are your unsurprised, I think, thoughts?
Victor Davis Hanson: I know the Left says, well, now the government’s been weaponized. It’s not being weaponized. All of these investigations, whether it’s Ilhan Omar or these FBI agents, either had their origins with the Biden administration and were dropped or were deliberately never prosecuted even though there was culpability there.
And what did these two people allegedly do? They went up to Congress, and they were under oath, and they were asked a series of questions mostly pertaining to two items.
Number one, the FBI had in possession for over a year by the time of the 51 intelligence authorities’ letter, basically, although it was carefully worded, saying that Hunter’s laptop was a product of Russian disinformation. Okay, so they knew that was false. They had already authenticated.
Anybody who looked at the laptop, and there were things on the internet that were leaked out, you knew that it was authentic. Everything about it, the pic— it could not have been doctored. So they deliberately misled about that lie.
And then the second thing is they were working, the FBI, with social media, and especially the New York Post, to suppress that story because they were terrified as the last debate came in 2020 and Joe Biden was not prepared to answer all the incriminating questions that had arisen from that laptop. Mr. Big, Mr. 10%. I always pay dad’s power bills. The checks that were… You know, they were repayment or something. They were income that was disguised as some type of other nontaxable remittance.
So the point was the FBI was working with social media, the old Twitter and Facebook—and Mark Zuckerberg has testified about this—to suppress their role. We know now that I guess his name was James A. Baker or James Baker, the FBI legal counsel, then went to work for a social media company. I guess it was the old Twitter, something like four or five hundred thousand.
So they, at one time, there were eight to 10 FBI agents working with social media. Some of them retired. You get the idea, what’s going on. And they lied about it.
And I don’t think they’re gonna get out of it. I really don’t. But it’s part of the scary thing that the Biden administration and the Left did, and that was take the government and use its powers to discredit opponents of the existing administration in the White House and really warp the… And it had been going on for a long time under James Comey.
We can remember Andrew McCabe’s reference according to [Peter] Strzok and Lisa Page. We can’t let this happen. We have an insurance policy. I guess that was the Steele dossier. So FBI was, I, hate to say it, but it was corrupt.
And under James Comey and Andrew McCabe, James Comey, remember, on 200 and almost 250 occasions went before the House Oversight Committee and just flat out lied and said he didn’t know, he couldn’t remember.
Andrew McCabe said on four occasions to federal investigators he was not the source of these opportunistic leaks that he deliberately did leak. So he was lying, I think on at least one or two they put him under oath.
And then we had Christopher Wray, the third person in this line, and he was going after parents at school board meetings. He was lying about Antifa and said it wasn’t a terrorist organization, it was an ideology. He was going after anti-abortion people.
And then we had Robert Mueller, who was the first in the four of these four despicable FBI directors. He was the one that after he ran the Mueller investigation, he was asked under oath, could you please tell what role the dossier played? Well, the dossier that was leaked prompted his appointment. And Mueller said I don’t know anything about it. That was a complete lie.
Jack Fowler: Oh, you know, Victor, that this institution could be so intentionally, become agents of partisan agents. I don’t know if this is so much partisan, or is it ideological, or is it practical in the sense, like we’ve talked about many times with generals, leading generals, that their goal is to get that, like Baker gets the job at the social media company for an enormous salary.
Is this the goal for the leaders of the FBI to corrupt that institution for partisan purposes to line their own pockets?
Victor Davis Hanson: I think in every FBI, there’s a tendency to want to conform to the perceived politics of the White House, and it really requires a director not to cave in. And we’ll see how Kash Patel resists that pressure.
I think the second thing is they all, and this—I’m saying it’s even true of the military—when you get to a certain level in law enforcement or a certain, like a police chief or an FBI administrator or a one-, two-, three-star general as opposed to a private, captain, colonel, you know, corporal, sergeant, you become left-wing because you deal with people who are left-wing in politics more, in the media more, and you have consultants from universities more. So they’re left-wing.
So it’s kind of like the old Soviet Union. Most of the people in the Communist Party didn’t believe any of it, or they didn’t even know what it was. But to be part of the nomenklatura, they had to say they were members. So that was what the FBI, Lisa Page, Strzok, McCabe, Christopher Wray, they may have registered as RINO Republicans, but they were basically more on the left side of the ledger, and they thought they can ingratiate themselves by using the agency to go after Trump.
The other thing is that we’ve talked about this so much. Trump was a sui generis. He was a special case. They hated him. They hated him because he was an outsider. They hated him because he didn’t look, he didn’t talk, he didn’t act like a normal president.
They hated every aspect of him, and they lost their minds. And you can see those text exchanges between Strzok and Page and other people who appeared. You know, I went to a Walmart, and I could smell the Trump supporters from here, blah, blah, blah.
Jack Fowler: Yeah.
Victor Davis Hanson: It was irrational.
Jack Fowler: Yeah. They didn’t want him to stand by while he diminished the value of elite, elite, elite-hood, you know, elite status.
Victor Davis Hanson: Remember that whole Comey narcissistic egomaniac, megalomaniac performance in 2016 with Hillary Clinton.
Did anybody not believe that she used a home-cooked server in her closet somewhere in her home against the law to transmit State Department messages? And did anybody not believe there was a dozen or two that were classified that was even more dangerous? And did anybody not believe that her devices were under subpoena and she broke them, smashed them, and she cleared out her emails that were subpoenaed?
Why did she do that? Because she knew she could get away with it, and she knew that she was culpable, and she would have lost the election on that alone. And so, the FBI, James Comey basically, I’m putting words in his mouth, but he basically said she’s culpable, but no prosecutor would go after Hillary Clinton.
Jack Fowler: Well, Victor, there’s a related story here. It has to do with France and it’s from Asra Nomani. We talked about Asra last episode. She is a senior editor of investigations at Fox News Digital, and she’s a great investigative reporter. I may have added an extra syllable there to investigative. But here she posted on X and she links to her Fox article. Let me- Here it goes.
In 2020, former FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that Antifa was, “not a group or an organization … but rather, quote, a movement or an ideology,” Well, last weekend in France, I saw their flags in the riots. I was there when Andy Ngo—I’m never sure how to say his name, NGO—built a beat investigating Antifa around the world. I knew there was more to investigate behind the idea that Antifa was simply an ideology. So I spent long nights this past week buried in Telegram and Signal chats, online dispatches, Instagram calls, etc.
Here’s what she’s found. What’s the network behind all this violence in France and other countries? 287—this is Antifa—287 groups and local chapters. 50 were explicitly Antifa and anti-fascist groups. 27 communist, socialist, Trotskyite groups. Just 27 were youth groups out of the 287. 24 labor unions and 11 Palestinian solidarity groups, etc.
Victor, I’ve mentioned this before. You see, the FBI that infiltrated the mafia, then infiltrated biker gangs, you know, cartels, never seems to have infiltrated Antifa, which is one of the worst causes of disruption and violence in the world.
And back to her, I can’t find it now, the statement. Yeah, about Christopher Wray essentially lying that this thing doesn’t exist. It’s just a thought.
He knew what he was doing.
Victor Davis Hanson: He knew what he was doing, and that was what he was supposed to do. He was instructed by the White House, whether it was explicit or implicit, he knew what he was going to do. They really went soft on Antifa, and I think it was partly because they were upper-middle-class, college-educated white kids, and they had a lot of parents that were, you know, connected. And most of the bureaucracy, most of Hollywood, most of the entertainment, most of the universities, most of them, as I said, the media, they’re all left-wing. So it was…
I mean, when you had Joe Biden night after night saying white supremacists are the chief terrorist group, and you came up with that pathetic FBI-aided kidnapping of supposed plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer or something, that was about it. And then they had to creepy reinterpret the Charlottesville that Trump said that, you know, there were good people on both sides. However, I condemn, and they just left all that out and lied.
They were in search of this bogeyman white supremacist, and they didn’t touch Antifa. They didn’t touch BLM. I don’t know why the fraud division of the DOJ did not, because it was across interstate lines, they didn’t go after the three women that were the original founders of BLM because they can’t account for what, $100 million? And they ended up with, not palatial, but upper-middle-class homes in very expensive areas with accoutrements. Why didn’t they go after them?
They all either had ideological or DEI exemptions, and people should remember this because if they come back in power and take the House and Senate, this will be a foretaste of what’s coming in four years if they win the presidency.
And they had that crazy blonde middle-aged blogger who said, I think today, that she wants to keep firing, like a gun at JD Vance. And we had that strange news account, Jack, about Data Republican who had a pretty good reputation. And she says she’s uncovered texts, emails of retired military officers, generals, bureaucrats, wealthy people who are all planning to stage violence and then evoke a reaction.
I had to speak the other night, and somebody asked me that. And I said, I’m not up on conspiracy theories, but I don’t even know if it’s a conspiracy theory. But when you hear people talking about wanting to shoot at the vice president openly on a podcast, then anything’s up for grabs.
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