FBI a Great Threat to Democracy: Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson, historian and Hoover Institution and National Review Institute fellow, in New York City on Dec. 9, 2019. The Epoch Times

Following the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, military historian Victor Davis Hanson is calling for the dissolution of the agency, which he calls “one of the great threats to democracy.”

“This idea of a Federal Bureau of Investigation ... its record is too dangerous to democracy,” Hanson said in an interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program following the raid on former President Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida.

“The left always says democracy dies in darkness. Right now, at this moment, the FBI is one of the great threats to democracy.

“It’s a terrible thing to say.”

But Hanson holds his position: The FBI, he says, intervenes in elections, lies under oath, and is a “massive behemoth that is out of control.”

Attacking Trump and Allies

The raid on Mar-a-Lago, according to Hanson, was part of a “series of incidents” against Trump and Trump’s allies that shows the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) to be “out of control.”

“If you want a lurid diary of Joe Biden’s and you’re in the FBI, and you become a retrieval service for the Biden family, you drag out James O'Keefe in his underwear,” Hanson said, referring to the FBI’s search of citizen journalist James O’Keefe’s home in November 2021. The raid was reportedly motivated by O’Keefe’s possession of a diary belonging to Ashley Biden, President Biden’s daughter.

James O'Keefe, founder of Project Veritas Action. Courtesy of Project Veritas

“You go to Roger Stones’s house with a SWAT team. You put Peter Navarro on leg irons. You go to Rudy Giuliani’s office and mess it up,” Hanson said, referring to other instances where the FBI prosecuted or raided Trump allies’ homes.

“So it was part of that series that the FBI and this DOJ are out of control, and they’re trying to send all of us a message: ‘We can do this, and nobody’s going to stop us from doing this and you better make the necessary adjustments,’” Hanson said, echoing Trump and Trump’s allies’ protests that the FBI raid was a political “witch hunt” and at least partly an attempt to stop Trump from running for the presidency in 2024.

Election Interference

Hanson pointed to a disparity between the FBI’s treatment of Trump—who’s said everything short of announcing a 2024 run—and what he observed as the agency’s reluctance to prosecute other establishment figures who were once presidential candidates or likely candidates.

“Didn’t James Comey tell us that when he was investigating Hillary Clinton and he found thousands of emails that were classified, and there was evidence that she took a hammer and broke up her devices and [used the] BleachBit program to bleach it?” Hanson asked rhetorically. “[Comey] basically said, ‘Well, she did things that were wrong, but she’s a candidate—and I’m not going to interfere in [the] election.’”

Then-FBI Director Comey said in July 2016 that the agency would bring no charges against Clinton for mishandling classified information, despite finding evidence that she and her team “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

Then-FBI Director James Comey testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Sept. 28, 2016. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo

In comparison, Hanson pointed to the 2019 impeachment of Trump, when Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to “look into” the firing of Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin for possible connections to then-candidate Joe Biden.

“Joe Biden would be a likely candidate. Therefore, Donald Trump is using his office to preemptively hurt a possible candidate. So this is the locus classicus of everything—and there was not a word,” Hanson said of the impeachment effort.

“They hired a foreign national spy. ... He was basically being paid by Hillary Clinton GPS-DNC pay wallet Perkins Coie,” Hanson said, recounting when federal officials found Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to have likely violated the law when they hired former British spy Christopher Steele, who conducted political opposition research (in the “Steele Dossier”) that alleged collusion between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russian entities.

“They ruined the life of Carter Page. They went after [George] Papadopoulos. They tried to destroy Michael Flynn,” Hanson said, noting people who were affected by the Steele dossier.

“Their leaders—when asked to explain what was going on—lied,” Hanson said. “Andrew McCabe lied to federal investigators. James Comey pled amnesia—he broke the law and he disseminated confidential memos. ... Mueller lied when he said he didn’t know [about] Fusion GPS or the Steel dossier. McCabe admitted he lied four times.”

Yet, before the 2020 election, when the FBI obtained Hunter Biden’s laptop from a computer repair shop owner, and the laptop was found to contain information that could be incriminating to both Joe and Hunter Biden, Hanson said, the agency dismissed it as “Russian disinformation.”

“When you have an agency that has gone rogue and is interfering at the highest level of the country to affect an election ... and the directors of those agencies are willing to alter or leak documents that they shouldn’t ... or lie under oath to federal investigators, or lie to a committee by claiming amnesia ... and they oversee a bureau that will wipe clean phone records that are under subpoena ... or they will not prosecute one person, but they will [prosecute] another ... then it’s institutionalized,” Hanson said. “And you’ve got to get rid of it. I think you do.”

‘Revolutionary Cycle’

According to Hanson, the big picture overshadowing the raid is that the left has perceived Trump as such a threat to the republic that it would use any means against him, putting America in a “revolutionary cycle.”

“We’re in a ’revolutionary cycle'—[as] the left has now said—under the pretext that Donald Trump is so extraordinarily threatening to the republic that it requires any means necessary to end him,” Hanson said, “and therefore we’re going to do things that are revolutionary.”

As a part of the power struggle, Hanson noted, the left has tried “legal” or “institutional” measures.

“Let’s get rid of the filibuster. Let’s pack the court. We’re going to form two more states. We’re going to have a national voting law. We’re going to get rid of the Electoral College,” Hanson said of the left. “None of that’s worked yet.”

Then, Hanson said, come the “extra-legal” means.

“We’ve established a precedent that the House minority leader has no say about the nominations on a committee,” Hanson said, referring to the Jan. 6 committee. “The speaker of the House says ... ‘No one is going to be on the January 6 committee and bother us unless they meet two criteria: They have to impeach Donald Trump, and they have to be politically inert with no future in the Republican Party.’”

“They’re also saying, if we don’t like the State of the Union, we tear it up on national TV. We just tear it up,” Hanson said, referring to the 2020 incident when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tore up Trump’s State of the Union speech on national television.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tears her copy of President Donald Trump's State of the Union address after he delivered it to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington on Feb. 4, 2020. Patrick Semansky/AP Photo

“We’re going to impeach a president, in his first term, the moment he loses the majority in the House,” Hanson said. “We’re going to impeach a president twice. We’re going to impeach a president when he is a private citizen and out of office.”

“And so they have set precedents—that and we’re not even talking about the Supreme Court—we’re going to set precedents that the Senate minority leader is going to go to the Supreme Court doors and threaten by name the Supreme Court justices,” Hanson said, recalling when Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), then the upper chamber’s minority leader, said in 2020 that Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch of the Supreme Court “will pay the price” for unspecified “awful decisions.”

The ‘What’

Within the “revolutionary cycle,” Hanson said, one thing that would be worth seeing is how the Republican Party will react after it takes power in 2022, especially taking into account the unprecedented raid of a former president’s home.

“There better be something good [in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents]—or we’re going to do ‘what’?” Hanson said, emphasizing the interrogative. Regardless, Hanson said, Republicans would need to act if nothing inculpating is found in Mar-a-Lago and if there are no consequences for the parties who approved and conducted the raid.

“And the ‘what’ is interesting,” Hanson said. “Because when the Republicans take the House—and I think they will, in November—are they going to have an article of impeachment of Merrick Garland? I don’t know. Will they impeach Joe Biden?”

“In other words, will Kevin McCarthy say, ‘I don’t like Joe Biden; it’s another one of his line speeches; I’m tearing it up on national TV just to show you that you shouldn’t do this.’

House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) at a press conference in the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 9, 2020. Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times

“Or will he say, ‘Squad members, none of you are going to be in committee? I’m sorry. But Nancy taught me in a good rule that you’re just too troublesome. And you would get in our way. So not any of you get to serve on a congressional committee.’

“And by the way, it’s time to impeach Joe Biden. Take your pick. ... He destroyed federal immigration law. He harassed individual citizens. He didn’t pay tax, we think, on money he gave Hunter, and he didn’t pay income tax on money Hunter gave him. So we’re going to investigate that.

“Or, we’re going to say: and by the way, Joe, we’re going to probably have to impeach you a second time, if the first one doesn’t work in conviction. And we might do it when you were a private citizen. And we might even have to go into one of your three homes.”

“That’s what happened in the Roman Republic. It happened at the end of Athenian democracy,” Hanson said of the revolutionary cycle. “So that’s what the Democrats have started—and we'll see how it plays out.”

The FBI didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.