By Daniel Greenfield February 1, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog
Charles McGonigal, who headed the FBI’s counterintelligence operation in New
York, before being arrested for working for a sanctioned Russiagate
oligarch and accepting $225,000 in cash from a former Albanian agent
which he allegedly kept wrapped in rubber bands at a small Brooklyn
apartment where he spent time with his mistress, is another chapter in a
familiar story.
It’s
a continuation of the sleazy affair between the FBI’s Peter Strzok and
Lisa Page, which helped unwind Russiagate, or the FBI’s Robert Hanssen,
who spent much of the Cold War peddling our national secrets to the
Russians and hoarded cash while visiting strip clubs.
The FBI
missed McGonigal, allegedly turned in by his mistress, much as it missed
Hanssen until it had exhausted every other possible alternative.
Russiagate has ushered in the exposure of a parade of FBI officials,
McGonigal, Strzok, McCabe, whose violations had gone unnoticed.
At
the bottom of it all, the tawdriness of McGonigal hooking up in an FBI
vehicle and dispatching agents to drive his mistress around, or Hanssen
sharing nude photos of his wife in chat rooms, was the smallness of the
men in contrast to the seriousness of their responsibilities. Under the
suits and ties are men who know all too well the measure of their
unworthiness. They sell out their country to afford a nicer house, a
boat or a mistress. They have affairs and lie about them.
The
Russians don’t have to go to any great lengths to compromise them
because they have already compromised themselves. They go through the
facades of church or politics, but they don’t really believe in
anything. Hanssen was outwardly churchgoing, but dove into the sewer.
McGonigal’s mistress describes him as “apolitical” and that’s probably
true. Even the anti-Trump antics of the Russiagaters was not born out of
real passion, but of a career establishment.
Over much of a
century, we have built a massive establishment that consumes enormous
resources, wields vast powers, but, except when the Left seizes the
wheel, is on autopilot.
The national security manned by men like
McGonigal, McCabe and Strzok, or, for that matter Comey and Wray, is an
institutional entity, not a patriotic enterprise. It has no more
affinity for America than it does any other country. Its men and women
do their jobs, which are hazardous to the mind and the soul, until the
task of dealing with the worst of humanity, traitors, drug dealers, con
artists and government officials, decays their morals and convinces them
that there is no real right and wrong, that the world just consists of
those who take what they can get.
And so they start taking too.
The
shady packets of hundred dollar bills handled by McGonigal and Hanssen
resemble how the criminals they came after handled things. The great men
of the FBI descended to the level of those they had hunted and turned
to the country’s enemies to finance their lifestyles.
Patriots
are not infallible or always moral, but they possess a sense of higher
duty, not just to an institution like the FBI, but to the nation, and an
understanding of why the war matters.
Men and women who grow
morally calloused, who have no particular allegiance or sense of why
it’s important that America win and our enemies lose, will fall sooner
or later. Their time in the FBI just provides them with the information
and skills to effectively sell out their country.
The FBI, like most of our government’s institutions, is suffering from a moral crisis of patriotism.
Our
national security state, like our military, exists for reasons that are
not meaningfully clarified. The long twilight struggle against
Communism gave way to national tensions with geopolitical rivals like
China and Russia, to a more ambiguous battle against Islamic terrorism,
in which our leaders are unwilling to name the enemy or define the
stakes. When there’s no moral clarity at the top, how can there be any
moral clarity within the FBI, the CIA or the military?
After
9/11, the FBI was tasked with fighting Islamic terrorism, but without
ever calling it such. Its leaders see Chinese, Russian, Qatari and other
enemy nations bribing our elected officials right and left, taking over
our economic and educational infrastructure, while they can do nothing
about it. Can they really be blamed for falling into cynicism about
their mission?
Like many failed states, we’ve become rotted
through with cynicism and corruption. No matter what the FBI officials,
reporters or politicians say to justify the Biden family’s dealings in
public, privately they become more convinced than ever that there’s no
such thing as ethics or integrity.
To live and work in D.C. for a decade while still retaining your principles is all but impossible.
And
that is why we have the government that we do. The FBI is no worse than
any other part of it, but its people can cause a lot more damage by
spying, by targeting political opponents and by destroying the public’s
trust in another celebrated institution. The trouble with it, as with
the whole government, is that it doesn’t stand for anything larger than
punching the clock.
Patriotism doesn’t mean a blind conviction
that there is nothing wrong with America, but the sense of mission that
the country and its people matter above all else in the world.
Men and women who don’t believe that have no place in the government.
The
FBI’s real failure isn’t national security, it’s national morality. And
it’s a systemic national failure. The essence of any organization, from
the local fast food joint to a military capable of striking any place
in the world, is morale. The greater the individual responsibility of
any member of an organization, the greater his morale should be. The
measure of a rotten organization is that the sense of duty actually
decreases the higher up you go.
That is how you end up with a
military whose ground forces risk death but whose generals push
wokeness. Or police officers who respond to shootings but whose leaders
take a knee to BLM rioters. Eventually the soldiers, like Russia’s
troops, find ways to avoid the fighting, and the officers, like those in
Uvalde, refuse to go into a situation where they might be killed.
The
fundamental question is whether America is worth fighting for. The FBI
leadership has answered in its own way that it’s not. Everything else
follows from that. Like the rest of our society, it has lost its way,
its sense of what matters and why those things matter.
Our
government is a massive system filled with small men who never rise to
the moment because they don’t see that it’s there. They fall for every
woke scam that travels across the D.C. cocktail party circuit, taking a
knee for BLM, studying “white rage”, and endorsing the transgender
movement, because they don’t really believe in anything. Certainly not
in America.
America desperately needs a government that believes
in it, whose men and women can rise above the pettiness to take risks
and make sacrifices for something more than themselves. That’s something
we ask of the 18-year-olds sent to fight and die on foreign soil, but
we don’t ever ask it of the men wearing suits and earning six figures in
Washington D.C.
It’s time that changed.
National security
without patriotism is just a perpetual abuse of power. Men with power,
but no patriotism, are only one offer away from treason. And we should
not be surprised when it happens. We will either have a government of
patriots or a government of tyrants and traitors.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
By Rich Kozlovich 
