Ex-FBI unit chief blows whistle on Comey, McCabe over warrantless spying
By John Solomon
JustTheNews.com
Andrew McCabe, left, and
James Comey (Jahi Chikwendiu/Matt McCain, Getty
Images)
The FBI agent who ran the bureau’s warrantless
spying program said Wednesday he warned ex-Director
James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe that the
program was a useless waste of taxpayer money that
needlessly infringed Americans’ civil liberties but
his bosses refused to take action.
Retired Special Agent Bassem Youssef ran the FBI’s
Communications Analysis Unit from late 2004 until
his retirement in late 2014. He told Just the News
he fears the deeply flawed program, which was
started in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, was
allowed to keep going to give Americans a false
sense of security in the war on terror and possibly
to enable inappropriate spying, such as that which
targeted President Trump’s 2016 campaign.
“I have no doubt, or very little doubt, that it was
used for political spying or political espionage,”
Youssef said during a lengthy interview for the
John Solomon Reports podcast.
Youssef confirmed that the FBI performed an audit of
the highly classified program (also known as the NSA
program because it searched call records captured by
the National Security Agency) after Edward Snowden
leaked its existence.
The audit showed that while the program had
generated two moderate leads for counterterrorism
cases, it had not helped thwart dozens of terrorism
attacks as officials had claimed, despite costing
tens of millions of dollars per year.
In fact, the program was generating large numbers of
“false negatives and positives,” Youssef said.
The audit, he added, also showed “there was
collateral damage in terms of civil liberties” of
Americans whose phone records were unnecessarily
searched or who were falsely identified as connected
to terrorism.
Youssef said he discussed the concerns with McCabe
both when McCabe served as assistant director for
counterterrorism and then when he was promoted to
acting executive assistant director, the No. 3 job
in the bureau. But his efforts to pause the program
and reform it so it could work better, cost less,
and infringe less on American privacy fell on deaf
ears, he said.
When McCabe was acting executive assistant director,
“I explained to him again, the model that I was
looking to establish and to let him know that we
were not really getting good support from this
program, and that maybe we should reconsider this
whole thing, unless we can re-tweak it,” Youssef
recalled. “And I remember, he was so adamant about,
we need this program. We're keeping it as this, even
though we're not getting anything out of it.”
Asked why the FBI would keep a program that was not
producing any terrorism leads, Youssef said: “It was
a way to say, you know, it's an insurance policy to
show that we're doing everything we can, when in
fact it wasn't giving us anything of what we hoped
it would get.”
FBI and DOJ declined comment on Wednesday. Lawyers
for Comey and McCabe also did not respond to
requests for comment.
Youssef said that in September 2014, shortly before
he retired, he was invited to brief Comey privately
about his concerns in the director’s office.
“It was a very lengthy briefing,” Youssef recalled.
“He was very interactive. He asked very good
questions. And after I explained everything to him,
his only concern was not that we should shut it
down, or that we should change it so that we can
protect civil liberties … his concern was, do you
have a problem or concerns with the statutory
authority?”
Youssef recalls explaining that while he had no
reservations about the legal authority of the
surveillance, which had to be approved by FISA court
judges, he had serious concerns about both the
“waste of human resources” inherent in the “hundreds
of thousands of agent hours in the field” lost to
the labor-intensive program and the threat the
program posed to civil liberties.
“Unless we change it to a different model,” Youssef
recalls telling Comey, “we're going to continue to
get many false positives and false negatives. And
you can imagine with a false positive, we would be
knocking on people's doors who have nothing to do
with any kind of terrorism act.”
Youssef said he had “no doubt whatsoever” that
McCabe and Comey understood the severity of the
problems. “I gave them the full monty brief,” he
said. “I explained everything to them. They were
fully briefed on the program.”
Youssef first publicly raised concerns about the
warrantless spying program during a 2018 interview
with me at The Hill. But his comments Wednesday went
much further, prompted by the release of a
White House civil liberties board report that
showed the same problems Youssef flagged in 2014 to
Comey and McCabe persisted for nearly five more
years.
Youssef was one of the FBI’s early counterterrorism
success stories, working on major cases like the
World Trade Center bombing and the Khobar Tower
bombings and singled out for praise by former
Director Louis Freeh. But after the Sept. 11, 2001
attacks, he was sidelined in a Human Resources
dispute with bosses, sued the FBI, and eventually
was restored as a supervisor running the CAU unit
that oversaw the warrantless spying program.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that even
after the Obama-era audit flagged serious concerns,
the FBI kept operating the program until President
Trump shut it down in 2019. Between 2015 and 2019
the program only generated two more leads, the
newspaper reported, citing the White House report.
“That's probably what grieves me more than
anything,” Youssef said. “Here we have a program
that was not doing what it should. It was leaked.
And the Obama administration very quickly appointed
a privacy and civil liberties board to look into
this. And we were mandated to give, we called it the
options paper. And so my option was really the one
that would give us the best intelligence at the
lowest cost while minimizing the false positive and
false negative intelligence. And so it makes perfect
sense that this would be adopted. And yet, the
director basically didn't do anything with it.”
Youssef said he has developed deep concerns since
his retirement that the NSA program may have been
abused, like the FISA warrants, during the Russia
collusion probe of the Trump campaign that included
a highly flawed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
warrant against Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
"There is no doubt in my mind now, looking at the
backdrop and the information that has come up since
2016 in the media, that the abuses were rampant,” he
said, “and not just for the FISA process, the FISA
program, but for other programs that were used to
spy on the Trump campaign. That to me is almost the
obvious conclusion of what I've seen.
There is “a high probability that that program was used to handpick selected targeted numbers for purposes other than fighting terrorism,” Youssef believes. “It’s kind of a mirror image of the FISA abuses on Carter Page. As you know, it came out much later that the FISA process was for counterintelligence and counterterrorism purposes only. That was not what they used it for on Carter Page. And so it's sort of the same type of situation with this other program. I have no doubt, or very little doubt that it was used for political spying or political espionage.”