Happy New Year and welcome to the first issue of the 2025 Regan Revolution! Your semi-regular newsletter about the FBI, police, crime, and occasionally - my crime fiction. Last year we published 27 articles on timely stories in the news, and I will shoot for approximately the same number in 2025.
With all the recent drama in the media over Kash Patel as President-elect Trump’s FBI Director designee, (See my December 9th article,) I thought I would give you my thoughts on former FBI Directors from the modern era - roughly 1978 to the present. This is strictly my opinions as a 25-year FBI veteran who served in every role from street agent to special agent in charge of an FBI field office, including two tours at FBI Headquarters and a detail assignment as the DOJ/FBI representative to the National Security Council (NSC) at the White House for two years during the George W. Bush administration.
This review only includes Directors who served during the same timeframe as I did, including three Directors I did not personally serve under, but whose tenure was close enough in time to my service that I saw the results of their directorships through an informed lens. It does not include interim Directors, of which there were several in-between appointed Directors.
This started out as a single issue but I soon decided it would be too long to publish as is. Instead, I will publish it over a series of weeks in three or four segments.
JAMES COMEY
Arguably, James Comey did more repetitional damage to the FBI during his tenure than any Director since the shortcomings of J. Edgar Hoover. (Which to be fair, should be a separate article because Hoover’s overall contributions to building the FBI from the ground up far outweigh his shortcomings. Which were substantial.)
Comey started his tenure by trying to distance himself from Robert Mueller (see a follow on article soon.) Comey was manipulative, and exploited what he perceived to be antipathy among street agents to Director Mueller’s style of leadership. Mueller was a former combat Marine, and demanded loyalty to him and the mission. (Much more in that future article.)
During one of Comey’s first addresses to “the troops,” he told them that among the most important things he needed was for them to “sleep.” This was a shot at Mueller’s style of arriving at FBI Headquarters at six a.m. for briefings, and not leaving until well after dark. He demanded the same work ethic from his agents, especially those in senior leadership. Comey tweaked the transfer policy and the promotion system to make them (wrongly in my opinion,) more agent-friendly, knowing it would draw a sharp distinction between him and his predecessor.
These were the least of Comey’s sins in my opinion. He would distinguish himself as likely the worst FBI Director in modern history through his decision-making in the Mid Year Exam (MYE - the Hillary Clinton emails,) and Crossfire Hurricane (CH - Russia Collusion,) investigations.
Recall that Comey famously held a press conference in July of 2016 to exonerate Hillary Clinton of a list of felonies he cataloged, before claiming that “no reasonable prosecutor” would pursue them. The problem was, as a law enforcement officer, he never checked with a prosecutor, reasonable otherwise, for an opinion on the same. Several reasonable former prosecutors immediately weighed in they would have pursued charges.
Then, only days before the 2016 election, Comey sent a letter to Congress re-opening the Clinton email investigation because of new Clinton-related email information found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. (Weiner was the husband of Huma Abedin - one of Clinton’s closest advisors.)
The letter was a two-for for Comey. First it was emblematic of his self righteous attitude. He claimed he had promised to inform Congress of any changes to the investigation, thus the letter was fulfilling that promise. Considering the short time it took to resolve the Weiner issue, mere days, Congressional notification could have waited. Congress’s oversight function shouldn’t impact time sensitive, on-going investigations.
Especially since he had to know the letter would leak, potentially impacting the election. In immutable Comey fashion, he considered the fact he pissed off both conservatives for giving Clinton a pass on the email investigation, and liberals for potentially costing Clinton the election, validation of his genius decision-making.
The second line of Comey logic was that just as in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation (below,) everybody, especially his courtier of seventh floor princes, knew Clinton was going to win. Thus, with MYE they had to be just aggressive enough with the investigation to give her cover, (“Hey, the FBI investigated and exonerated me,”) but not too aggressive as to expose a whitewash. (And suffer her wrath when she won. See FBI Lawyer Lisa Page’s text to Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok, also her paramour, before he interviewed Clinton: “Don’t go in loaded for bear, she might be our boss someday.”)
Crossfire Hurricane was every bit the “insurance policy” Strzok said it was in another text message to Lisa Page. Even IF anybody thought there was any substance to the allegations of Australian Ambassador Alexander Downer about George Papadopoulos having Trump “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, (there wasn’t, Downer misconstrued what PappaD said in their oddly arranged meeting,) it didn’t justify the massive CH investigation that followed.
Under normal circumstances (as in not involving Donald Trump,) a simple interview of PappaD could have resolved the matter. Recall, what PappaD allegedly claimed as wrongly heard by Downer, should have made him a witness, not one of four sub-file subjects in the CH investigation.
There were so many off ramps the FBI could have taken in the faulty investigation, starting with the still secret and highly likely bogus foreign intelligence that allegedly prompted Comey to exonerate Clinton, that should have led to closing it. The Steele Dossier was such nonsense the Washington press corps wouldn’t even run with it for months. Even as the highly paid FBI informant Christopher Steele was begging them to. Until Comey himself set the “news hook” by briefing President-elect Trump about the dossier in January of 2017. Very convenient.
Also in January, the FBI learned directly from Steele’s primary sub-source that the dossier was bogus and consisted of “bar talk over beers with friends.” Not only did the FBI keep the investigation going, they continued to seek FISA warrants on former Trump advisor Carter Page, and they turned Steele’s sub-source into their own source, allegedly paying him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Again, as in Mid Year Exam, much of what was going on during Crossfire Hurricane was never supposed to see the light of day both because it was classified, and because everybody knew Clinton was going to win. As Director, Comey owned all of this.
Then, after Trump won, there was Comey’s famous “we’ll send a couple of guys over to the White House” decision to interview National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Not only had Flynn not committed any crimes by talking with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after the election, he was arguably doing his job. Just as with his Clinton exoneration speech, Comey’s sending FBI agents (Strzok was one of them) to the White House to do interviews in a criminal investigation (Flynn was one of the CH sub-file subjects,) violated all DOJ norms. Which Comey always believed his superior intellect gave him license to do.
The last example I’ll note, though there were others, was his decision to announce in March of 2017, during an open Congressional hearing, that the Trump administration was under a counterintelligence investigation. Not acknowledging any investigation is new-agent-at-the-FBI Academy stuff. Mentioning “counterintelligence” is next level stupid.
See, the purpose of a counterintelligence investigation is to determine if the subjects are an intelligence threat to the United States. Even if there’s nothing to it, it lets the subjects of such investigations know they are under investigation, and to stop whatever suspicious activity they are engaged in.
Comey knew this type of allegation would lead to a special counsel, which would handcuff the president. Both of course happened. Whether he knew it would lead to his being fired by Trump in May of 2017, only he knows.
Comey’s legacy was that several of his senior advisors were fired, or left in disgrace before they could be fired including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (fired), Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok (fired), General Counsel James Baker (resigned), and Associate General Counsel Lisa Page (resigned). In Part II, I’ll review three additional modern FBI Directors from my perspective.
What I’m Working On:
Book 2 in the CJ Hawk - FBI Thriller Series, ZULU CENTER, dropped on December 9th. A special thanks to everyone who has bought an eBook, paperback, or downloaded it on Kindle Unlimited. (In production is the Audiobook version which will be available in a few months.) I’m not supposed to have favorites, but if I did, this book would be it. (So far!)
Next up is Book 3 in the CJ Hawk - FBI Thriller series, WASHINGTON FIELD. I’m nearly done with the first draft, but final edits and timing for release will be dictated by the FBI’s Pre-publication Review Unit who must review all of my FBI-related books - even fiction.
Also, I have a nice outline in place for Book 3 in the Detective Kiki Diaz Thriller Series, titled McLEAN STATION. Since it does not have to go through pre-publication review, look for it to probably come out first, sometime in 2025.
Lastly, I’m working on something really exciting that will start sometime in 2026. I can’t disclose too many details, but look for something that blends thrilling FBI stories with historical fiction.
You can follow everything I’m working on at www.fxregan.com.
Until next time,
F.X.
There can be no doubt that for a million reasons Comey was the worst Director in FBI history. Meanwhile, Inspector Clouseau could have done a better job than Wray but that's another post. As the daughter of an Agent who worked in Hoover's FBI I could not agree more that while he certainly had his "issues" he revolutionized modern day law enforcement. We desperately need to get back to that rigor when it comes to crime fighting.
Repetitional? I think you meant reputational.