 I don't like cancel culture. But James Comey and Andrew McCabe and Peter Strock and Lisa Page need to be canceled. I don't want to send them to jail, but I think they need to be canceled. I think they need to be banished from polite society. Let's talk about the FBI and how we go about that and then how we deal with this larger question of things. How do we rebuild trust and confidence not just in the FBI but in the political process or in our culture and just as to tee that off the listener or the viewer Colin for $5, which you can do at YouTube. You can pay money and we'll always read your question, but he writes, we know the FBI is corrupt and DOJ is controlled by Biden. Why do we expect anything to change? Congress won't gut the entire federal government. Eli, can we look at what Durham, you had mentioned this before, Durham does not come up with a series of reforms. Zach, do we have some language about what Durham, what he does kind of suggest in terms of reform for the... He ultimately suggests appointing a career position for a nonpartisan FBI agent or a lawyer to challenge FISA applications and every other stage of any investigation where it's a politically sensitive investigation. So that's the one recommendation that he makes. We also have an appetite among Republicans. This is representative Andy Biggs of Arizona who's on the House Judiciary Committee saying defund and dismantle the FBI, which honestly I'm open-minded to just a wholesale like do we need to, is this agency even working at all anymore? But I'm curious what you think of... And we'll also point out that Vivek Ramaswamy who we interviewed a couple of weeks ago was saying that. He said that the FBI should just be dismantled because it is too far gone and rebuilt from the ground up what that means. But yeah, Eli, what should happen specifically to the FBI in order to make it less prone to this kind of behavior and other types of recurring mistakes, it seems. Well, the first thing is, I think, you separate the domestic intelligence function from the FBI from the law enforcement function. So I would take out all the intelligence stuff that's in the FBI. It's a big part of the FBI. It's like Hoover built all that stuff in the 20th century against the Communist Party and the Soviets. It should go to something else, maybe a new agency, but it should not be under the same roof as the cops. Cops and spies should not co-exist because spies break laws and rules and cops enforce them. So as a very basic point, we do not want the same people who are responsible for sort of countering intelligence threats or spying on potential terrorist cells in the same building as the people who are just there to catch fraudsters and stuff like that. And how did 9-11, how did the response to 9-11, including the Patriot Act, but not limited to that, how did that, did that steroid up Jagger Hoover's initial conception of the intelligence gathering and infiltration aspects of the FBI or are we working on that? That's a great point. So in a piece I wrote a few months back for commentary magazine, can the X, there it is, can the FBI be saved from itself and can we be saved from the FBI? I get into the fact that I think it's been missing is that right before 9-11, the FBI came very close to kind of having the sorts of huge reforms that it so desperately needs, but it got out of that because Louis Free, who was the director, resigned in shame after Robert Hansen was caught who went undetected for 20 years as originally a Soviet agent and then a Russian agent and they sort of went after the wrong guy. It's nice to see somebody who made a smooth transition from the Soviet to the Russian side, it's only sad that he was an American FBI agent. Right, so that was a huge blow, but there were several other things. The Wenho Lee case was completely botched. Could you briefly describe what the Wenho Lee case, because that was something that was everywhere for a while and then it disappeared and it is a disturbing, personification of when the FBI gets something really wrong. Yeah, sure, I mean, this is a guy who worked for one of the top secret DOE nuclear labs and he was accused of being a spy for the Chinese and the FBI was absolutely convinced of that. There were a number of, there were a number of stories that were written, I think, in major elite publications, like The New York Times, accusing him of such and then it ended up that they were totally wrong and he sued the FBI and won because they defamed him and even though I think they eventually charged him with something far less than being a part of it. I was like taking a classified or a secured computer home or something like that. Yeah, but it was like, it was far less than whatever. Right, but then there's like the screw up at Waco. I mean, there's all kinds of things that happened in the 1990s that really were very bad for the FBI and it's traditional friends on the Capitol Hill. Usually Republicans like the FBI. So Chuck Grassley at the time kind of gives a speech. He was only in his 80s, so he was oddly vital. A young spry spring chicken was like to say, hey, my daddy loved the FBI, but I at this point don't think I can trust them. And that was in like 2000 or 2001 when he said that. And it's only kind of gotten worse. So what happened is, so Frieze gone and then Bob Mueller comes in to be the FBI director. So once you have a new guy, you're not gonna blame him for everything else. And then the FBI is kind of blamed for not putting connecting the dots on 9-11. Again, though, that's Louis Frieze fault. It's not Bob Mueller's fault. He was only there like a week or two before 9-11 is his first day. And so the problem what they said was that there were too many restrictions. And this is very important to the FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And that's the system that the FBI uses to try to get the court to issue a warrant to spy on American citizens. And so they needed to remove those restrictions and knock down this wall between collecting intelligence and doing the law enforcement work. And which is what they thought that was the problem. What's rarely mentioned is that before 9-11, there were these FISA scandals, which produced all this outrage. The FISA court rebuked members of the FISA, for basically the same kind of thing that we saw with Carter Page. His FBI agents just totally making false BS statements to the court. They were ignoring this time limits on various surveillance warrants that they were continuing to listen to lines when they shouldn't have. Or even in some cases, they were continuing to collect information on phones after the number had gone to somebody else. I mean, all kinds of things like this that were violations of like what they were supposed to do and violations of the court oversight. It looked really bad for a while. It was the reason why we have something that is called the Woods procedure, which is that now, allegedly, for every FISA warrant that you submit to the court, you have to have a separate file at FBI that shows why every fact in that application documented is accurate. So as you have to have, it's sort of another one of these safeguards, another one of these reforms. But what do we learn from Horowitz? What we learn from Horowitz is that the FBI ignores the Woods procedures all the time. And that gets back to the main point of Dorian, which is that if you have an institution that's filled with people who don't have integrity, then you can have all the reforms you want. It's not gonna make a difference. So there has to be something that is also, in addition to, I think removing the intelligence collection from the Bureau, which is a no-brainer. I mean, this is gonna sound strange because normally I don't like the idea. I'm like Reason Magazine and many others and I'm very aware, I don't like cancel culture. But James Comey and Andrew McCabe and Peter Struck and Lisa Page need to be canceled. That I don't wanna send them to jail, but I think they need to be canceled. I think they need to be kind of like, banished from polite society. They should not be asked to appear on prestigious think tank panels or to teach at universities or to appear as law enforcement analysts on CNN. And something like that would show that there are at least some sort of social consequences for FBI leaders who have fallen so far of the mark and have been so, have lacked so much integrity. And then maybe we have a chance to sort of trying to change what appears to be a really, I'm worried about the culture of the FBI at this point because it's not limited to just, I mean, listen, this is an egregious case, but we see it time and again that oftentimes these GMN kind of think there's a law unto themselves and we can't have that. So I'd like to see some social consequences for some of these folks. That was an excerpt from Reasons Livestream with Eli Lake dissecting the Durham report. If you wanna watch the whole conversation, go here. If you wanna watch another excerpt, go here and tune in next Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time because Zach Weismiller and I here will be back here with a great guest. Thanks for watching.