Last week, FBI agent Kendra Kingsbury was sentenced to 46 months in prison. She stored classified documents from her work as an FBI analyst in her bathroom.
Predictably, comparisons were immediately made to the photos released in connection to the Trump Mar-a-Lago case. The four-year conviction was used to bolster claims that the DOJ really DOES take classified document cases seriously. Some headline writers turned themselves into knots making it ‘REALLY’ a story about Trump.
Here are some headlines that came up in a websearch of her name:
For all their bluster, you don’t have to look very closely to see these cases are nothing alike.
A piece written by Creative Destruction Media explains why Kingsbury is not just a story about an irresponsible staffer taking documents home. It’s not even a story about ‘connections with criminals’, as some media reports referred to it.
This is a clear instance of collaborating with foreign powers that explicitly mean us harm. In this case, jihadis.
But the surgically omitted public facts of the Kingsbury case expose this treatment as biased journalistic malfeasance and far worse. The coverage hurt America by blanketing over the fact that Kingsbury, who never worked in counterterrorism, stole documents related to FBI counterterrorism investigations of violent jihadists, communicated by phone with active terrorism investigation targets, and ran database searches on counterterrorism cases to which she was not assigned.
With her document thefts, self-initiated database searches, and secret telephone communications with FBI-targeted jihadists, Kingsbury exposed the nation to real-harm Islamic terror attack – for years.
Why the 50-year-old divorced mother of two stole Top Secret and Secret counterterrorism documents and what she did with them bears no resemblance whatsoever to any allegation pending against Trump. Trump’s reportedly accidental initial retention of classified documents and later refusal to turn them over falls under very different legal rubrics where no such intentional theft and national security harm is alleged.
But U.S. media should not get away with this misdirection. Kingsbury’s crimes and punishments demand the full telling, decoupled from Trump, to remind Americans that a jihadist threat inside America persists unabated, to deter others from doing what she did, to raise questions about FBI employee vetting, and to demand fuller investigation of background and motives for “see-something-say-something” purposes.
According to court records accessible to all journalists who reported about Kingsbury’s sentencing, investigative FBI analysis of her home and cell phones showed she began communicating with bureau “counterterrorism subjects” in 2000, four years before she actually hired on with the bureau as an analyst, and went on communicating with them through at least 2018 in Missouri and throughout the United States.
The FBI’s investigator “was able to identify other suspicious calls to and from the defendant’s phone numbers dating back to 2000 and prior to her employment with the FBI, including one call that lasted over 38 minutes,” the government’s June 12, 2023 sentencing memorandum notes.– CDM
Let’s see: we’re neck deep in an election cycle where one of the key political points of difference will involve our undefended southern border and the rising number of confirmed terrorists who have been intercepted trying to cross it.
Do you suppose an FBI agent getting convicted of having collaborating with Jihadis — for years! — should have any bearing on the conversation of …
(a) the security of our border
(b) the threat of hostile regimes or
(c) the credibility of the FBI?
It’s amazing how many questions NOT relating to President Donald J. Trump this news could generate interest in — supposing you actually venture beyond the media talking points.
Here are a couple:
- How did they miss this red flag in her hiring process?
- How easy is it for unscrupulous FBI agents to access files they have no business looking at?
- How often is this happening?
- And of course: is this kind of illicit back-channel communications with jihadis signaling some sort of a serious threat that American’s ought to be concerned about?
- Those are ALL more interesting angles than the threadbare ‘get Trump’ narrative on which the media princlings have been glutting themselves.
Sources Cited:
Creative Destruction Media
