Why There's No James Kallstrom To Manage This Crisis

The other day, I mentioned James Kallstrom, the FBI manager who quickly became the face of the investigation into the July 17, 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800. He represents a textbook execution of crisis management: at first, there were equal competing theories of the disaster, ranging from a terrorist bomb to a misfired US antiaircraft missile.

Kallstrom was able to establish himself as a credible central figure who made information available no matter which way it led, and by making himself the best single source, he was able to establish the consensus that the explosion was the result of combustible vapor in a fuel tank, ignited by an electrical short circuit. As a result, other competing theories remain at the fringe.

While TWA 800 was unquestionably a corporate crisis for TWA, which had already declared bankruptcy the year before, it was also a crisis, and probably a bigger one, for the FBI, whose credibility had been badly damaged by the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992 and the Waco massacre the following year.

Kallstrom's performace gave the FBI a brief respite from bad publicity, but it's woth pointing out that only ten days after the Juy 17 TWA 800 disaster, the Atlanta Olympic bombing took place on July 27, which led to the FBI wrongly identifying Richard Jewell, a security guard who actually alerted the crowd to the bomb, as the suspect. One Kallstrom clearly wasn't, and isn't, enough to rescue a corrupted FBI.

And as I've been saying, the one figure who's missing from the current crisis -- a crisis not just for the FBI and the Secret Service, but for the Biden administration, which is in lugubrious collapse, and the federal intelligence and law enforcement communities in general -- is someone of Kallstrom's character and integrity. As a result, we're getting piecemeal reports from leaks by frustrated agents lower down in the orgainizations, for instance:

Thomas Matthew Crooks, who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump, made his final search for pornography before the Pennsylvania rally shooting last weekend, according to a new report. A senior law enforcement official told the Daily Beast that the FBI found this… pic.twitter.com/LuFRIaSwJx

— josette caruso (@josettecaruso) July 20, 2024

No doubt in following days we'll see some of these claims retracted or contradicted, while other new ones will arise willy-nilly, precisely because the FBI currently has no James Kallstrom, when it badly needs one. Kallstrom had one factor working for him in addition to his clear aura of integrity: the FBI didn't have a dog in that fight. The competing theories involved terrorists, none of whom worked for the FBI, or possibly the US Navy, which might have had an antiaircraft missile fire by mistake from a nearby destroyer, but the Navy didn't work for the FBI, either.

In contrast, the agencies involved in the Butler assassination attempt, the FBI, Homeland Security, and the Secret Service, are all closely associated organs of state security, and they have an incentive to cover for each other. The FBI could tolerate a Kallstrom, even if he had the potential to be a loose cannon, because no matter which way he got loose, it couldn't hurt the FBI, and on balance, whatever he came up with, it could only make the FBI look good.

In the Butler assassination attempt, no matter which way the investigation goes, the FBI is not going to look good, and if anything, the Secret Service and Homeland Security will only look worse. So we have Missouri Repulican Sen Hawley commenting on the secret briefings the FBI and Secret Service are providing to insiders:

I mean, let’s be honest, the Secret Service is out there and the FBI now doing these secret calls, these behind-the-scenes briefings, where, by the way, they don’t really answer questions. They limited — strictly limited the number of questions. The Secret Service director herself did not actually brief. She was present on the call, but didn’t do hardly any briefing.

When she did try to answer a question or two, it did not go well. She was not well-prepared. This needs to be done in public, bottom line. We need public hearings. We need a full and thorough investigation.

Neil, what we know about this is that there were 62 minutes, 62, between the time that the Secret Service identified the shooter as a person of interest, somebody acting suspiciously, and the time he started firing shots at the president.

I mean, what in the world is going on? We have got to find out.

At this point, the crisis is out of control. Biden has retreated to a Delaware basement and likely has little knowledge of what's going on. He could rescue the crisis, and potentially even his candidacy, by firing Secret Service Director Cheatle and appointing a Kallstrom-like figure to take over and make the facts public whichever way they fall -- because, realisically speaking, Joe doesn't have much of a future no matter what happens now.

Instead, we're starting to get the predictable second-gunman theories, and there's really no credible body of reliable information to say whether they're reasonable or not. The crisis is more than just the administration, it's going to metastisize into the deep state, and the only way to control it, which is the only way to control any crisis, is to have a strong honest-broker spokesman to provide credible information as soon as it's available. That's the one thing the deep state can't do.