They call Walter Giardina a Marine hero. The media portrayed him as a martyr in FBI Director Kash Patel’s recent “purge” of politicized FBI agents.
In my new book, I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To, I call Giardina something else: the tip of the spear in a weaponized FBI campaign to destroy Donald Trump — and a disgraced FBI agent who personally targeted me and my fiancée.
I don’t use “weaponized” lightly. I was there. I lived it. I still feel the cold steel of the handcuffs Giardina, and his gaggle of armed agents, slapped on me at Reagan National Airport. I will never forget the sight of my fiancée being perp-walked out of that same terminal as part of the circus arrest Giardina staged for maximum humiliation – nor will I forgive Giardina for that.
Giardina wasn’t just another FBI agent “doing his job.” He was the Bureau’s go-to guy for virtually every politically loaded, lawfare gambit targeting Trump and his allies.
Giardina’s steep fall started with the single most destructive lie in modern American politics — the Russia Hoax. In 2016, Giardina was reportedly one of the very first FBI officials to review the Steele dossier — a fetid pile of Clinton-funded faux opposition research dressed up as intelligence.
Whistleblowers allege Giardina told colleagues the Steele dossier was “corroborated” even though its most explosive claims were unverified — and later proved false. It was a Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, plain and simple. I believe that Giardina either refused or didn’t want to see that it was a hoax.
Giardina’s internal stamp of credibility for the Steele dossier helped catalyze the FBI’s entire Crossfire Hurricane investigation — the 2016 counterintelligence probe into whether the Trump campaign had coordinated with Russia.
While Crossfire Hurricane started with a whimper, it turned into a big lawfare bang once the FBI and Giardina swallowed Christopher Steele’s Clinton-funded dossier. That credibility stamp was central to justifying the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant used to secretly monitor Trump adviser Carter Page, giving the Bureau a legal pretext to spy on a U.S. citizen tied to the campaign.
From there, the Steele Dossier fed directly into the Mueller Special Counsel, which would ultimately ensnare a very good man and ultimate patriot and warrior, Michael Flynn.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz would blow the lid off this Crossfire Hurricane corruption in 2019. His report exposed 17 major errors and omissions in the FISA applications — from overstating Steele’s credibility, to hiding exculpatory evidence, to concealing that Steele’s own sources had disavowed parts of the dossier.
This wasn’t a good-faith investigation gone bad. It was the tip of the weaponized justice spear — Clinton oppo research laundered through the FBI, with Giardina carrying it into case files that would haunt Trump’s presidency.
Neither Page nor Flynn was ever convicted of any Russia-related crime. Yet, both were saddled with millions in legal fees. This was financial ruin inflicted through lawfare without a single valid charge.
The faux scandal forced Mike’s resignation just weeks into the administration. It was a catastrophic event for the nascent Trump administration – I know, I was there in the White House.
Flynn’s departure would deprive newly elected President Donald Trump of a battle-tested National Security Advisor. Even worse, it saddled him instead with far less capable successors — first the globalist lightweight H.R. McMaster and later the beyond treacherous John Bolton.
The Mueller Witch Hunt
Crossfire Hurricane would metastasize into the two-year Mueller Special Counsel Witch Hunt in 2017. That probe, formally titled the Special Counsel’s Office to Investigate Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, was launched under former FBI Director Robert Mueller, with a sweeping mandate: to examine alleged coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, potential obstruction of justice, and a raft of spinoff matters.
It was a $30 million weaponized lawfare dragnet with 2,800 subpoenas, 500 witnesses, and endless leaks. And what sat at the heart of Mueller’s team? The same Steele Dossier rot. And who was a key member of Mueller’s investigative team? Walter Giardina.
Whistleblowers say Giardina’s conduct inside the Special Counsel’s team raised red flags. They accuse him of wiping his assigned FBI laptop outside official protocol — destroying government records the American people had a right to see. Any internal communications, draft reports, case notes, or classified materials linked to his work thereby vanished forever — gone before the Inspector General or Congress could review them.
If Giardina did indeed intentionally wipe his computer — shades of Hillary Clinton, who infamously deleted thousands of emails from her private server while under federal investigation — he possibly could have been charged with felonious destruction of potential evidence in one of the most politically charged investigations in modern history.
Even as prosecutors admitted behind closed doors that they had no evidence of conspiracy, the circus rolled on. The 448-page Mueller report ultimately conceded what Trump had said from day one: no collusion.
And here’s the stunningly ironic post-script: Internal FBI records show Giardina was given a Special Counsel’s Office award for his work — underscoring the degree to which the Bureau rewarded those at the center of politically charged investigations, even when their actions may have skirted proper record-keeping rules.
