If you listen to right-wing talk radio, chances are that you’ve probably heard from John Guandolo, a former FBI agent who now bills himself as a counterterrorism consultant. However, most of his commentary is Islamophobic red meat. To hear him talk, virtually every Muslim organization in this country is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, and Muslims moving into certain towns are actually waging jihad. Recently, he has taken to claiming that ISIS, the Taliban, and other Islamist outfits are among those supposedly paying anti-Trump protesters.\
As outrageous as this is, there’s something about Guandolo that is even more outrageous. As I note at Liberal America, his brand is built on a lie.
For some time, Guandolo has claimed that he was pushed out of the FBI in 2008 when he found out it had been taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood and wouldn’t shut up about it. The truth is far less noble and patriotic.
In late 2008, his bosses at the FBI learned that he’d made a list detailing his numerous affairs on the advice of his marriage counselor. He’d not only slept with numerous female colleagues, but also mentioned that he’d slept with someone named “Lori M.” while on the job and feared he’d “jeopardized (a) case” by doing so. The FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility opened an investigation, but Guandolo apparently knew how that would end and resigned.
Things took a new turn in June 2009, just days before former Congressman “Dollar Bill” Jefferson was due to go to trial for corruption. Much of the government’s case was based on recorded conversations with NoVa businesswoman Lori Mody. She’d worn a wire on several meetings with Jefferson in the spring and summer of 2005. However, just before the trial, Mody told the FBI that she’d carried on an affair with Guandolo while he’d posed as her chauffeur during the sting.
The FBI confronted Guandolo soon afterward, and he admitted having the affair. Prosecutors were concerned enough about Guandolo’s behavior that they filed a sealed submission about these disclosures in the event that it could potentially be exculpatory information that had to be shared with the defense. They also opted not to call Mody to the stand, though they relied heavily on her recorded conversations with Jefferson. Partly due to those tapes, Jefferson was convicted in August.
The prosecution’s submission was unsealed in September, on the same day that the judge rejected Jefferson’s motion for a new trial. The defense claimed that they should have had a chance to look further into the Guandolo-Mody affair.
Legal experts were dumbfounded that the FBI didn’t immediately tell prosecutors about Guandolo’s affair with Mody in December. While they believed it was unlikely that it could derail Jefferson’s conviction, they nonetheless thought it raised eyebrows about FBI culture.
This story is not news to any Kossacks from New Orleans. But none of the right-wingers who have sung his praises have bothered to look further into Guandolo’s story, even though this information has been publicly available for almost a decade. Had they done so, they would see that Guandolo was not forced out of the FBI after being stonewalled over his efforts to expose supposed Islamist influence in the bureau. He was pushed out for carrying on an affair with an informant that could have potentially blown apart a major corruption case.