Does the U.S. State Department Have a Far-Right Extremist Problem?
American Nazis outside the State Dept
The U.S. Department of State has had three employees caught up in far-right white-supremacist activities - in under three weeks.
Federico Klein, a Trump political appointee at State, was arrested by the FBI in connection with his alleged participation in the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Fritz Berggren, a Foreign Service officer, was yanked from his embassy posting in Bahrain after he issued a slew of racist social media rants.
Senior Diplomatic Security special agent Dominic Sabruno was summarily pulled from Kabul after posting a series of pro-Trump, racist diatribes over his social media accounts.
In 2019, Department employee Matthew Gebert was suspended for openly espousing neo-Nazi views on social media and in other fora.
What gives? Foggy Bottom a nest of neo-Nazis? Nietzschean Übermensch-besotted crypto-storm troopers fixated on a "Man in the High Castle" vision of America?
Perish the thought. Don't forget, the GOP's sainted Joe McCarthy asserted that "the State Department is infested with communists." And that great globalist Jesse Helms picked up where McCarthy left off, pulling all the stops to kneecap the State Department. And along came Donald Trump, who did all he could to give the coup de grace to the bastion of the "deep state."
In my 23 years as a Foreign Service officer, I seldom knew the political leanings of my colleagues, nor they mine. It's all part of service discipline. We serve the mission, that being our country and the American people. Confine political beliefs to home and the ballot box. There has always been an assumption that State's brainiac work force leans left, but, in truth, no one knows for sure. Centrist is definitely a good bet. Many of my Foreign Service retiree friends are Republicans; many are Democrats; many, perhaps most, are independents. A couple are even Trumpers. In this respect, I believe the Department is fairly representative of America at large.
So, what's going on suddenly with at least four cases of agitated falangists brazenly brandishing the fascist salute in the bowels of the USG's reputed hotbed of lefty-save-the-whales/embrace-the-world's-tired, poor, huddled-masses-yearning-to-breathe-free pinstriped suited Ivy Leaguers?
Let's examine the malefactors in question --
Federico "Freddy" Klein, 42, has a long rap sheet with law enforcement from the '90s onward that includes assault, robbery, theft, public drunkenness, possession of marijuana and many traffic violations. Klein was the proverbial black sheep in an otherwise highly respected family. Both parents were economists - his mother with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative; his Argentinian father with the Inter-American Development Bank. Federico, Jr. was one of those individuals who just couldn't find his groove in life - what Donald Trump liked to call "losers." He worked on political campaigns for Republican candidates from 2008 through 2016. A minor agitprop in the 2016 Trump drang nach Washington, he finagled a do-nothing sinecure in the State Department's Latin America bureau with a $66k salary attached. True to his screw-up ways, Klein was subsequently transferred to processing Freedom of Information requests, the equivalent of a Soviet Moscow political commissar being exiled to a turnip kolkhoz in Yakutsk oblast. A former supervisor told me, "He was deeply unimpressive. No indication of real knowledge, interest or even significant intelligence."
The Pentagon issued him a top secret clearance in 2014, renewed by State in 2019, despite his arrests and indictments, which certainly surfaced during his background investigations. Any routine job applicant would have been rejected. Why was Klein approved? Politics, of course. Remember Jared "Let's Set Up a Back Channel Comrade Kislyak" Kushner? And so many more in the Trump Crime Empire? The White House rammed Klein's appointment through in 2017 - a reward for one thuggy, yet loyal, campaign brownshirt.
Klein, arrested by the FBI, is facing seriously hard prison time for being in the vanguard of the assault on the Capitol - while still an employee with the State Department and holding a top secret clearance. And there's no longer a corrupt president in place to pardon him.
Fritz Berggren is a Foreign Service officer - the only FSO (admin) in this menagerie of wannabe Sturmbannführers. "The goal of the Left is to destroy blood and faith so that (Marxist) religion alone becomes master and enslaver of all," blogged Fritz. "Europeans must reclaim their blood and faith, just as Blacks are proud and hispanics have very strong blood identity organizations." Add to this the usual medieval drivel about "the Jews murdered Christ." Apart from orthographicide, Fritzy seems hell-bent on committing career suicide. He was recently pulled from his embassy posting in Bahrain and sent packing back to DC to work in a dead-end job processing special visas for Afghans, pending no doubt an investigation leading to either pulling of his security clearance and dismissal or assignment to the mail room in the expectation he will get the message and quit.
The dumbest of this lot, imho, is Dominic Sabruno. After decades of service, Diplomatic Security special agent Sabruno reached the top rank of the Foreign Service. Put in charge of security at the exceedingly sensitive and vulnerable Embassy Kabul, Sabruno, clearly in a fit of exceptional lucidity and sound judgment, blogged the following:
"Sad day in American history. A fraudulent election that ushered in a senile idiot and a woman that claims to be black, but she's not. Your (sic) witnessing the death of America as we know it and just standby as all our freedoms are eroded."
A Diplomatic Security special agent who had worked with Sabruno told me he was a "toxic bully" with few friends now to come to his aid.
Sabruno is now "walking the halls," to use State Department vernacular. I expect he's scouting good retirement property in some all-white gated community in Florida.
The first State Department far-righter with a big mouth and small brain to make the headlines recently was Matthew Gebert. A presidential management intern who in 2013 landed a civil service job focusing on energy at State, Gebert stated in "The Fatherland" podcast in 2015, "We need a country founded for white people with a nuclear deterrent. And you watch how the world trembles." Gebert hosted white supremacy events in his home and participated in the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, VA. State suspended him in 2019. It's unclear what his current status is.
So, two key questions come to my mind: 1) how do such extremists obtain and retain security clearances? and 2) does the State Department have its own serious problem of far-right extremists within its ranks?
In the case of Federico Klein, DS certainly had all the goods on him. Assault. Theft. Robbery. Drug possession. Disorderly conduct. Any of these would have sunk the candidacy of any other routine job applicant. State clearly was rolled on this one. Nonetheless, where were the protests, even resignations among career folks, particularly when his clearance was renewed in 2019? There needs to be an investigation.
That goes as well for Berggren, Sabruno and Gebert. Were pre-employment extremist activities known? If not, why not? And how was it they were cleared after they disseminated their extremist, anti-government views?
Last October, former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Eliot Engel called upon the department to explain whether it had sufficient background check procedures to screen out individuals with ties to white supremacist and other hate groups.
Nahal Toosi reports in POLITICO on the Berggren case,
There are rules that govern diplomats’ on- and off-duty behavior that could be grounds for punishment or dismissal in similar instances — rules that can differ based on whether a person is serving overseas or in the United States. But the federal government, for First Amendment reasons, is not supposed to dictate its employees’ religious views.
According to a former State Department attorney, if Berggren can show that he never used work time or U.S. government equipment to craft his writings and recordings, he might fall in a gray area in terms of whether or how the department could discipline him.
In my experience, when a trouble-making employee cannot be fired, State will pull their clearances and assign them literally to the mail room or other mind-numbing, career-killing job, invariably forcing the employee to resign in disgust.
Does the State Department therefore have a white supremacist-right extremist problem as do the military and law enforcement?
"I think the Department certainly has its share of far-right, second amendment loving folks who are unable to contain their personal agendas," a DS special agent told me. "I find it remarkable that I worked with some of these people that are now publicly exposed, but I am sure there are dozens more who are just as bad. Not worrying about being held accountable by a weak Department system of discipline does not help stop this behavior."
"Neo-Nazis are not all shaved heads and tattoos, they are hiding in plain sight," observed Matthew Gebert's former boss.
Compared with the military services and law enforcement agencies, known cases of white supremacist and far-right employees at State are likely few. Yet, based on recent cases, there nonetheless needs to be a review.
Central to these cases is the fact that they coincided with Trump's term in office. The embattled ex-president acted as weed-grow to the American neo-Nazi scene. Employees who normally knew well enough to keep their rancid political views to themselves, if only to preserve their careers, suddenly felt free to emerge from the intellectual toxic waste pool they inhabited to speak out.
Well, now it's time to pay the piper.