Episode 969: Wayne Barnes on “A Traitor in the FBI”
Newt's World
Gingrich 360
4.6 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 19 April 2026
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Newt talks with former FBI counterintelligence special agent Wayne Barnes, whose 29-year career included working KGB espionage, running double agents, recruiting hostile intelligence officers, and debriefing Cold War defectors before becoming a private investigator, signature expert, and specialist in recovering stolen impressionist paintings. Barnes recounts his path from inner-city Philadelphia through Penn State and Villanova Law into the FBI, where high scores on a language aptitude test led to Romanian training in Monterey and a Washington Field Office posting focused on Eastern Bloc counterintelligence. Barnes’ book, “A Traitor in the FBI: The Hunt for a Russian Mole,” documents his investigation to uncover an internal FBI spy for the Russians, Robert Hanssen. After he wrote the book, it was a seven-year struggle to get it through FBI pre-publication review. An initial submission in 2016 was returned almost entirely redacted except for half a page, leading to multiple trips to Washington, wording changes, and securing permission from 32 named individuals before final clearance.
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:08.0 | Welcome to Nutz World Podcast on the IHeart Podcast Network. |
| 0:13.0 | You know, we have the 250th anniversary of America's Declaration of Independence coming up. |
| 0:20.3 | And one of the things that's being done is to take the original Declaration Independence |
| 0:26.0 | engraving and the Constitution and fly them to eight different cities and show how they tie in |
| 0:33.1 | with the 250th anniversary. |
| 0:36.5 | The National Archives and Records Administration |
| 0:38.9 | and the National Archives Foundation |
| 0:41.2 | announced this week that several key founding documents |
| 0:45.2 | will be traveling across America |
| 0:47.3 | and a Boeing 737 dubbed the Freedom Plain. |
| 0:52.2 | The Freedom Plain will travel to eight different cities, Kansas City, Atlanta, Los Angeles, |
| 1:00.4 | Houston, Denver, Miami, Dearborn, and Seattle. |
| 1:05.7 | On the plane will be the original engraving of the Declaration Independence, one of only |
| 1:10.5 | 50 known engraved copies. |
| 1:13.4 | The Articles of Association of 1774, which were signed by all 53 delegates urging columnists |
| 1:21.6 | to boycott British goods, the oath of allegiance signed by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr during the Revolutionary War in 1778, |
| 1:34.1 | a rare copy of a draft of the Constitution with the delegates handwritten notes from the Constitution |
| 1:41.2 | in 1787 and a tally of votes approving the Constitution |
| 1:48.0 | from 1787. Rodney Slater, chair and president of the National Archives Foundation's |
| 1:55.6 | Board of Director said, the Freedom Plain National Tour underscores that the rich history of our nation belongs to all of us, |
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