[Editor’s note: Make sure to read Robert Spencer’s masterpiece contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

By the time former FBI agent Robert Hanssen was found dead in his cell in Colorado’s Supermax prison Monday, he had been largely forgotten, but in some circles, he is remembered all too well. U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty, who prosecuted Hanssen, stated, “The magnitude of Hanssen’s crimes cannot be overstated. They will long be remembered as being among the most egregious betrayals of trust in U.S. history. It was both a low point and an investigative success for the FBI.” Indeed, what Hanssen did was terrible. But when it comes to egregious betrayals of trust by FBI personnel, Hanssen has some stiff competition from the likes of James Comey, Peter Strzok, and Christopher Wray.

Hanssen, according to a Monday Associated Press report, “had been serving a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole since 2002, after pleading guilty to 15 counts of espionage and other charges.” He had been passing on secrets to the Soviets since 1985 and possibly even before that, and “was believed to have been partly responsible for the deaths of at least three Soviet officers who were working for U.S. intelligence and executed after being exposed.”

On top of that, Hanssen “passed some 6,000 documents and 26 computer disks to his handlers, authorities said. They detailed eavesdropping techniques, helped to confirm the identity of Russian double agents, and spilled other secrets. Officials also believed he tipped off Moscow to a secret tunnel the Americans built under the Soviet Embassy in Washington for eavesdropping.” As McNulty said, the seriousness of all this “cannot be overstated,” but nonetheless, in terms of massive betrayals of the American people, today’s FBI is giving Robert Hanssen a run for his money.

After all, on May 15, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) tweeted about the Durham report, which exposed the FBI’s actions to frame and destroy a presidential candidate for a crime he did not commit; those actions did not end when that candidate became the duly elected president of the United States. In fact, Lee used the same language that McNulty used when speaking about Hanssen. “The gravity of the misconduct uncovered by Mr. Durham,” Lee wrote, “cannot be overstated.”

Lee added, “The LEAST one can say of it is that it involved a malicious use of federal law-enforcement officers to conduct a contrived investigation utterly lacking any valid, factual foundation from the very beginning. That is itself incredibly troubling—and also unconstitutional. But this was SO MUCH WORSE than that. It was an effort to use a powerful, long-respected, federal law-enforcement agency to render a presidential candidate unelectable—entirely in the absence of any valid, good-faith basis for doing so.” And what is that but an “egregious betrayal of trust”?

Up until recently, Americans generally assumed that the FBI was a law enforcement agency that was concerned with protecting Americans. Yet the officials at the very top — the directors of the agency James Comey and then Christopher Wray, and Peter Strzok, who was Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division and leader of the investigation into the supposed Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — took the trust of the American people and fed it to the sharks. They turned what was once considered to be an unimpeachable agency into a corrupt cesspool of partisan dirty tricks. They have undermined the trust of Americans in the system altogether, making ever-increasing numbers of people doubt the trustworthiness of our government and the honesty of our elections.

And not only did these men destroy the FBI; they are proud and unrepentant about having done it. When Robert Hanssen was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2002, he at least had the residual decency to say: “’I apologize for my behavior. I am shamed by it. Beyond its illegality, I have torn the trust of so many. Worse, I have opened the door for calumny against my totally innocent wife and our children. I hurt them deeply. I have hurt so many deeply.”

Comey, Wray, and Strzok have torn the trust of the entire nation and damaged one of our foremost intelligence agencies, probably beyond repair. Yet instead of making statements of contrition and retiring to silent private lives, all three are still plaguing the country. Wray, of course, still heads up the corrupt and degenerate agency. Comey is making the rounds of the Leftist talking head shows, warning about Trump and pretending he has the moral high ground. Strzok is taking a page from the old Left’s Alger Hiss playbook and continuing to insist that the Russian Collusion hoax was as legitimate and honest as the day is long.

No, in the final analysis, Comey, Wray, and Strzok cannot be compared with Robert Hanssen. They’re far worse.