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.