Fox News Guest Lied About Central Intelligence Agency Job

Federal prosecutors say a Maryland man who offered national-security commentary on Fox News has been charged with fraud for falsely claiming a lengthy Central Intelligence Agency career.

An indictment unsealed Thursday in a Virginia federal court charged the 62-year-old, a guest terrorism commentator on Fox, with multiple counts of fraud.

A Fox News spokeswoman told CNN that Simmons was an unpaid guest and never a host for the station, and declined further comment.

Simmons faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison if convicted of wire fraud, and 10 years if convicted of major fraud.

Janet Cooke, who falsely claimed a master’s degree from the University of Toledo, wrote a profile in 1980 for the Washington Post on an 8-year-old heroin addict. The website says he “spearheaded Deep Cover Intel Ops against a few of the world’s most unsafe Drug Cartels and arms smugglers from Central and South America and the Middle East”.

From decrying the film Zero Dark Thirty for its excessive use of waterboarding as a form of torture because, in his words, “waterboarding is not torture”, to calling President Obama a “novice” for not doing enough to capture Edward Snowden, Simmons has been all over the Fox News Channel and Fox News Radio network. In 2004, he claims former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recruited him to join the Pentagon Outreach Program for Military and Intelligence Analysts.

Prosecutors alleged in the indictment that Simmons was hired as the “Human Terrain System Team Leader” for an unnamed government contractor in 2008, and in that role, he trained at a U.S. Army facility.

Simmons is also a co-author of the thriller “The Natanz Directive”.

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd said in a brief statement that the agency was “working closely with the Justice Department on this matter”.

He also, and this is the greatest excuse of all time, claimed that past criminal convictions on his record “were directly related to his supposed intelligence work for the CIA, and that he had previously held a top secret security clearance”.