Former FBI agent Wayne Barnes: From exposing the KGB to analyzing Hunter Biden's signature

Retired Special Agent Wayne Barnes had a 29-year career with the FBI, which included working undercover with the Black Panthers and the KGB, as well as analyzing signatures for forgeries and understanding the signatories. 

Just the News recently commissioned a report by Barnes to analyze the "R. H. Biden" signature on a spring 2019 Delaware computer repair shop receipt to help determine if the receipted laptop was truly Hunter Biden's. 

Barnes discussed Hunter's signature and his long career at the FBI on the Thursday episode of the John Solomon Reports podcast. 

Barnes, who described himself as "a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed, six-foot-one guy," was undercover with the Black Panthers for nine months in Los Angeles early in his FBI career. 

Having grown up in Philadelphia and attended "Germantown High School, which was 85% black," Barnes said he "was on all the athletic teams, and I just got along with everybody" so he volunteered to work undercover with the Panthers since "all of our black agents were well-known in the community."

Barnes recalled what he told the Panthers in order to join: "'I'm doing a master's thesis on an American ethnic group. What do you think? I picked you,' and they said, 'Welcome to the Black Panthers.'"

Thanks to his background in learning the Romance languages of Spanish and French, Barnes scored high on the FBI's language test, so they had him learn Romanian. Afterwards, he was transferred to Washington, D.C., where he worked for 18 years, first with the Eastern Bloc countries, then with the Soviet KGB, including "an awful lot of undercover cases against Hungarians, Czechs, and many, many different Soviets."

Barnes recalled that time in the FBI as being "as interesting a life as you could possibly have."

He eventually got into analyzing signatures, which includes learning about someone's personality just through their signature. 

"I always have to do the analysis of what the person's personality is," Barnes explained, "whether they're managers or quick starters, or ... how they feel about themselves, their family, all the aspects of their life that come out in signatures."

Barnes explained how he could do a blind reading of a person's signature, without knowing anything about them. He mentioned a time when his daughter would describe to him the signature of a guy she was considering dating and "she would say, 'Tell me about him,'" because he could, just based off of the description. 

He also discussed the investigation beyond a person's signature, which would include checking their alibi, or, as in Hunter Biden's case, checking closed-circuit TV feeds to see if he entered the Delaware computer repair shop where his laptop was left. 

Barnes said that while he was the undercover coordinator in the Washington, D.C., FBI field office in counterintelligence, he would backstop agents' undercover identities, which meant creating fake driver's licenses, credit cards, and library cards to make the undercover identities appear real. 

With all the information that has been recovered from Hunter Biden's laptop, it would be "beyond the pale" for it to be fake, he said. "You just couldn't do it." 

Barnes expounded on how, before, the FBI used to train agents who would eventually work their way up into upper management positions. Now, however, they pull people with Ivy League degrees from the Department of Justice and elsewhere and place them in management, without prior FBI or law enforcement experience. He believes this newer hiring system has made the management more political, even as FBI field agents across the country continue to do good work.