An Unaccountable FBI The bureau tries to tarnish a House memo before it’s released.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-unaccountable-fbi-1517443236
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is making a last-ditch effort to block the release of a House Intelligence Committee memo detailing the bureau’s behavior during the 2016 election. This is all the more reason to let Americans see it.
In an unusual public statement Wednesday, the bureau objected that it had only “a limited opportunity to review” the memo the day before the House voted Monday to release it. The statement added that the FBI had “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”
This is really something. The FBI knows what’s in the memo because it has long known what the House committee was seeking to examine. For months it refused to provide access to those documents until director Christopher Wray and the Justice Department faced a contempt of Congress vote. If they now object to the way the House construes the facts, they should have been more cooperative from the start.
Note the FBI’s language about “material omissions” rather than errors of fact. Until this statement the FBI was pleading damage to “national security.” Now that rationale has given way to the claim that the House is omitting key details to reach judgments that the FBI apparently disagrees with. If Mr. Wray wants to fill in those omissions, he can always ask President Trump to declassify more documents to provide a more complete record. We’d love to see them, and Mr. Trump should give that transparency a boost even if Mr. Wray doesn’t request it.
The FBI’s public statement appears to be an act of insubordination after Mr. Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein tried and failed to get the White House to block the memo’s release. Their public protest appears intended to tarnish in advance whatever information the memo contains. The public is getting to see amid this brawl how the FBI plays politics, and it isn’t a good look.
Neither Congress nor the White House can afford to back down on the memo amid this kind of political hardball. To do so would make the FBI an agency accountable only to itself, as it was in the days of J. Edgar Hoover.
In response to the FBI broadside, Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes disclosed that “it’s clear that top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counter-intelligence investigation during an American political campaign.” Perhaps this is what the FBI really doesn’t want the public to see, but Americans need to know if the country’s premier law enforcement agency abused its power to influence a presidential election.
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