Did Robert Mueller Find Evidence of Collusion Yet? By Jim Geraghty
Making the click-through worthwhile: Do we want the FBI launching counterintelligence investigations of presidents and other elected officials on its own authority?
Who Watches the FBI Watchmen?
The New York Times reported this weekend:
In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.
Today the boss writes:
The Times story is another sign that we have forgotten the role of our respective branches of government. It is Congress that exists to check and investigate the president, not the FBI. Congress can inveigh against his foreign policy and constrain his options. It can build a case for not reelecting him and perhaps impeach him. These are all actions to be undertaken out in the open by politically accountable players, so the public can make informed judgments about them.
The Times went to note that special counsel Robert Mueller “took over the inquiry into Mr. Trump when he was appointed, days after F.B.I. officials opened it. That inquiry is part of Mr. Mueller’s broader examination of how Russian operatives interfered in the 2016 election and whether any Trump associates conspired with them. It is unclear whether Mr. Mueller is still pursuing the counterintelligence matter, and some former law enforcement officials outside the investigation have questioned whether agents overstepped in opening it.”
(This is the 609th day of the Mueller investigation. Remember when we were hearing that Mueller “is expected to issue findings on core aspects of his Russia probe soon after the November midterm elections”? Good times, good times.)
If Mueller did find evidence that Trump was working on behalf of Russia, I’d hope he would tell the public sooner rather than later. This doesn’t seem like the kind of conclusion that you can leave sitting on your desk during a long weekend.
If he and his team didn’t find any evidence that Trump was working on behalf of Russia . . . this means that the FBI just launched an investigation into the personal matters of the president of the United States in a fit of baseless paranoia. Trump might have a ludicrously optimistic and naive perspective on Russia, but that’s not a crime. A lot of us thought the previous president had a ludicrously optimistic and naive perspective on Iran. That wasn’t sufficient evidence to launch an investigation of whether Barack Obama was an agent of Tehran.
Back during the 2016 campaign, more than a few Democrats argued that the FBI had a slew of agents with an axe to grind against Hillary Clinton. The Guardian quoted an unnamed agent who described the bureau as “Trumpland.” The Washington Monthly contended that “very senior FBI agents in the New York field office went rogue with their ‘deep and visceral hatred of Secretary Clinton’ by leaking information to congressional Republicans and being insubordinate when told to ‘stand down’ on investigations that had no merit.”
In The Atlantic, Adam Serwer argued:
Elements of the nation’s premier law-enforcement agency, acting out of a variety of motives, injured not Trump’s candidacy, but that of his opponent. For all Trump’s complaints about the FBI, without the intervention of members of both the FBI rank-and-file and Bureau leadership, he might still be living in Trump Tower.
Maybe some people believe that there’s only one form of political bias within the walls of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and they think FBI agent Peter Strzok was just being fair, even-handed and objective when he texted Lisa Page that “we’ll stop” Trump in August 2016. It’s worth noting that the FBI inspector general did not see it that way.
Because of the possibility of conscious or subtle political bias affecting FBI officials’ judgment regarding decisions about investigations of political figures, in these circumstances, every “i” needs to be dotted, every “t” crossed. If you’re going to make a giant accusation like the president being a foreign agent, you had better have a significant amount of really compelling evidence.
Of course, Trump is his own worst enemy in this area. For example, if your political opposition keeps accusing you of being a Russian stooge, you would want to emphasize your opposition to Russia’s aggression — and from time to time, the president has done this. But he also keeps gravitating towards proposals that align with Russian strategic goals: “Senior administration officials told The New York Times that several times over the course of 2018, Mr. Trump privately said he wanted to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”
You can’t save a guy who keeps choosing to put a fork in the electrical socket, over and over again.
Comments are closed.
