FBI: punching bag or in need of reform?
Trump undeterred
WASHINGTON, Feb 4, (Agencies): The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), accused of abusing its power in its probe of links between President Donald Trump’s election campaign and Russia, has become a political punching bag, experts in the US law enforcement community say.
But after two years of becoming deeply enmeshed in the swirl of American politics — at one point in 2016, it was investigating both Trump’s team and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton — the FBI also needs to clean up its image, they say.
“I think that there are troubling things that myself, many former agents, as well as current on-board employees, would like to see a full accounting of,” said retired special agent James Gagliano.
In the past few years, actions by the agency’s top management “have had a deleterious effect on the reputation of the FBI,” Gagliano, who is now an adjunct assistant professor at St John’s University in New York, told AFP.
The FBI was accused of both aiding Clinton’s campaign and causing her loss. Since then, Trump and his Republican Party claim that the agency has tried to discredit his victory — and possibly help force him from office — by opening a special investigation into possible collusion with Moscow.
The FBI took another brutal hit Friday when Trump spearheaded a Republican effort to tar the agency as deeply politicized, with the release of a secret, controversial GOP memo.
But the agency’s director Christopher Wray — who was hand-picked by Trump six months ago, but whose future now seems unclear — has so far stood tall.
“Talk is cheap,” he told his 35,000-strong staff after the memo release, in an internal letter obtained by AFP.
Trump’s battle with the Justice Department and FBI is not new, and is just one in a long series of fights between presidents and their top law enforcement officials.
Trump
Institution
Legendary G-Man J. Edgar Hoover, the agency’s first director who served for nearly a halfcentury, turned the FBI into an institution feared by crooks and politicians alike.
Presidents from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon considered dismissing him, but Hoover was seen as too powerful — and dangerous.
The FBI director is appointed for a term of 10 years — a method seen as ensuring he or she remains apolitical. But some critics say that goal has not been met. The root of the current battle is former director James Comey’s personal handling of the 2016 investigation into Clinton’s use of an unauthorized personal email server while she was secretary of state.
His attempts to keep that sensitive probe apolitical fell flat, reaping attacks from both parties even as he twice found the evidence lacking to charge her. “The Clinton investigation put the FBI in the center of the political battle,” said Jeffrey Ringel, a veteran agent who is now director of the Soufan Group, a security consultancy.
“Either way, the FBI was going to come out bruised.”
Meanwhile, even before he’d read the memo, President Donald Trump seized on what it could mean. The president first learned of the House Intelligence Committee document last month from some Republican allies in Congress and he watched it take hold in the conservative media, including on some of his favorite Fox News programs, according to seven White House officials and outside advisers.
Trump’s decision to authorize the memo’s public disclosure was extraordinary, yet part of a recent pattern. Like few of his predecessors, Trump has delivered repeated broadsides against intelligence and law enforcement agencies, working in tandem with some conservatives to lay the groundwork to either dismiss or discredit special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the Russia investigation.
Vindicates
“This memo totally vindicates ‘Trump’ in probe,” the president tweeted Saturday from Florida, where he was spending the weekend. “But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on. Their (sic) was no Collusion and there was no Obstruction (the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding nothing, collusion is dead). This is an American disgrace!”
Trump had dismissed forceful pleas from the FBI Director, Christopher Wray, and the second-ranking Justice Department official, Rod Rosenstein, to keep the memo under wraps. They said the four-page document was inaccurate and lacked critical context, and they made their views known in a remarkable public statement objecting to its release. Democrats said the memo, which disclosed material about one of the most tightly held national security processes, selectively used Republican talking points in an effort to smear law enforcement. Trump, however, was undeterred. Early last week, aides briefed him on the never-before-used-process that the House would use to release the classified memo. Lawyers at the White House and Capitol Hill worried about making dangerous missteps.
Trump told allies he believed the memo would reinforce his belief that accusations of collusion between his 2016 campaign and Russian officials were false and part of the conspiracy to discredit his victory. And the president signaled that he would approve the memo’s public disclosure if the House committee voted to pursue that course.
Several aides cautioned that the memo did not contain convincing evidence of a conspiracy, while others urged him to black out sections on intelligence-gathering methods, according to a White House official. Other advisers, inside and outside the West Wing, questioned why his administration had allowed the memo to become the dominant talking point during the week when he gave his first State of the Union address, overshadowing the well-received address.