Clean up Justice
The IG’s report shows political FBI
Only a bright lawyer or a super human could claim to have absorbed all the content and all the implications of the 500-pageplus Department of Justice Inspector General’s report.
(The IG did an investigation, essentially, into the last two years of shenanigans at the DOJ, from the botched investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email security breach to the initial FBI probe into the Trump campaign — pre-special counsel.)
But a few things become clear. The biggest is that something has gone terribly wrong at the Department of Justice.
There are no good guys in the IG’s report.
The only possible good guy, is the author of the report himself, Micheal Horowitz, who has been the IG for six years and is a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He did what you are supposed to do when you work for the Department of Justice — a thorough, fact-based, unbiased investigation that uncovered rather than covered up.
What he uncovered was what had begun to seep out — the most blatant bias imaginable — perhaps the most blatant bias in FBI history. It was from essentially the same team. And it cut in two different directions. Basically, the FBI team had decided to exonerate Ms. Clinton before gathering all the evidence. Indeed, it made this decision before even interviewing Ms. Clinton.
Yet the same team decided that Donald Trump was guilty of colluding with the Russians, it had done any substantial investigation. Indeed, some members of the team, had already decided to destabilize the Trump administration and aid and abet impeachment, before the president had even formed his government.
In both cases, the investigation was prejudged. The words, “we will stop him,” coming from an FBI agent, are chilling.
We have a portrait of an FBI in which whole sections of the bureau, and much of the leadership, was highly politicized.
One may say all this is reminiscent of the days of J. Edgar Hoover, but Hoover was interested in his own power and longevity and this made him an equal opportunity blackmailer. It is possible that this level of bias at the FBI is a broader and deeper corruption than Hoover in his day and at his worst. It is surely historic and intolerable bias.
The FBI and the department must be cleaned up, and that has to start with very tough and independent leadership.
There is a precedent. After the abuses of Watergate and his own inept and corrupt attorney general, John Mitchell, President Richard Nixon was forced to name William Saxbe, a U.S. senator from Ohio and a former state AG, as U.S. attorney general. Then Gerald Ford appointed a great man, and very great lawyer, Edward Levi, as AG.
Nixon was also compelled, after Hoover and the Saturday Night Massacre, to bring in Clarence Kelley, a career FBI agent who had departed the bureau under Hoover in disgust and become the chief of police of Kansas City, Mo. Mr. Kelley established integrity and order at the FBI.
Jeff Sessions is not up to the job of cleaning up Justice, and the current FBI director, though “new,” Christopher Wray, has been less than forthcoming with Congress and seems more interested in damage control than uncovering patterns of abuse. We need a broom. The president must bring a new team to Justice and the FBI. But here is the catch: They need to be able to stand up to him.
As for how the IG’s report reflects on the Mueller investigation, it certainly shows that early FBI work was compromised and corrupted. Mr. Mueller should move things along, not to exonerate the president and lift the cloud over his head but to relieve the country of its “long national nightmare” and allow all of us to get on with ordinary life and ordinary government.
One of the first tasks is a cleanup of the Department of Justice and a clean out of the FBI. The work of both is noble and most of the people who work at the DOJ are sober and straight-as-an arrow professionals. They would be the first to tell you that political bias has no place at the DOJ.