How not to hold hearings
House questioning of FBI agent was ugly theater
According to Gallup, 75 percent of Americans polled disapprove of the job Congress is doing and only 18 percent approve. Thosenumbers will likely tilt even more toward disapproval after this week’s House joint hearing on dysfunction at the FBI, in which disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok was the star witness.
The hearing was a combined effort of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Judiciary Committee, two key committees of the House with a noble history and two committees essential to oversight and reform of the bureau.
You would not know it. The hearing was a disaster on every level, even as theater, which is what most of the participants seemed to think was the purpose.
Instead, the event came off as the Three Stooges multiplied and magnified, as Republicans interrupted the answers of Mr. Strzok, and generally imitated Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare; Democrats yelled at Republicans; and Mr. Strzok, aggressive and smirking, told one whopper after another. The biggest two were that strong and unbending opinion is not bias and that he should not have recused himself from investigating someone he regarded a menace who had to be stopped — Donald Trump. That was Mr. Strzok’s view before he began to investigate. Three things are true: First, the Russians meddled in our last presidential election.
Second, the net effect was negligible because the Russian efforts were inept and the American people were not distracted and had no trouble sorting out the issues. Give the voters some credit. TheRussians did not elect Mr. Trump.
Third, somewhere along the line, many at the top of the FBI lost their detachment, their objectivity and their professionalism. A great American institution has been corrupted.
The comic opera masquerading as a hearing this week did nothing to enlighten us on any of these points, or to act upon them.
And that is critical. The point of congressional hearings is to enlighten (either by investigating or by educating) and to do oversight. The joint hearing failed on all counts.
Members of the House should go back to Watergate and observe the manner in which the Judiciary Committee in the House and the select committee in the Senate uncovered crimes and abuses of power. Rep. PeterRodino and Sen. Sam Ervin and, on the GOP side, Sen. Howard Baker asked tough questions, and very close and precise ones. They did a lot of homework. They never yelled, interruptedor preened for the cameras.
It is almost impossible to imagine any further, effective investigation, or education, coming out of the House or Senate in the current atmosphere. The great need now is to change the culture, and perhaps the operation, of the FBI and restore impartial justice to the Department of Justice. It is possible that the FBI should be split in two (crime and intelligence) or that it should not do counterintelligence work at all — only criminal investigations.But certainly its culture, and that means, in part, its personnel, must change. Members of Congress
could help by doing this vital oversight, if enough of them were grown-ups, or atleast capable of imitating grown-ups.