FBI employees battle worry, work, fear of lasting damage

Director Wray urges staff to ‘keep calm and tackle hard.’

In the 109 years of the FBI’s existence, it has repeatedly come under fire for abuses of power, privacy or civil rights. From Red Scares to recording and threatening to expose the private conduct of Martin Luther King Jr. to benefiting from bulk surveillance in the digital age, the FBI is accustomed to intense criticism.

What is so unusual about the current moment, say current and former law enforcement officials, is the source of the attacks.

The bureau is under fire not from those on the left but rather conservatives who have long been the agency’s biggest supporters, as well as the president who handpicked the FBI’s leader.

Republican critics charge that the birth of the investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and agents of the Russian government was fatally infected by the political bias of senior FBI officials - and President Donald Trump tweeted Saturday that the release of a memo on the issue “totally vindicates ‘Trump.’ ”

Bureau officials say the accusations in the document produced by House Republicans are inaccurate and — more damaging in the long term — corrode the agency’s ability to remain independent and do its job.

One law enforcement official summed it up bluntly: “There’s a lot of anger. The irony is it’s a conservative-leaning organization, and it’s being trashed by conservatives. At first it was just perplexing. Now there’s anger because it’s not going away.”

On Friday, FBI Director Christopher Wray sent a video message to those he leads, urging them to “keep calm and tackle hard.”

“You’ve all been through a lot in these past nine months, and I know that’s been unsettling, to say the least. And the past few days haven’t done much to calm those waters,” Wray said. “So I want to make sure that you know where I stand, and what I want us to do.”

Most FBI agents see their mission as fundamentally nonpolitical — ferreting out wrongdoing, even when that occurs inside political campaigns or government.

For decades, the FBI has been trusted to investigate corruption inside the government, even at the highest levels, including the White House. In the 1970s, the FBI’s probe of the Watergate break-in led to the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. In the late 1990s, President Bill Clinton came to detest then-director Louis Freeh, but their distrust did not lead to withering public attacks from the president himself.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the agency was retooled to focus primarily on preventing terrorism, and public confidence in its work grew.

In the past two years, however, the probe of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state and a separate Russia investigation are testing whether the FBI can maintain the trust of Congress, the courts and the country.

Wray’s vision for leading the agency out of its current predicament is a return to the type of low-profile management favored by former FBI director Robert Mueller, according to several people who have spoken to him about the current challenges.

Wray’s predecessor, James Comey, was fired by Trump in May amid the ratcheting tensions of a criminal probe into the president’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. At the time, Trump called Comey a “showboat” and a “grandstander.”

It makes sense, then, that his successor would want to keep his head down.

Wray’s defenders say there is a more strategic reason for the new director’s approach — by relying on long-standing law enforcement policies and procedures, he believes the FBI can navigate through the current political storms and get back to a position of widespread trust across the political spectrum, according to people familiar with his thinking.

The public attacks from the president have diminished morale inside the FBI, according to current and former officials. Among themselves, senior officials and rank and file frequently debate the best way forward. Several law enforcement officials said they agreed with Wray’s lowkey approach, as a means of what one called “getting back to Mueller’s FBI.”

That is a sentiment not without irony because Mueller is now the special counsel leading the Russia investigation so despised by the president and his allies.

On Saturday in his tweet, Trump said the “Russia Witch Hunt goes on and on ... This is an American disgrace!”

Others express doubts about emulating Mueller’s detached approach, worried that Wray’s calculation not to publicly spar with the president may lead to a gradual erosion of the bureau’s reputation and clout.

A HuffPost/YouGov poll last month found that 51 percent of the public say they have a fair amount of trust in the FBI — down 12 points from 2015. Most of that drop was driven by Republicans and independents, the poll found.

The so-called #Release TheMemo campaign — a GOP effort to make public the fourpage document produced by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., alleging surveillance abuses by the FBI — is just the latest salvo in an escalating war on the credibility of federal law enforcement. On Friday, over Wray’s objection, Trump authorized the release of the Nunes memo and declared, “A lot of people should be ashamed of themselves and much worse than that.”

The document — which Democrats said lacked appropriate context and seemed to be a pretext for conservatives to discredit the investigation into Trump — alleged the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in obtaining a secret warrant to monitor former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

That was because, Republicans alleged, the bureau did not tell the court they were relying in part on information they received from an ex-British spy who was working for an opposition research firm hired by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Officials familiar with the matter, though, said the court that approved the warrant was aware some information in the request was funded by a political entity, even if that entity was not named.

“That’s it?” Comey tweeted after the memo was released Friday. “Dishonest and misleading memo wrecked the House intel committee, destroyed trust with Intelligence Community, damaged relationship with FISA court, and inexcusably exposed classified investigation of an American citizen. For what? DO J & FBI must keep doing their jobs.”