The Surreptitious State v. America
Old Juvie asked the big question 2,000 years ago. “Who’ll watch the watchdogs?” he wondered.
Old Juvie — Juvenal, the Roman writer — never offered an answer. He left us to ponder the conundrum all these years later regarding certain Washington “watchdogs.”
Twice now — first with then-FBI Director James Comey, now with Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz — government watchdogs have barked but declined to bite. Comey cited a litany of infractions by Hillary Clinton (the bark) but declined to pursue a prosecution against her (the bite). Now IG Horowitz has acted in similar fashion. After citing a litany of FBI/Justice Department bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton, Horowitz for the most part declined to recommend further investigation of the matter.
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” indeed.
(“Who’ll guard the guardians?”) A sinister shadow government has acquired the nom de guerre Deep State. “Surreptitious State” would be more descriptive, besides which is alliterative. In either case, when all is said and done, a powerful, secretive, skulking, conniving bureaucracy seems in the process prevailing over those who interpose quaint libertarian concerns.
The watchdogs do their duty only to the extent of barking a little; they opt not to back up the barking with a bite. Trumpderanged Democrats are hailing the IG’s sophistic conclusion and ignoring his damning evidence. And why should they not? The IG himself, after all, ignores his own mountainous evidence.
To damn with faint praise, Comey and Horowitz deserve credit for at least laying out the evidence for all to see, even as they recommended that the evidence be sloughed off.
After 500-plus pages of meticulous inventory suggesting the contrary, Horowitz’ offered the Talmudic conclusion: “Our review did not find documentary or testimonial evidence directly connecting the political views of these (FBI/Justice Dept.) employees... to their specific investigative decisions...” It’s a conclusion that skirts the border of sophistry, if not strays across it.
“No FBI/Justice Dept. bias found!” crows CNN, MSNBC and the rest of the anti-Trump chorus. Not true. Plenty of bias was found. Found and enumerated in the IG report.
In a challenge to logic, the report simply declined to infer any connection leading from A — conspicuous bias — to B — egregious investigative actions and/or omissions.
The IG report damningly states the following:
— FBI Director Comey violated Justice Dept. policy in publicly detailing likely offenses committed by Hillary Clinton after deciding not to prosecute her. His Clinton email probe “deviated from procedure” and veered “dramatically from FBI and department norms.”
— Attorney Gen. Loretta Lynch at a minimum made a serious “error in judgment” by meeting secretly with former President Bill Clinton while her Justice Dept. was investigating Clinton’s wife.
— The Justice Dept. was ethically lax in ignoring the appearance of a conflict of interest regarding the political activity of the wife of a high-level FBI official, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. While McCabe ran the Hillary Clinton email probe, his wife vied for a Virginia state senate seat, receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from a political action committee headed by a long-time Clinton political ally, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
— McCabe, long one of the government’s highest counter-intelligence officials and law-enforcement executives, “lacked candor... on multiple occasions” — translation: lied repeatedly — when questioned under oath about leaks he made himself and then tried to pin on other FBI personnel.
Such alleged “lack of candor,” meanwhile, has saddled marginal Trump campaign associates with criminal indictments and crushing financial punishment in the form of legal fees and business losses in advance of any trial. The Kremlin’s “siloviki” — “strong ones,” as the operatives of the Deep State there are called
— surely feel a twinge of envy when they contemplate such awesome power to crush foes underfoot.
— The anti-Trump fulminations of two top-level FBI officials, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, prompted “concerns that political bias may have impacted investigative decisions.” Their partisan email comments in any event brought “discredit” to them and raised “doubts” about the integrity of their investigative activities. Their outbursts were “deeply” troubling, their conduct “not only indicative of a biased state of mind, but even more seriously implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s (Trump’s) election prospects.”
— Even as they supposedly investigated Hillary Clinton’s legally questionable use of an off-the-grid, unsecured private email system for official government business including classified information, Strzok and Page were doing exactly that themselves
— using private, unsecured email for official government business.
The IG report also, figuratively speaking, peeked in on the dimly-lit dives where, in the dark booths toward the back, operatives of the Surreptitious State hand off their tips to drudges of the Fourth Estate. The IG report noted “numerous” clandestine contacts between the FBI and reporters.
Our story — the media’s — is that we are only doing our due diligence and fulfilling our First Amendment watchdog obligations. But here’s a tip for the public: The truth is we — the media
— as often as not are really only passing along the Surreptitious State’s party line — not challenging it.
The media and the Surreptitious State have a symbiotic relationship through leaks.
Official leaks often have a self-serving motive, even when the leaks happen to serve a public interest. The Watergate revelations, for example, were largely the work of an official leaker — “Deep Throat” — now known to have been a bureaucrat who was in a retaliatory frame of mind after the White House passed him over for the top FBI post.
And here’s an additional unpleasant truth: Some in Congress — likely more than a few — may be compromised by their own, um, checkered histories and therefore in no position to aggressively exercise their constitutional obligation to keep the Surreptitious State under control. Raise too much of a ruckus and you may wake up one morning to ugly, leaked insinuations about yourself on the front page of the New York Times.
If the IG report is accepted as an exoneration of politicized, blackbag bureaucracy, then America is in the process of signing its own death certificate as a truly free country. That may sound like dramatic overstatement. Alas, it’s not.