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The Paranoid Style at the FBI spectator.org/the-paranoid-s…
The FBI’s counterintelligence probe of Trump marks one of its lowest moments of political paranoia. As anti-Trump hysteria, before and after his election, swept through D.C., @Comey and his staff succumbed to it, turning the FBI into an extension of the Democratic Party.
Hillary Clinton’s opposition researcher, Christopher Steele, might as well have had an office down the hall from Comey, such was the FBI’s absurd reliance upon Steele’s smears.
It was bad enough that the FBI had already treated multiple members of Trump’s campaign as “probable” Russian agents during the campaign, based on nothing more than flaky partisan hunches. It then on even thinner grounds placed a president in that category too.
Out of months of obsessing over Trump — from vows to “stop” his candidacy to talk of an “insurance policy” in the event that he won — Peter Strzok and company hatched one of the most half-cocked probes in the history of the FBI.
Under normal circumstances, the discovery of such a meritless and outré investigation would spark outrage, as it confirms that the FBI under Comey had become a rogue agency engaged in what amounted to the beginnings of a coup against a sitting president.
Senior leaders at the FBI responded to Comey’s firing like members of a cult or a banana republic, unleashing agents on Trump in the hopes of catching him out in Russia-related impropriety.
The gross and abusive politicization at the FBI is the obvious story here, yet the media portrays the probe with somber respect, as if it still reflects badly on Trump rather than an out-of-control FBI.
Were official Washington not in the grip of obsessive Trump hatred, it would see the story as a stunning indictment of the FBI for squandering its objectivity in the pursuit of low and paranoid politics.
In the past, the media chastised paranoid FBI agents for their “McCarthyism”; now they turn them into heroes, even as their suspicions prove embarrassingly hollow.
If you strike at a king, you better kill him, the old saying goes. But in Trump-hating Washington, the FBI could strike at Trump, miss, and still receive a pat on the head from the ruling class.
The media reports very gravely on the supposed reasons for the probe — that Trump had made a joke about the Russians finding Hillary’s missing emails, that Trump’s aides had weakened the Russian plank in the GOP platform (a bogus claim that has been debunked repeatedly),
that Trump’s political and foreign policy moves struck FBI senior leaders as too friendly to Putin, and that Trump fired Comey. These are manifestly unserious reasons for treating anyone as a traitor, much less a president.
And since when did political analysis become part of the FBI’s criteria for investigations? Could Department of Justice standards really be that unrigorous? If so, all Americans should shudder.
If a president can be investigated on such sketchy grounds, how much more vulnerable are citizens without power?
