The FBI is composed of people. But not these people.
The FBI has long been an iconic institution in American life. From Elliot Ness to Clarice Starling, the image of the FBI — unflappable, smart and relentlessly fair — has been sterling.
That little opening, from the slightly less than iconic Chris Cillizza, has a few issues. First off, Elliot Ness never worked for the FBI, and Clarice Starling was not just a fictional character, but one who becomes the brain-eating cannibal lover of a serial killer. So neither one … really works as an great example. But hey, Starling. Sterling. I see what you did there.
The real FBI has always, always been a political animal. From J. Edgar Hoover, who formed a covert dirty tricks operation exactly because the Supreme Court was putting a damper on his ability to prosecute Civil Rights leaders, to Comey’s ill-timed, ill-intentioned letter, the “relentlessly fair” FBI has never existed in real life.
It certainly doesn’t exist now.
James Comey has proven that he’s impossibly sensitive to his own political image and quick to buckle under pressure from people from both inside and outside his own office.
Even the agency’s supposedly automated Twitter account is now the subject of an internal investigation. And that’s the good news. Because with Comey demonstrating that neither protocol nor chain of command is valued at his FBI, the agency is reeling out of control, spraying opinion and supposedly private information in all directions.
Maybe the biggest irony of the entire election season is that an investigation that’s supposedly about proper handling of classified documents, is now being driven by nameless agents breaking the agency’s secrecy policy on a daily basis.
Whatever public goodwill may have accumulated with the FBI has been blown away by Comey.
Let’s be clear. Comey’s astounding act was a deplorable and reckless dereliction of duty. He spurned Department of Justice objections and ignored long-standing guidelines that the DOJ or the FBI not release information about investigations within 60 days of an election. “Those guidelines exist for a reason,” explained George J. Terwilliger III, former deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration, to The New York Times. “Sometimes, that makes for hard decisions. But bypassing them has consequences.”
Those consequences include not just calls for Comey’s dismissal, but a recognition of an intrinsic lawlessness in his department that has agents spilling the beans—and slanting the results—in a way that makes the right wing ecstatic. Even that Twitter account is not immune to heavily slanted news dumps.
The account at issue, @FBIRecordsVault, had been dormant for more than a year. Then on October 30 at 4 a.m., the account released a flood of documents, including one describing Donald Trump’s father Fred Trump as a “philanthropist.”
But it wasn’t until two days later, when the account tweeted documents regarding President Clinton’s controversial pardon of Marc Rich that the account began to attract significant attention.
The account has not been active since that tweet.
11 Days before the election
The FBI Director issues a letter saying that emails—emails which no agent has even seen—might be related to a case involving the Democratic candidate, requiring him to violate Justice Department policy and the guidance of his superiors
9 Days before the election
After a year of silence, the FBI Twitter accounts wakes up to put out a document praising Donald Trump’s father—making no mention of his association with the KKK or lawsuits over his racist rental policies, issues another document about a controversial pardon made by Bill Clinton, and goes back to sleep.
8 days before the election
“Law enforcement officials” tell the New York Times that possible connections between Trump and Russian oligarchs didn’t amount to anything—including poo-pooing a server story that broke just hours before. The same officials delivered the astounding news that Russian hacking into Democratic emails and release of those emails at critical moments, is not intended to help Trump.
7 days before the election
FBI sources leak that they are expanding investigations of the Clintons based on a right-wing attack book whose sources and accusations have been roundly debunked, but that the department hasn’t investigated issues with Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort because “agents have followed the Justice Department’s guidance” in staying away from controversial topics so close to an election.
5 days before the election
Unnamed sources inside the FBI spread the word that the Clinton Foundation investigation is huge and will lead to indictments, the emails on Wiener’s laptop contain unseen Clinton documents, and that Hillary’s email server had been hacked not once, but five times—directly invalidating previous FBI statements.
What happens next? Well, another day, another torrent of slanted, completely political “leaks” from an agency that’s throwing what remains of its reputation away in double handfuls.
Apparently Comey doesn’t have to be fired. He’s already stopped any pretense of running the place.