From the wsj
What the FBI Fight Is About
A reckoning is inevitable when electorate and elite are so out of sync.
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Jan. 30, 2018 6:23 p.m. ET
To journalists, the Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times” is anything but a curse. We live to live in interesting times. At least you would hope so.
On the “PBS NewsHour” the other night we heard a panelist explain: “The idea, Judy, that the FBI, made up of professional law enforcement people, is a hornet’s nest of bleeding-heart, knee-jerk liberal lefties, which is what Trey Gowdy and these people are selling, is that somehow there is a great cabal, left-wing.”
If you think this is what’s going on with the Trump-FBI fight, you’ve lost the plot in the most interesting story of our time. To the extent that top leaders of the Obama FBI or intelligence agencies were hostile to Donald Trump, it was not on partisan or ideological grounds, but because they thought him singularly unsuited to be president. This view, by the way, they would have shared with millions of Americans, including a healthy chunk of the national political and media elite.
Mr. Trump is not a conservative, hardly even a Republican. At the same time, no candidate was so well known before he entered the political arena. Donald Trump, for 40 years, deliberately peddled an image of himself as the garish, high-living playboy-businessman. What a colleague once said of his fellow Manhattan swashbuckler Ron Perelman seemed doubly true of Mr. Trump: “His basic value is making money, money, money and collecting women.”
Whether or not FBI leadership did anything improper, its behavior could not help but be conditioned by the presumption that Mr. Trump was unacceptable to most Americans, that he was likely to lose, and that Hillary Clinton would be the next president.
But 63 million Americans disagreed; with an assist from our quirky electoral system, they made him president anyway. And now we’re having the inevitable reckoning. Simply because of the way the chips have fallen, the FBI is at the center of that reckoning.
Its leadership would have been far from human if its perceptions of Mr. Trump didn’t color its response to a succession of inherently thorny decisions about the Clinton email “matter” and about allegations of Trump-Russia connections.
The text messages and memos you’ve been reading about go straight to the key questions: Did the FBI soft-pedal its Clinton investigation because it saw her victory as inevitable and necessary? Was the agency a little too eager to exploit questionable Russian intelligence as an excuse to intervene in her case? Was it a little too keen to find grounds to suspect Trump associates of playing footsie with Vladimir Putin ?
The word we have used is not conspiracy, but cascade—a cascade of awkward decisions that amount to the FBI playing a much bigger role in the election than it possibly could have wanted. These culminated in the comeuppance that fate often reserves for the too-clever: James Comey’s pressured decision to reopen the Clinton case when the Anthony Weiner laptop surfaced, a thunderclap that inadvertently may have pushed Mr. Trump over the top.
Somewhere in her voluminous writings, the German Freudian with the unfortunate name, Karen Horney, describes the logic of neurosis as meaning that the professions attract some who are least suited to them—lawyers who are cynical about justice, doctors who enjoy suffering. That also includes journalists who constantly seek to reduce our interesting world to partisan banality.
Personally, I’ve given up trying to predict how the Trump presidency will play out, but his rise provides an opportunity to think in new ways about presidential competence. There are as many ways to be president as there have been presidents. With his big mouth, lack of discipline, and momentous baggage, it’s easy to imagine Mr. Trump not finishing his term. It’s also possible to imagine him, because of his showmanship, mercurial nature and lack of partisan conviction, becoming the antic midwife of one compromise after another to move the country forward on longstanding stalemates—its dysfunctional corporate tax system, its dysfunctional immigration system.
In any case, you are not a partisan to realize that partisan opportunism, more than any real evidence of a Trump conspiracy with Mr. Putin, drives the Russia narrative. Every president, including Donald Trump, has a duty to fight for his political existence. In our two-party system, where the parties serve as a check on each other, Republicans have a duty to help him mount a defense against those who would destroy him, at least until they decide the partisan cost of Mr. Trump exceeds the benefit.
America is a happy, prosperous, low-crime country right now by historical standards, yet something curious and transformative is happening in our politics. You are living in interesting times. Don’t miss out. Don’t make the mistake of relying too much on claptrappy, ratings-driven media institutions whose limitations become most apparent just when the story gets most interesting.
What the FBI Fight Is About
A reckoning is inevitable when electorate and elite are so out of sync.
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Jan. 30, 2018 6:23 p.m. ET
To journalists, the Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times” is anything but a curse. We live to live in interesting times. At least you would hope so.
On the “PBS NewsHour” the other night we heard a panelist explain: “The idea, Judy, that the FBI, made up of professional law enforcement people, is a hornet’s nest of bleeding-heart, knee-jerk liberal lefties, which is what Trey Gowdy and these people are selling, is that somehow there is a great cabal, left-wing.”
If you think this is what’s going on with the Trump-FBI fight, you’ve lost the plot in the most interesting story of our time. To the extent that top leaders of the Obama FBI or intelligence agencies were hostile to Donald Trump, it was not on partisan or ideological grounds, but because they thought him singularly unsuited to be president. This view, by the way, they would have shared with millions of Americans, including a healthy chunk of the national political and media elite.
Mr. Trump is not a conservative, hardly even a Republican. At the same time, no candidate was so well known before he entered the political arena. Donald Trump, for 40 years, deliberately peddled an image of himself as the garish, high-living playboy-businessman. What a colleague once said of his fellow Manhattan swashbuckler Ron Perelman seemed doubly true of Mr. Trump: “His basic value is making money, money, money and collecting women.”
Whether or not FBI leadership did anything improper, its behavior could not help but be conditioned by the presumption that Mr. Trump was unacceptable to most Americans, that he was likely to lose, and that Hillary Clinton would be the next president.
But 63 million Americans disagreed; with an assist from our quirky electoral system, they made him president anyway. And now we’re having the inevitable reckoning. Simply because of the way the chips have fallen, the FBI is at the center of that reckoning.
Its leadership would have been far from human if its perceptions of Mr. Trump didn’t color its response to a succession of inherently thorny decisions about the Clinton email “matter” and about allegations of Trump-Russia connections.
The text messages and memos you’ve been reading about go straight to the key questions: Did the FBI soft-pedal its Clinton investigation because it saw her victory as inevitable and necessary? Was the agency a little too eager to exploit questionable Russian intelligence as an excuse to intervene in her case? Was it a little too keen to find grounds to suspect Trump associates of playing footsie with Vladimir Putin ?
The word we have used is not conspiracy, but cascade—a cascade of awkward decisions that amount to the FBI playing a much bigger role in the election than it possibly could have wanted. These culminated in the comeuppance that fate often reserves for the too-clever: James Comey’s pressured decision to reopen the Clinton case when the Anthony Weiner laptop surfaced, a thunderclap that inadvertently may have pushed Mr. Trump over the top.
Somewhere in her voluminous writings, the German Freudian with the unfortunate name, Karen Horney, describes the logic of neurosis as meaning that the professions attract some who are least suited to them—lawyers who are cynical about justice, doctors who enjoy suffering. That also includes journalists who constantly seek to reduce our interesting world to partisan banality.
Personally, I’ve given up trying to predict how the Trump presidency will play out, but his rise provides an opportunity to think in new ways about presidential competence. There are as many ways to be president as there have been presidents. With his big mouth, lack of discipline, and momentous baggage, it’s easy to imagine Mr. Trump not finishing his term. It’s also possible to imagine him, because of his showmanship, mercurial nature and lack of partisan conviction, becoming the antic midwife of one compromise after another to move the country forward on longstanding stalemates—its dysfunctional corporate tax system, its dysfunctional immigration system.
In any case, you are not a partisan to realize that partisan opportunism, more than any real evidence of a Trump conspiracy with Mr. Putin, drives the Russia narrative. Every president, including Donald Trump, has a duty to fight for his political existence. In our two-party system, where the parties serve as a check on each other, Republicans have a duty to help him mount a defense against those who would destroy him, at least until they decide the partisan cost of Mr. Trump exceeds the benefit.
America is a happy, prosperous, low-crime country right now by historical standards, yet something curious and transformative is happening in our politics. You are living in interesting times. Don’t miss out. Don’t make the mistake of relying too much on claptrappy, ratings-driven media institutions whose limitations become most apparent just when the story gets most interesting.
