commentarymagazine | Obama’s
FBI and former intelligence-community leaders kept open an
investigation into Trump after that investigation yielded exculpatory
evidence. Following Trump’s election, Comey, Brennan, and a host of
Obama national-security officials weaponized the allegations against
Trump by becoming pundits themselves on cable news channels and
suggesting by their very presence that they had inside information about
the Trump-Russia conspiracy—information they did not have. With few
exceptions, members of Congress and the press who should have
scrutinized their false assertions acted as an echo chamber to amplify
them.
Is it any wonder that no Republican voted to impeach Trump
in the House on the Ukraine matter? This cannot just be explained away
as political and moral cowardice. It’s a response to the failure of the
party leading the impeachment to acknowledge the falsehood of its
initial conspiracy theory about Russia.
But it also must be said
that this debacle is not evidence of a deep-state coup, as so many on
the right have alleged. There are two important reasons for this. First,
there is no singular “deep state.”
Horowitz also showed in his report
that there were FBI agents at the New York field office who were rooting
for Trump. Certainly the key deep-state figure here would be James
Comey—and if he were, why would he have mortally damaged the campaign of
Trump’s rival 10 days before the election by briefly reopening the
investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server? In any case, the
“deep-state” theory suggests there is a governmental hive mind, an
unelected bureaucracy that runs things while officials like Comey sit on
top, clueless and imagining themselves powerful.
You can see how
the “deep-state” theory might let the actual saboteurs off the hook.
Comey, McCabe, Brennan, and others had a mix of motivations for making
the decisions that they did. To say they were acting on behalf of an
unelected bureaucracy is to absolve them.
The deep-state theory
also leads those who espouse it to overreact. If the institutional rot
is this profound, then why not eliminate the FBI and CIA altogether? But
that’s a bit like calling for the abolition of a police department
after a brutality scandal. The country needs spies and lawmen to protect
us against real foreign threats. The problem with the Trump-Russia
investigation is that at the moment the investigators were receiving
exculpatory evidence, the false collusion theory became the hottest
story in the world. And that happened because the most important
evidence the FBI leadership believed was true was also briefed to media.
This
should never happen again. And, in normal times, it would not have
happened. Journalists would have maintained their initial skepticism
about the dossier. FBI lawyers would have been more vigilant about
including exculpatory information in the Page surveillance warrant.
Congressional leaders would have been more restrained in publicly
questioning the loyalty of Americans who worked for a rival political
campaign. Former intelligence officials would not have deployed innuendo
to imply that the legitimately elected president of the United States
was a traitor.
But Trump was perceived to be such a threat to the
republic that resistance was required. That resistance became a
permission structure to break longstanding rules and norms. Just
consider Clinesmith, the FBI attorney who altered an email from the CIA
to make it appear that Carter Page was not assisting the agency when he
really was. In a footnote, Horowitz quotes an instant message from
Clinesmith to a colleague the day after Trump won the election in 2016.
“I am so stressed about what I could have done differently,” he wrote.
Two weeks later he tapped out a message that ended with “Viva le [sic] resistance.”
It’s
rare that law-enforcement scandals involve officials who acknowledge
bad motives to themselves. They are almost always the result of cops and
lawyers who justify their infractions and misconduct as a necessary
means to a more noble end. From Comey to Clinesmith, the investigators
responsible for the Russia investigation really believed that Trump was a
unique threat to the republic and that they were justified in taking
the steps that they did. The problem is that their theory about Trump
and Russia was wrong, and the shortcuts they took to prove the theory
true blinded them from seeing their folly sooner.
That folly has
deformed our politics. Now, in 2020, voters are faced with a choice
between two parties led by conspiracy theorists and gaslighters. Instead
of saving America from Trump, the Resistance may have reelected him.
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