That’s what I’m getting from the Peter Strzok story. (Random link.) For those not following it or inclined to read links, that’s the FBI guy who played a crucial role in both the Clinton email and Trump-Russia investigations, and who had to be removed from the latter on the discovery of texts to his (also FBI) mistress expressing strongly pro-Clinton and anti-Trump sentiments. This caused a whole uproar in certain circles, which I find surprising.
Firstly, it doesn’t seem possible to mandate that all FBI or DOJ people investigating political figures be completely apolitical. Among any collection of people intelligent enough to work for these agencies you’re going to have a decent percentage who have strong opinions on political matters. I don’t see how it’s feasible to exclude all such people from these investigations - among other things, you wouldn’t necessarily even know who thinks what about politics.
Or is it just that FBI/DOJ people are required to refrain from publicizing their views to create a false pretense that they’re more apolitical than they actually are? If they are, then I don’t see why Strzok got in trouble for exchanging private texts with his mistress.
Perhaps I’m missing something in this story. But ISTM that political bias is inevitable, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it other than hire people with integrity, try to guard against it to the extent possible, and hope for the best.
Republican cops will still arrest Republicans. Democratic prosecutors will still indict Democrats. But yes, the DOJ tends to drift left and the FBI tends to drift right.
You are correct that it is probably impossible to be completely apolitical. OTOH your article mentions that he changed the description of how Clinton handled her emails from ‘grossly negligent’ to ‘extremely careless’, and that gross negligence is much more a criminal matter than extreme carelessness. I haven’t seen the texts, but it seems fair to me to see if they demonstrate a lack of effort on Strzok’s part to put aside his partisan bias.
It’s going to be a judgment call, of course. And it’s possible to be a person of integrity as well as a partisan.
It’s certainly a significant change, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything nefarious about it. It might have been the correct thing to do. (It’s not like he snuck in in middle of the night and changed some text; any number of other people - including Comey himself - would have had to sign off on that change.)
Well if he confessed in those texts that he was specifically intending to use his position to help Clinton and hurt Trump, then that’s certainly an issue - he should be fired if that’s what happened. But if all he did was reveal his like of Clinton and antipathy to Trump, then that’s his right as a citizen, I would think. I’ve not seen any reporting which suggests it was the former.
Based on how Comey talked about the deliberation process of talking about Trump and whether he was a “target”, it sounded like these sorts of issues would be hammered out in internal debates. It’s reasonably possible that the exact wording was decided by committee and it just happened to be Strzok who made the agreed-upon change.
It seems unlikely that he was a rogue agent acting on his own to rewrite a document that Comey would unsuspectingly read out in public at a later time.
This is a very hot topic among our conservative intellectual leaders, such as Sean Hannity. Now that the FBI has been proven beyond doubt to be subservient to the Hillary/Soros cabal, they are pressing for investigations into Mueller aimed at his certain firing and the disbanding of his persecution of Trump.
I was briefly pleased that such drivel had not reached our pristine pages. Alas.
It is worth discussing whether the FBI has become politicized, in the same sense that kicking your tires is usually going to reveal that your tires are pumped up, but it’s good to know if they aren’t.
The Strzok change doesn’t worry me, since it doesn’t sound like a rogue act that changed policy in any way.
It does sound like the FBI investigation into Hillary was pretty well set to lambast but not charge her on anything, from the beginning, and it was simply a matter of confirming that no major surprises were in the emails. (It sounds like there were a few classified emails, but that none of them actually contained anything sensitive, despite the classification. …So, basically, her team actually did a pretty good job of vetting things that they were sending around.) Practically speaking, all they could have done was to recommend firing her, and she’d already left. Trying to charge her when almost no one else gets charged for the crime would have been partisan.
I read another report saying that the FBI was asked to not categorize Benghazi as a terrorist attack, and they acceded, implying “bowing to political pressure”. But it’s just as possible to argue that they accepted that there was a national security/diplomatic argument that was for the better of the nation.
Currently, all the tire kicking makes it sound like the FBI is using their heads and some logic to do their job but also not waste their time on political investigations that are simple stunts. There are different partisan beliefs in the organization, leading to a difference of opinions on how to move forward on things, with the Republicans being more “Death! Death!” and the Democrats being more “Pardon! Pardon!”, but ultimately they decide what to do based on talking points out and coming to some form of consensus.
I wouldn’t mind a few more stories to come out just to confirm that impression. Certainly nothing has sounded dire to me yet, if we exclude partisan eye glasses.
FBI agents aren’t robots, and they have opinions, and political opinions, just like everybody else. But they’re also supposed to be professionals, and if you’re on a team investigating the Trump administration, its bad press for the investigation if it gets out that you’re sending messages out talking about how much you don’t like Trump.
Mueller: “This is an unbiased investigation. We just want to get to the truth, no matter where it leads.”
Reporter: “Then how come your investigators are talking about how terrible Trump is and how he needs to step down?”
Mueller: “Do you have any OTHER questions?”
It’s like that. Have whatever views you want, but your integrity will be questioned if you express strong personal views about something you’re supposed to be objective about.
The FBI recognizes confirmation bias as a potential concern in tainting their investigations and have long guarded against it – something I notice the Hannities of the world fail to note in their efforts to politicize and delegitimize the agency. It’s one reason why agents work in teams, so they can check one another’s work. Moreover, as Christopher Wray testified today, there are non-partisan Inspector Generals in place to review accusations of bias made with respect to the agency’s investigations. Such a review is currently underway about how the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails was handled.
Republicans are acting like no FBI agent ever had a political opinion or the ability to separate his or her personal views from performing his or her professional responsibilities. In reality, all government workers are required to do this if they are actually doing their jobs. Most do it just fine.
Example: I am an atheist. But during my career, that did not excuse me from administering oaths to witnesses, jurors and others that included the language, “So help you God,” as was required by custom and practice. My personal views are my own. My job was my job. I did it without introducing personal bias.
There is no culture of corruption within the FBI except the impression of one being created by Trump and his ideological cronies, for which the only permitted response in an investigation into Trump is, “Nothing to see here. Move along.” You know. Like a dictatorship.
Some of the most serious damage Trump is doing to our country is creating distrust in every institution required for a democracy to function: A free press, trustworthy law enforcement and an unbiased judicial branch. He is working to politicize all these facets of democratic culture. I fear it will take generations to recover once we are finally rid of him.
Strzok was removed from the case when Mueller found out about the texts, long before they became public.
In fact, AFAICT, the only way these texts became publically known to begin with was as a result of them being the reason Strzok was removed from the case.
But the ramifications of that would seem to be that an FBI agent or DOJ official can’t express political views even in private, because of the risk of them becoming public. And this over a non-substantive “appearance of bias” issue. That seems like quite a lot to me.