In this article about Trump’s house being searched, it says that , as standard procedure, the White House is given no knowledge of such issues.He gives the example of a major FBI investigation of Chinese spying, which George Bush was never told about.
Every president gets a daily briefing of top-secret security info. Spying by the Chinese is pretty important information, isn’t it? Why would the FBI not notify the President?
Now, I can see why a simple criminal investigation/search of Trump’s private house might not be reported to the President. But this is apparently not a simple criminal case–it involves papers containing top-secret security information. It seems like the raid on Mar-a-Lago should have been mentioned.
The president is , ultimately, the “commander-in-chief” of the FBI, just like the military. Why would he not be told about issues of national security?
Several reasons can apply but “leaks” is always a major concern. No big secret that leaks come from the WH as well as most any govt agency. Plus plausible deniability is something as well. The FBI should not have to fill the sitting president in on their investigations.
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States;
The FBI is not an Army or Navy not is it a militia in actual service of the US.
I typed “commander-in-chief” in quote marks, because I was coining a phrase. What I meant was the the FBI is a national agency, so the President has ultimate authority over it.
Simple principle - the Department of Justice is supposed to apply the law without fear or favor - it is not an arm of the White House, to do or not do what the president tells them to do - i.e. the president is not their commander in chief. His responsibility lies in appointing the administrator of the Department of justice and telling him/her “go do a good job”.
Same logic that a member of the Supreme Court, or Congress, or the White House cannot call a judge up and say “you will render the verdict as follows”, the administraton of Justice is best served by the rest of the government not meddling in the details of who is investigated or charged or how.
So why not just tell the president? Same reason they don’t tell the Chicago DA’s office or the Los Angeles office or the Phoenix office, unless those offices have to participate in the investigation. As mentioned - leaks are important. Leaks tell the suspect and cronies whether they should be hiding stuff and what to hide, taint a future jury pool, or worse may implicate by innuendo an innocent person. Hence the standard line “we don’t talk about details of investigations” and “We don’t talk about specific cases”.
The only logical reason the president would need to know would be the political implications, and the political implications should be irrelevant to the administration of justice.
I don’t recall hearing what time the White House was informed - I assume at the time it was under way and about to hit the news anyway, but not before it happened.
Plus, Biden would want to distance himself as far as possible from the raid, so someone couldn’t say he was involved or even knew about it in advance. Plausible deniability.
We’re living in a dangerous time if the law is finally being run in a just and proper way and people have to ask why that should be happening.
Yes, other presidents used the FBI for their own purposes. Other Attorney Generals were in the core of the president’s political team. Other presidents fired their AG and FBI heads when they didn’t do everything the president wanted.
That behavior was called wrong and supposed to have ended. It apparently has. Good.
More than being irrelevant, the political implications are exactly why the President shouldn’t have been told ahead of time. The old saying, “Justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done” applies. No matter what the facts are of the case, were the President to be involved, even tangentially, in the advance planning of a raid on his political rivals, there will be accusations of political interference. And possibly not just from the President’s opponents.
The Trumpers were going to moan and whine about this no matter what the FBI did, but this way, at least us normal people can have confidence that the FBI’s actions were based on real police work, and not a political witch hunt.
Biden did make a declaration back when he was campaigning that he would not personally go after Trump. Apparently it was during the fifth Democratic debate.
Joe Biden said on Wednesday that he would not order his administration to investigate Donald Trump if the former vice president is elected in 2020.
“Look, I would not direct my Justice Department like this president does. I would let them make their independent judgment,” Biden said during the fifth Democratic debate in Atlanta.
“I would not dictate who should be prosecuted or who should be exonerated. That’s not the role of the president of the United States,” Biden said.
So his staff probably remembered that pledge and when it came to setting up protocols for Department of Justice briefings specified that the President should be kept at arms-length from any investigations of Trump.
Here is a historical example of why you don’t suck the White House into a politically sensitive investigation, no matter how “hugely important” it seems:
Because the DOJ should do its work without the interference of the President, so as not to be accused of merely doing the President’s bidding for political reasons. This is especially important in “hugely important” investigations that may have political ramifications.
He has authority to fire every political appointee at the head and for several levels down at the agency. He has the legal power to direct their activities or to replace them (subject to the advice and consent of the Senate, or temporarily under statutory authority) if they will not do as he directs. But, we live in a nation of laws the polity expects that the DOJ should not be politicized and exploited as an administration tool to punish the President’s enemies. The President has the authority but he should not use it. To his credit, Biden seemingly has not.
The senior Justice Department source says that Garland was regularly briefed on the Records Act investigation, and that he knew about the grand jury and what material federal prosecutors were seeking. He insists, though, that Garland had no prior knowledge of the date and time of the specific raid, nor was he asked to approve it.
As I recall, there’s a limit to this. When Barr tried to replace the NY DA with an unqualified person, it was not possible and instead the second in command took over when the NY DA resigned.
Also, poetic justice - the person who stepped up to become the Attorney General and do Nixon’s bidding that Saturday night was Robert Bork, who later was denied a seat on the Supreme Court by the senate. Not many nominees to SCOTUS lose their up-and-down vote in the Senate.
It’s a misleading analogy. Of course the commander-in-in-chief of a military is briefed on major military operations.
But it’s exactly the opposite with the Justice system. The higher up you go in the political branch, the less they should know about day-to-day operations of the police and the prosecutors, because you don’t want any suggestion that the police and prosecutors take their instructions from the political higher-ups.
Using a military comparison confuses the issues right out the gate.
Correct. And as AK84 points out, the definition of the President’s powers draws a clear distinction between the President’s control over the military part of the executive branch, and the civil branch.
The President is the commander-in-chief of the military, not of the executive as a whole. The military power is a command structure; the civil power is more nuanced.
Since the Constitution itself draws a distinction, and restricts the term “commander-in-chief” to the military, it is misleading to try to use that term when discussing the President’s power over the civil part of the executive.
Just to elaborate on this, the President is sometimes referred to as the Chief Executive of the United States. That’s not what the Constitution states. The actual text in Article II, Section 1 is:
The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.
But it’s pretty clear that the writers of the Constitution meant that the President would be the man in charge of the Executive branch. Note that this role is the first one mentioned. That means that being chief executive is the primary role - more important than his role as commander-in-chief.
So why is the language in the two sections different? I’ve read that the writers of the Constitution expected Congress to be much more hands-on in directing the government. Note that Article I describes the powers of the legislature before Article II describes the power of the executive. However they recognised that directing a military in times of war would require quick decisions and could be better done by an individual, rather than a large body of men. Even so, the duty of both executive and commander-in-chief is expresses in the first statement of each of the sections, emphasizing the importance of both roles.
That says, to me at least, that the writers of the Constitution expected the President to carry out his duties as chief executive and commander-in-chief in the same ways. As commander-in-chief, the President would consult with Congress, and then provide direction to the generals and admirals. As chief executive, Congress would have a stronger advisory involvement, but the President would still provide directions to his cabinet and other executive branch leaders.
So in line with this thread, I disagree that the President is constitutionally constrained to have less powers directing any part of the executive branch than he does directing the military. If the President chooses to have a high level of involvement in directing the response to a health crisis, that’s within his power. Similarly, If the President chooses to have a high level of involvement in directing the Department of Justice response to criminality, it’s equally within his power. There may be other historical policies or conventions such that the President chooses not to make full use of his powers. But they aren’t constitutional limitations.