Abolish the FBI
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In ignoring the latest John Durham indictment, most of the media and official
Washington are ignoring the elephant between its lines: the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.Mr. Durham, the special counsel appointed to investigate the government’s
handling of the Russia collusion mess, levels a single criminal charge against
Michael Sussmann, then a lawyer for the Democrat-linked firm Perkins Coie. In
delivering to the FBI fanciful evidence of Trump-Russia collusion a few weeks
before the 2016 election, Mr. Sussmann is alleged to have lied to the FBI’s chief
lawyer, James Baker, claiming he was acting on his own behalf and not as a paid
agent of the Clinton campaign.Already you might be rolling your eyes. Mr. Durham provides ample reason in his
own indictment for why the FBI would have known exactly whom Mr. Sussmann was working for. If Mr. Sussmann didn’t lie at the time, Mr. Baker may have lied since about what transpired between him and Mr. Sussmann. Either way, we are free to suspect the FBI would have
found it useful to be protected from inconvenient knowledge about the
Clinton campaign’s role. The same FBI then was busy ignoring the political antecedents of the Steele dossier, also financed by Mr. Sussmann’s law firm on behalf of the Clinton campaign,
Michael Sussmann during a cybersecurity conference in Washington, Oct. 6, 2016.Information that the FBI would shortly withhold from a surveillance court in
pursuit of a warrant to spy on Trump pilot fish Carter Page.
Mr. Durham, in describing the Sept. 19, 2016, meeting with Mr. Baker, suggests
that a properly informed FBI might have thought twice before opening an
investigation into Mr. Sussmann’s phony story about the Trump Organization and
Russia’s Alfa Bank. This is a way also of saying the FBI might have found it harder
to proceed without the political deniability that Mr. Sussmann’s alleged statement
provided.
At this late date, none of this can be consumed without recognizing that the FBI
was already hip-deep in the 2016 election. It began a few weeks earlier with
Director James Comey’s insubordinate, improper (according to the Justice
Department’s own inspector general) intervention in the Hillary email case. We
learned much later that Mr. Comey justified this unprecedented action by
referring to secret Russian “intelligence” that his FBI colleagues considered a red
herring and possible Russian disinformation. Your eyes should really be rolling
now.Mr. Comey thereupon created the preposterous jam for himself when new information surfaced in the Hillary case, which led him to reopen the case shortly before Election Day and likely tipped the race to Mr. Trump. Of course the “new
information” turned out to be a nothingburger. Worse, the information had been sitting unnoticed in the FBI’s hands for weeks.These antic actions, along with the subsequent FBI leakfest aimed at undermining the president it just helped to elect, might be written off as a singular consequence of Mr. Comey’s overweened sense of importance.
But this doesn’t explain the FBI’s top counterintelligence deputy, Peter Strzok,
engaging in compromising political banter on an FBI network while playing a
central role in the FBI’s most politically sensitive investigations. It doesn’t explain
FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith’s criminal act of falsifying agency submissions to the
surveillance court.Ask yourself: In what way, in anyone’s memory, has the FBI covered itself in glory?
The Larry Nassar case, in which it failed to pursue a serial abuser of teenage
gymnasts? The Noor Salman case, in which it trumped up a failed prosecution of
the innocent and abused wife of the Orlando nightclub shooter? The Hatfill case,
in which it attempted to railroad an innocent scientist over the 2001 anthrax
attacks?Ironically, Hollywood is now the FBI’s biggest devotee because the agency’s
screw-ups are fodder for its best movies. The FBI’s role in the assassination of
Black Panther Fred Hampton was the subject of “Judas and the Black Messiah.” Its
persecution of an innocent security guard in the Atlanta Olympics bombing was
the theme of “ Richard Jewell. ” Its cosseting of the criminal psychopath Whitey
Bulger was a central pillar of the Johnny Depp film “Black Mass. -
