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Resistance See other Resistance Articles Title: Why the FBI might wage “war” on Trump — and how they would actually do it Why the FBI might wage “war” on Trump — and how they would actually do it Vox.com Zack Beauchamp 10 hrs ago © Provided by Vox.com It’s not often that you hear members of the FBI threatening to go to war with the president. But that’s where we are after Donald Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey. “[Trump] essentially declared war on a lot of people at the FBI,” an anonymous FBI official told the Washington Post. “I think there will be a concerted effort to respond over time in kind.” There’s every reason to believe that the FBI is as angry as this official says. Interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe on Thursday told Congress that “the vast majority of employees enjoyed a deep, positive connection to Director Comey.” Reports from inside the bureau suggest horror and rage after the firing; one agent told the Daily Beast that “everyone feels like there has been a death in the family.” The FBI values its independence from the political branches above all else, an independence directly threatened by Trump firing Comey in retaliation for the Russia investigation. Historically, the bureau has been willing to fight — and fight dirty — to stay independent. “The FBI is a tribal organization,” Ben Wittes, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, tells me. “You screw with the FBI, you screw with the institution of the FBI, and ... a lot of people are gonna be angry.” So let’s say that the official’s comments to the Washington Post are right: that we’re about to see elements of the FBI launch a full-scale offensive against Trump in retaliation for the Comey firing. I asked both Wittes, who’s very familiar with the current FBI’s practices, and Douglas Charles, a historian of the FBI at Penn State, what the FBI could actually do — in practical terms — to undermine and weaken the Trump presidency. Their answer? Quite a lot. The bureau could leak damaging information to the press. It could work more closely with Congress to strengthen the legislative probes into Russia. It could intensify its own Russia investigation, or even open new investigations into Trump and his allies. Any one of these actions, theoretically, could do serious damage to Trump’s already chaotic and politically vulnerable administration. And, according to Charles, one of them is “probably” inevitable. This is one fight the president may soon regret picking. Leaks, leaks, leaks The first and most obvious thing the FBI could do is talk to the press. “The FBI has a really long history of leaking to various outlets who could advance their own bureaucratic interests,” Charles says. “There could be some very good amount of leaking happening soon, if there’s not already.” The most famous leaker in US history — the pseudonymous Deep Throat, who gave sensitive information on the Nixon administration to Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in 1978 during the Watergate scandal — was later revealed to be Mark Felt, who was associate FBI director at the time. Interestingly, Felt’s motivation for leaking about Watergate wasn’t whistleblowing: he wasn’t motivated by some patriotic sense of duty to protect American democracy. Rather, he believed he was acting to protect the FBI’s independence from Nixon’s attempts to reign it in. “He was doing that because Nixon appointed a sycophant, L. Patrick Gray, as FBI director,” Charles explains. “He wasn’t leaking out of some sympathy for Woodward and Bernstein or Watergate, but for his own interests — to undermine Gray.” It “wouldn’t surprise me whatsoever,” Charles continued, if this were to happen again in this case. A senior FBI official decides that Trump is a threat to the FBI, and begins leaking damaging information that the FBI has on the president to reporters. That could start, obviously, with any troubling facts the FBI may have uncovered so far in the Russia investigation. In late March, CNN reported that “the FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign.” CNN didn’t say what that information was, exactly — Was it a phone call between a Trump ally and Russian intelligence? Compromising emails? — but it’s pretty likely that its release would be embarrassing for the Trump administration. And presumably there’s more where that came from, given that the FBI’s investigation into Trump and Russia has only grown in the past month and a half. These leaks wouldn’t necessarily have to be authorized at the highest levels. A few disgruntled agents with access to the right information could contact the press on their own. Indeed, that’s what appeared to happen last summer, when information about the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails kept drip-drip-dripping out of the bureau’s New York field office. “I have not seen a lot of evidence of leaks out of this Russia investigation. In fact, I haven’t really seen any,” Wittes says. But “I don’t deny the possibility that you could imagine individual agents doing that stuff [now].” Assuming the FBI investigation is as serious as it seems — and given that Acting FBI Director McCabe testified Thursday that the investigation was “highly significant,” it probably is — the information it has is likely far more specific and damning than what we’ve seen so far. Fighting them would consume huge amounts of Trump’s time and energy — and could potentially grind his legislative agenda to a halt, as Congress holds hearing after hearing on whatever the FBI tells the press. It’d be especially painful since FBI investigations usually take a long time to conclude, which means the information could continue to drip out for quite a while. The sooner it started to come to light, the sooner it would start messing up Trump’s political agenda. Poster Comment: I was watching Gen. Jack Keene on Lou Dobbs, and he said that the consensus in the FBI was that Comey was not doing his job. Is that enough reason for Trump to fire him? You bet it is. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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