FBI’s Weaselgate
by George Neumayr
February 19, 2019, 12:05 AM
Andrew McCabe’s book is tilted The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump, as if to say Trump is part of the terror. The real upshot of the book is that the politicized ranks of the FBI under James Comey and McCabe were too afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome to protect America from real threats. Those ranks took their eyes off real threats and concocted a phony one about Trump and Russia, behaving like members of a cult who turned to retaliation after their dear leader fell in a wholly justified firing.
In his recent interviews, McCabe has talked about the firing of Comey as a crisis of the greatest proportions. It wasn’t. Trump had the constitutional authority to fire him and plenty of grounds to do so. He was under no obligation to retain an FBI director chosen by his predecessor. Comey’s tenure had been marked by unprofessional behavior, and Trump was correct in recognizing that Comey had signed off on unfounded investigations unfairly targeting his campaign and White House. Why should a chief executive let a department of his own branch of government hobble his presidency and treat him like a criminal? What the media insists on calling “obstruction of justice†is nothing more than the ordinary self-defense any chief executive would practice if he saw the executive branch in the hands of political hacks who hated him and were misusing their powers.
Instead of jumping to wild conclusions about Trump’s motives, FBI and Justice Department officials should have seen the firing of Comey as an obvious and legitimate exercise of Trump’s constitutional authority and just gone back to real work. Trump, if anything, has shown too much deference to the Justice Department and the FBI during their torments of him. Under most presidencies, the double-dealing Rod Rosenstein would have been fired a long time ago. He emerges from McCabe’s account as one of the chief weasels. According to McCabe, Rosenstein offered to wear a wire to try and catch Trump out in a crime and discussed using the 25th amendment to oust him. Under any other president, those would be automatic firing offenses. But the pressures of the Mueller investigation make it impossible for Trump to control his own Justice Department.
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https://spectator.org/fbis-weaselgate/
