President Donald Trump shakes hands with James Comey,
director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, during an
Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders
Reception in the Blue Room of the White House ,
| Getty
From Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton, history
suggests that it is never a good thing for a
president to have the FBI, with its nearly
infinite resources and sweeping investigative
powers, on his tail.
FBI Director James Comey’s promise to the
House Intelligence Committee on Monday to
“follow the facts wherever they lead” in the
bureau’s investigation into possible collusion
between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign
and Russia during last year’s election amounted
to an ominous guarantee, barely two months
into Trump’s term, that institutional forces
beyond any president’s control will force the
facts of the case to light, whatever they are.
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“Comey’s admission of an ongoing
counterintelligence investigation, with no
endpoint in sight, is a big deal,” said historian
Timothy Naftali, who was the first director of
the federally run Nixon presidential library.
“This is not going away.”
Moreover, given Trump’s demonstrated
willingness to attack any adversary — hours
before Comey’s testimony, he tweeted that the
suggestion of collaboration between his
campaign and Russia was “fake news” —
official acknowledgment of the investigation
raises sharp new questions not only about the
president’s own credibility, but also about his
willingness to continue undermining public
trust and confidence in the government
institutions he leads.
Typically, the mere existence of such an
investigation would make any White House
hypersensitive about the appearance of
attempting to interfere with the FBI or the
Justice Department. Bill Clinton’s loathing for
his FBI director, Louis Freeh, was an open
secret in the 1990s (and the feeling was mutual),
but it couldn’t stop the bureau from doggedly
pursuing investigations of Whitewater or the
Monica Lewinsky affair. If anything, the reverse
was true.
Will the Trump White House, which is installing
loyalty monitors in every Cabinet department ,
feel similarly hamstrung about publicly
attacking Comey, whom the president famously
hugged at a Blue Room reception shortly after
his inauguration, or trying to quash the
inquiry? At a minimum, Trump and his aides
would do well to recall the most celebrated
instance of a president’s attempt to block an FBI
investigation.
FBI’s Trump-Russia probe
knocks White House on its
heels
By SHANE GOLDMACHER and MATTHEW
NUSSBAUM
“The obvious example that comes to mind is
Watergate, when Richard Nixon famously
turned to the CIA to block the FBI’s
investigation,” said the historian Julian Zelizer,
a professor at Princeton. That attempt failed
spectacularly, of course, but Zelizer added,
“This is the kind of investigation that is never
good news for an administration,” and he noted
that the current probe has already “consumed
much of the president’s time, and the doors
keep opening to bigger potential problems.”
Trump has an ambitious agenda that involves
the Justice Department on matters from
immigration to civil rights to border security.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of his
earliest and most vocal supporters, had his
choice of Cabinet positions. Sessions has
announced he would recuse himself from any
Russia-Trump investigation, but Comey went
out of his way to say that the Justice
Department had authorized him to take the
unusual step of disclosing it.
The disclosure raises questions about how
Trump will navigate his dealings with his
attorney general and the department to avoid
any suggestion of meddling in an ongoing
investigation. At least since Watergate, there
have been strict protocols covering contacts
between the White House and Justice
Department about pending investigations —
protocols that Trump’s chief of staff, Reince
Priebus, may already have violated by speaking
with Comey and Assistant FBI Director Andrew
McCabe about the Russia inquiry.
It also raises the possibility that Trump will get
bogged down in questions about the
investigation, which could adversely affect his
ability to achieve his policy goals. Even
initiatives that have nothing to do with Russia
or national security could suffer if a Republican
Congress is less inclined to fight for his
proposals, and there is also the matter of the
time and focus responding to such an inquiry
requires from the White House.
Louis Freeh, President Clinton's choice to head the FBI,
speaks as the president looks on July 20, 1993, in the Rose
Garden of the White House. The two came to dislike each
other. | AP Photo
Bill Clinton devoted much of his second term to
fending off the Lewinsky investigation and
subsequent impeachment proceedings, fueled
not only by the zealous special prosecutor
Kenneth Starr, but also by a hostile FBI. When
the Lewinsky probe was gathering steam in
1998 and Starr’s lieutenant Bob Bittmann
requested 20 FBI agents and 10 financial
analysts, “We had them the next day,” he would
recall. Freeh personally let Attorney General
Janet Reno know that he opposed the Secret
Service’s invocation of a “protective function”
privilege that would shield its agents from
having to testify about any contacts they might
have witnessed between Clinton and Lewinsky.
Trump’s aides and allies have questioned
whether the permanent professional
bureaucracy of the federal government
amounts to a “deep state,” dedicated to
undermining his policies. They should be more
concerned in the short term about a new “Deep
Throat,” like the long-anonymous source who
aided The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward’s
coverage of Watergate. The source turned out to
be Mark Felt, the No. 3 official at the FBI, a
reality that the Nixon White House caught onto
just months after the foiled break-in at
Democratic National Committee headquarters.
“Now why the hell would he do that?” Nixon
asked his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, on Oct.
19, 1972. A few months later, when Felt’s name
was floated as a possible successor to FBI
Director L. Patrick Gray, who had resigned
under fire, Nixon told his attorney general,
Richard Kleindienst, “I don’t want him. I can’t
have him.”
If Trump can take any comfort from Comey’s
latest revelation, it may be that the FBI
director’s own credibility was badly damaged
last year — first when he took the unusual step
of announcing that the bureau’s investigation
into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email
server did not warrant prosecution; then when
he announced he was revisiting the
investigation in light of potential new evidence
found on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, the
husband of Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin; and,
finally, when he declared, just days before the
election, that his original conclusion still stood.
WHITE HOUSE
5 takeaways from Comey’s
Trump takedown
By AUSTIN WRIGHT and MARTIN
MATISHAK
Trump has repeatedly shown himself willing to
breach the usual niceties of presidential
decorum and discourse. With his White House
now officially under siege by an entity
empowered to seek subpoenas to compel
testimony, it’s anybody’s guess just how the
president or his lieutenants might react. But one
thing is certain: The mood in the White House
is grim, and probably apt to get worse before it
gets better.
In September 1972, as the FBI pursued its
Watergate investigation, Nixon had some advice
for his White House counsel, John Dean, as
reported in John A. Farrell’s forthcoming book,
“Richard Nixon: The Life.” “This is war,” Nixon
said. “We’re getting a few shots and it will be
over, and we’ll give them a few shots and it will
be over. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t want to be on
the other side right now.”
The president had no idea just how wrong he
was. But the FBI did.
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