FBI and the question of quis custodiet ipsos custodes has always been with us

From AG Barr just signaled that things are about to get ugly for the Russia collusion team by Kevin R. Brock.

Brock is reading the tea leaves of an interview with AG Barr to conclude that the hypothesis that the FBI leadership committed a range of crimes in launching and sustaining an investigation of the Trump campaign without proper predication, has merit. Basically, that a federal agency acted on behalf of the sitting president/party against the other.

There has been an enormous accumulation of evidence to support that hypothesis. The open question in my mind is whether it was coordinated and authorized or whether it was an emergent order? Was it an active and structured conspiracy or was it a bunch of people acting in sympathetic concert but without overt planning and coordinated intention? I am inclined, reasonably strongly, towards the latter interpretation but for a subject which has been so extensively obfuscated, anything is possible.

“Travesty” is not a nice word. It usually is applied to gross perversions of justice, and that apparently is the context Attorney General William Barr desired when he dropped it into an interview answer the other day in the breezy courtyard of the Department of Justice (DOJ).

His composed, understated delivery almost disguised the weighty magnitude of that disturbing word and the loaded adjective that preceded it. “I think what happened to him,” he said, referring to the president and the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into his campaign, “was one of the greatest travesties in American history.”

Okay, it’s important to pause for a moment and absorb what the AG said. He just called an FBI investigation not just a travesty but one of the “greatest” travesties in the nation’s history. It was an unprecedented statement by an attorney general about his own department’s premier agency.

Fair enough. I accept that as a reasonable but speculative argument. Across the entirety of the opinion, I am in general agreement with the direction of Brock's speculation.

But there is a jarring note. Brock keeps noting how unprecedented this is.

Okay, it’s important to pause for a moment and absorb what the AG said. He just called an FBI investigation not just a travesty but one of the “greatest” travesties in the nation’s history. It was an unprecedented statement by an attorney general about his own department’s premier agency.

The FBI has made plenty of mistakes, but never in its 112-year history has an FBI investigation been characterized as a travesty, let alone one that equates to other hall-of-fame travesties in American history.

[snip]

The biased, overeager Comey and McCabe, however, opened an unprecedented full-blown investigation into a presidential campaign. Worse, Durham possibly will show that the Comey team started involving itself in questionable intelligence community activities that improperly ran confidential sources against Papadopoulos well before they officially opened a case — a potentially big no-no that, if proven, will not go well for all involved.

[snip]

This is what the Durham investigation could well conclude: A group of people aligned with or sympathetic to one political party conspired to illicitly use the authorities of the FBI to besmirch the opposing party’s presidential candidate — and that every effort should be made to indict those who can be charged as a result.

If true, such a thing has never happened before. It would represent a direct, unprecedented attack on our democracy, to fraudulently influence the voting public with lies ostensibly emanating as facts from a noble, traditionally trusted FBI. And that, indeed, would be a travesty of historical significance. One never to be repeated, we can hope, against any future president of either party.

In very narrow terms, I suppose this is correct. If Comey and McCabe did use the power of the FBI to illegally launch an investigation of one presidential candidate during a campaign to benefit the presidential candidate of the other party, with the intent to sway the election, that quite possibly is unprecedented.

But more broadly, has the head of the FBI ever attempted to interfere in American politics in order to change political outcomes? Sure, I think it is pretty well established that that used to be standard operating procedure. See the history of J. Edgar Hoover.

John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States and an American law enforcement administrator. He was appointed as the director of the Bureau of Investigation – the FBI's predecessor – in 1924 and was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director for another 37 years until his death in 1972 at the age of 77. Hoover has been credited with building the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency than it was at its inception and with instituting a number of modernizations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories.

Later in life and after his death, Hoover became a controversial figure as evidence of his secretive abuses of power began to surface. He was found to have exceeded the jurisdiction of the FBI, and to have used the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists, to amass secret files on political leaders, and to collect evidence using illegal methods. Hoover consequently amassed a great deal of power and was in a position to intimidate and threaten others, including sitting presidents of the United States.

I came back to the States in 1976, just a few years after Hoover's passing. A lot of revelations were still coming out at that time as to the range of illegalities committed by the FBI and speculation was rife as to just how much Hoover had meddled in politics through the use of politically damaging information he had amassed. His record in that regard with respect to Martin Luther King has been pretty thoroughly documented. But how many other ML Kings were there? That is less clear.

To have the same federal senior law enforcement leader remain in the same position over 48 years was clearly an extreme dereliction of legislative and administrative duty and likely a testament to Hoover's extensive power of blackmail. It was the very living embodiment of Juvenal's caution, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. Who guards the guardians?

Part of Hoover's strength was that the two main political parties were much more heterogenous then than now. Democrats ran the gamut from deeply conservative yellow dog democrats to avowed academic marxists and urban radicals while the Republican Party ranged from John Birch Society to the globalist Wall Street club of Kissinger. Left/Right ideology was much less of a partisan issue at that time. There was widespread support among parts of the Democratic Party for Hoover's actions against perceived radicals just as there was among Republicans.

There was an interlude of perhaps thirty or forty years after Hoover in which the FBI tried to reform itself and perhaps behaved better. But Comey and McCabe' actions are not unprecedented. They are a reversion to the older norm. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes remains very much as real an issue as ever. We have been fortunate that, in comparison to the crude, street-fighting brawler Hoover, Comey and McCabe come across as mean-girl nancy boys.

But effete incompetent law breaking is still just that - law breaking. And it demands judgment and appropriate punishment. Lest citizens come to believe that there are more merciful laws for the Mandarin Class which differ from those more stringently applied to regular citizens.