By David French
Tuesday, December 05, 2017
If the story hadn’t been verified by virtually every
mainstream-media outlet in the country, you’d think it came straight from conspiratorial
fever dreams of the alt-right. Yesterday, news broke that Robert Mueller had
months ago asked a senior FBI agent to step down from his role investigating
the Trump administration. This prince of a man was caught in an extramarital
affair with an FBI lawyer. The affair itself was problematic, but so was the
fact that the two were found to have exchanged anti-Trump, pro-Hillary Clinton
text messages.
Here’s where the story gets downright bizarre. This
agent, Peter Strzok, also worked with FBI director James Comey on the Clinton
email investigation. In fact, he was so deeply involved in the Clinton
investigation that he is said to have interviewed Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin,
and to have been present when the FBI interviewed Clinton. According to CNN, he
was part of the team responsible for altering the FBI’s conclusion that Clinton
was “grossly negligent” in handling classified emails (a finding that could
have triggered criminal liability) to “extremely careless” — a determination
that allowed her to escape prosecution entirely.
After the Clinton investigation concluded, Strzok signed
the documents opening the investigation into Russian election interference and
actually helped interview former national-security adviser Michael Flynn.
In other words, it looks like a low-integrity, reckless,
biased bureaucrat has played an important role in two of the most important and
politically charged criminal investigations of the new century. Yes, it’s good
that Mueller removed Strzok when he discovered the text messages. No, Strzok is
not solely responsible for the conclusions reached in either investigation. But
his mere presence hurts public confidence in the FBI, and it does so in a way
that further illustrates a persistent and enduring national problem: America’s
permanent bureaucracy is unacceptably partisan.
Remember President Obama’s second term, when the IRS Tea
Party–targeting scandal erupted? The bureaucrat at the fulcrum of the scandal,
Lois Lerner, was unabashedly partisan, launching a comprehensive and
unconstitutional inquiry into conservative groups even as she was “joking” that
“she wanted to work for the pro-Obama group Organizing for America.”
It’s hard to overstate the effect of the IRS scandal on
conservative confidence in the federal government. Yes, there were some
progressive groups that faced scrutiny, but the sheer scale of the attack on
conservative groups was unprecedented. The IRS sought confidential donor
information, passwords, and information about the political activities even of family members of those involved with
some scrutinized groups. I remember. I represented dozens of these
organizations.
When it came time to launch a criminal investigation of
the IRS, the Obama Department of Justice put an Obama
donor in charge of the probe. The decision to offer her the job was
inexcusable, as was her decision to accept. At a time when half the country was
losing confidence in the integrity of its public servants, the Obama
administration raised its hand and extended a big middle finger.
While there are certainly some biased, partisan
conservatives in the federal bureaucracy, the ideological imbalance in the
civil service is striking. It’s not quite at university-faculty levels, but
it’s getting close.
For example, in the 2016 election cycle, Hillary Clinton
received an astounding 95 percent of all federal-employee donations. The Hill created
two charts that show the staggering disparity, in total and by department:
The danger here isn’t just the kind of naked display of
partisan bias that we saw in the Obama IRS. It’s also the emergence of
groupthink. As we know from other liberal-dominated enclaves, such as academia
and the mainstream media, ideological uniformity can lead to a startling degree
of ignorance and incompetence. It’s hard to govern (or educate, or report on)
an entire country when you aren’t sufficiently exposed to contrary perspectives
and experiences.
For more than a year, I’ve been challenging conservative
readers to look at Trump’s actions and imagine how they’d react if Democrats
were behaving the same way — to apply the same standards to their team that
they’d apply to their opponents. Now, I want to challenge my progressive
readers: Consider how you would respond to the federal bureaucracy with the
opposite ideological imbalance. Would you have confidence that it would apply
the law and Constitution fairly? Would you be alarmed if you found that a
senior FBI agent so biased and reckless was playing a key role in the
investigation of a Democratic president?
I’m no “deep state” or “soft coup” conspiracy theorist. I
know there are progressives who do excellent work in the bureaucracy, and I
know there are also incompetent conservatives. As we’ve learned, incompetence,
bias, and sleaziness know no ideological bounds. But unless our nation can
diversify its civil service (and unless civil servants themselves stop acting
recklessly and foolishly) public trust will continue to erode, and everything
will be viewed through a partisan lens, all the time.
It is to Robert Mueller’s credit that he took swift
action against Strzok. It’s a problem that, as the Wall Street Journal observes, he “kept this information from House
investigators.” For a critical mass of the public to have confidence in
Mueller’s investigation, it must be as transparent and accountable as humanly
possible. A proper investigation into Russian interference in our election is
vital to the health of our democracy. A biased and opaque probe, however, will
do far more harm than good.
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