Whither the FBI?

"... for the FBI was incorruptible, as they knew."

If you don't recognize that phrase, it was written by Mario Puzo in The Godfather, that sterling 1969 novel of the Mafia in the '40s and '50s.  The context being a Mafia one, it is interesting -- and Puzo researched the heck out of the topic -- that it was clear that the mob of the time, with judges and congressmen in their pockets, didn't even consider trying to infiltrate the FBI.  They assumed that not a single agent would be able to be influenced.  The context of the quote is actually why a mobster would have to use a different governmental entity to do his dirty work; the FBI was a non-starter.

I read that book around 1972, the same time when the movie of it was made.  In fact, it was what convinced me that it was really hard to capture a deeply-detailed book in a movie without having to chop out entire plot lines, characters and content.  The Godfather movie was really good, don't get me wrong, but the book was so marvelous that nothing could live up to it on the screen.

But the important part is that the Mafia thought the FBI was a brick wall as far as influence-buying and corrupting.

Is it indeed so now?

I have the most extraordinary respect for the agents of the FBI, the career servants of the USA who do the investigatory work of the Bureau and often put their lives on the line in their work.  They are heroes of the same level in the USA as the military who protect us abroad, at least to me, and the agents I have known over the years are amazing individuals.

Of course, the FBI is a Federal agency.  As such, it has a layering of its management to where its highest official, the Director (Christopher Wray at the moment) and several levels below are political appointees.  That means that above the lower level of dedicated agents and agents in charge, the efforts of the FBI are overseen and controlled by people assigned to their positions for political reasons or based on their political positioning, along with their capability and experience.

We would like to think that sort of thing has no effect on investigations, but after the last year, we are convinced otherwise.  We look at the machinations during the 2016 election, where 99.99% of prosecutors would at least have put the Hillary Clinton email BleachBitting scandal before a grand jury.  James Comey, the politically-appointed Director at the time, not only declined to do so (after calling a press conference and announcing some of the evidence that any prosecutor would have taken forward) but grandstanded for months.

We still have Federal agencies full of political appointees -- appointed by Barack Obama -- whose replacement appointees the Democrat minority in the Senate has slow-rolled as far as they can, to prevent President Trump from having a government which is responsive to his policies.

The problem in the FBI is the comparison to the military.  Sure, the Secretary of Defense is a political appointee, and the undersecretaries are also political, but there is a tremendous senior corps of governance -- the general officers -- who came up through the ranks and are a huge voice inside Defense for proper use of the military -- we know our generals and admirals, but the Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force, all politically appointed, are relatively anonymous.

The FBI also has a solid, senior level of career agents.  But let's face it, all through 2016 there was plenty of talk that if Hillary Clinton was not at least put in front of a grand jury, many of the agents who worked on the case, and who had a pretty good sense that there was more than enough evidence -- and destruction of evidence -- to have a good case, would resign from the Bureau in protest.

Whether 100 did, or 50 or only one left the Bureau is not known, and certainly wouldn't be made known, regardless of who was the Director.  But what did happen is that the reputation of the FBI as incorruptible took a big hit.  If the Director could not be relied upon to put forth a case that 150 agents had worked on and developed, then the public would quickly change its attitude about the incorruptibility of the Bureau -- after all, the public does not readily distinguish between the dedicated agent corps and their political leadership.

I wonder now what the agents who worked the Email-gate case last year think, as we see public pressure for the Bureau to investigate the heck out of the Hillary-selling-uranium-to-Russia-for-$150M-to-the-Foundation-and $500K-to-Bill's-wallet scandal.

The agent corps is, of course, not particularly sympathetic to Hillary, at least when they go home for the day; they know corruption when they smell it.  We know the facts of the case, in terms of uranium committed, payments made, etc.  There is a lot to investigate, in stark contrast to the Donald Trump "RussiaRussiaRussia" election conspiracy nothingburger that still has a special prosecutor but no evidence of anything having happened.

So we will keep our eyes on the FBI as Uranium-gate hangs on in the part of the press willing to air it (i.e., only Fox News).  I hope the current Director realizes that the reputation of the Bureau is far more at risk than it has ever been before, and that an unimpeded investigation of that apparent corruption and a real prosecution is necessary.

Otherwise, Puzo's observation may be an anachronism.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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