Trumps Brazen War on the FBI Defies History

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The president is attacking one of the government's most conservative institutions—and the Republicans have his back.

In announcing the release of a declassified four-page memo prepared by the House Intelligence Committee, which he chairs, Representative Devin Nunes said, “The committee has discovered serious violations of the public trust, and the American people have a right to know when officials in crucial institutions are abusing their authority for political purposes. Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies exist to defend the American people, not to be exploited to target one group on behalf of another.”

As The New Republic’s Matt Ford explains, the memo does not support Nunes’s allegations, let alone justify the hype that preceded it from Fox News and other right-wing outlets. But its release on Friday is still an important event: the latest skirmish in the war that Trump and his allies in Congress are waging against the FBI.

FBI Director Christopher Wray had told the White House he opposed making the memo public, and the FBI released a statement saying it has “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” But Trump had other ideas. Early Friday morning, he tweeted an attack on the FBI and the Department of Justice:

Link to tweet

It’s unprecedented for any president to attack the FBI so brazenly, but it’s especially unusual for a Republican president to accuse the FBI, one of the most conservative of federal agencies, of being anti-Republican. This is, of course, a deliberate strategy to undermine the investigation against him, which New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg on Thursday compared to Republicans’ attacks on climate science and the mainstream media. “And now, to protect Trump, the right has expanded its war on empiricism to that most conservative of institutions, the F.B.I.,” Goldberg wrote.


More: https://newrepublic.com/article/146932/trumps-brazen-war-fbi-defies-history