Trump's successful neutering of the FBI's Kavanaugh investigation has scary implications [View all]

[babylonsister]

Trump’s successful neutering of the FBI’s Kavanaugh investigation has scary implications
A proof of concept for further erosion of the FBI.
By Matthew Yglesias@[e-mail] Oct 8, 2018, 10:00am EDT


Donald Trump’s instinct was right. A loyal FBI is worth a purge or two.

Case in point: Brett Kavanaugh is an associate justice on the Supreme Court.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, installed after Trump fired James Comey for refusing to limit the scope of the Russia investigation, said and did nothing as the White House ordered limits on a reopened background check of Kavanaugh.

The bureau agreed not to interview Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford, who accused him of sexually assaulting her, or to respond to many people stepping forward with new information. They agreed not to follow up on possible lies Kavanaugh is accused of telling in his Senate testimony. And they made other concessions unknown to the public or even Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

According to the New York Times’s reporting, White House lawyer Don McGahn made sure relevant questions went deliberately unexplored because, he believed, “a wide-ranging inquiry like some Democrats were demanding — and Mr. Trump was suggesting — would be potentially disastrous for Judge Kavanaugh’s chances of confirmation to the Supreme Court.”

At the end of the one-week deadline, the FBI handed a document to Congress that didn’t seek to clarify seriously the veracity of the accusations against Kavanaugh, but its existence gave Republicans the cover they wanted to back him anyway.

The upshot is that the independent FBI established after Watergate and whose existence everyone reaffirmed during Wray’s confirmation process is now dead. Other senior FBI leaders have already been purged, and Trump’s shameful treatment of Peter Strzok, Bruce Ohr, and others has made it clear that he has no compunction about ordering further purges.

Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court dealt a serious blow to the integrity of the Court — and the implications of how he got there go well beyond to the entire legal order.

Bye-bye, Bob Mueller

The White House got away with stamping on an FBI investigation. Think of it as a dry run for a coming shutdown of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/8/17947614/kavanaugh-fbi-investigation