Is Reckless Comey Seeking Revenge on Critics via FBI Twitter Account?
By Adele M. Stan [1]
AlterNet [2], November 1, 2016
http://www.alternet.org/print/election-2016/reckless-comey-seeking-revenge-critics-fbi-twitter-account
Something very dangerous is happening in the Federal Bureau of
Investigation: The nation’s foremost law enforcement agency appears to be at
war both within itself and with the Department of Justice, of which it is a
part. The disagreements all involve our national politics, and the FBI’s
appropriate role in them, leaving the American people with yet another major
institution on their do-not-trust list. The government is coming ever more
undone.
The chaos at the FBI and in the Justice Department burst into public view on
Friday, October 28, 11 days before the 2016 presidential election is
scheduled to take place. That’s when FBI Director James Comey
issued--against the wishes of DoJ officials and counter to department
guidelines--his now-infamous letter informing the chairmen of eight
congressional committees that agents investigating a possible sex crime by
former congressman Anthony Weiner had found emails on his computer--to and
from his estranged wife Huma Abedin--that may be pertinent to the bureau’s
investigation of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a
private email server during her tenure as secretary of state. (Then, as she
is now, Abedin was a Clinton aide.) He hadn’t seen the emails, he said, and
didn’t know what was in them, leaving a lot of people scratching their heads
and wondering if he just wasn’t trying to sway the election.
In the meantime, as noted in a letter to Comey from Senate Minority Leader
Harry Reid, the FBI was investigating links [3] between the Republican
presidential nominee Donald Trump and the government of Russia. There again,
it may well be that the FBI hasn’t uncovered any actionable information, but
its director has not seen fit to write a letter to Congress in order to
inform committee chairs that it has discovered a server used by the Trump
Organization, possibly to conduct [4] traffic between itself and the Alfa
Bank of Russia.
According to news reports, the Bureau has also investigated [5] the Trump
Organization’s use of the server, but doesn’t know what’s been transmitted
on it. Kind of like Anthony Weiner’s laptop, except that it involves a
foreign government that is also believed by leaders of U.S. intelligence
agencies to be behind the hacks of the emails of the Democratic National
Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the chairman
of the Hillary Clinton for President campaign. (The Intercept published an
article Tuesday claiming to debunk the theory [6] of the "Trump server"
communicating with Alfa Bank.)
So it seems that, from a law enforcement perspective, the FBI behaved
properly in not sending word to Congress about the server, or any as-of-yet
unproven links between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. But that same
standard was not applied in the case of the Weiner laptop.
It’s been reported that Comey was feeling pressure not just from Republicans
who are furious with him for not indicting Clinton for her use of her
private server for the conduct of government business, but also from his own
agents. And it would seem that Comey feels stung by the criticism he’s
taking from Democrats regarding the letter he sent to Congress on Friday.
Now comes word, via Devlin Barrett of the Wall Street Journal [7], that
agents who were investigating allegations of influence-peddling involving
the Clinton Foundation were incensed when higher-ups at the Justice
Department urged them to tread carefully so as to adhere to department
guidelines against taking action that could influence an election, and that
members of the Department’s anti-corruption unit didn’t think the FBI had a
strong case.
It seems as if whoever controls a Bureau Twitter account called
@FBIRecordsVault [8] has struck back against all those Clinton surrogates
who are calling foul on Comey. The account, whose purpose is the posting of
documents released through Freedom of Information Act requests, appears to
have been dead for a year--no postings since October 7, 2015. Suddenly, on
Tuesday, it sprang to life with a handful of posts, one a nothing-burger on
Fred Trump, father of the Republican standard-bearer, and another on an old
investigation of the Clinton Foundation [9] and President Bill Clinton’s
pardon of Marc Rich, then a fugitive hedge-fund manager whose wife had
donated to the DNC and the Clinton Foundation. It was Comey who brought the
criminal case against Rich, Bloomberg News reports [9], and is said to have
been "stunned" by Clinton’s pardon of the financier. The documents linked to
in the tweet don’t say much of anything, but the tweet itself does reinforce
in the public mind the controversies advanced by Clinton’s enemies about the
foundation. It's not the fact of the tweet that's at issue--the material was
released via FOIA--but the timing of it from an account that was only
reactivated on Sunday.
Over the years, leaders and members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
have given the American people many reasons from which to draw the
conclusion that, in matters involving the American political landscape and
the people who inhabit it, the Bureau cannot be trusted.
Among them, of course, are the FBI’s attempts to undermine Rev. Martin
Luther King at the height of the civil rights movement, and the bureau’s
infiltration of civil rights and anti-war groups in the 1960s through its
COINTELPRO [10] operation, and a similar operation that targeted the
American Indian Movement.
In subsequent years, the Bureau was seen as more or less chastened and
rehabilitated, thanks to the 1976 Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States
Senate, popularly known as the Church Committee (named for its chairman,
Sen. Frank Church of Idaho).
Now we have entered a new era, one in which the director of the FBI is
acting so recklessly as to harm the very process of democracy--either that,
or he's lost control of the agents he's supposed to be leading. Either way,
he's made a choice to let chaos reign in the closing days of a presidential
campaign.
Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's senior Washington editor, and a weekly columnist
for The American Prospect. Follow her on Twitter @addiestan [11].
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Revenge on Critics via FBI Twitter Account? [12]
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Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/reckless-comey-seeking-revenge-critics-fbi-twitter-account
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/adele-m-stan
[2] http://alternet.org
[3]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/veteran-spy-gave-fbi-info-alleging-russian-operation-cultivate-donald-trump
[4]
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/was_a_server_registered_to_the_trump_organization_communicating_with_russia.html
[5]
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/fbi-russia-election-donald-trump.html?_r=0
[6]
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/01/heres-the-problem-with-the-story-connecting-russia-to-donald-trumps-email-server/
[7]
http://www.wsj.com/articles/laptop-may-include-thousands-of-emails-linked-to-hillary-clintons-private-server-1477854957
[8] https://twitter.com/FBIRecordsVault
[9]
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-11-01/fbi-surprises-with-files-on-bill-clinton-01-pardon-of-marc-rich
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
[11] http://www.twitter.com/addiestan
[12] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Su
