J. Edgar's Unworthy Heirs

The FBI has been a totally political organization ever since it founder, J. Edgar Hoover, used information his agents found to blackmail presidents and other powerful people to keep his job.

Some journalists have said that J. Edgar Hoover would "turn over in his grave" if he could see the lawless activities of the current generation of FBI leaders. We agree, but not for their stated reason: If Director Hoover was legendary for one thing, it was for competence.  Not always competence at catching actual criminals, necessarily, although his FBI did pioneer many modern crime-fighting techniques and was able to successfully lock up a fair number of genuine nogoodniks over the years.

But when it came to effectively holding secrets over the heads of everyone rich and powerful in the entire country, Director Hoover had no peer.  Only his death freed our politicians from his icy grip.  Ever since, politicians and bureaucrats have lusted after his so amply-demonstrated kind of power, and being the abnormally ambitious humans that they are, they're willing to do most anything to get it.

It's becoming more and more clear that the Obama administration weaponized the FBI to try to win the 2016 Presidential election for Hillary, Mr. Obama's anointed successor.  This wasn't terribly hard because of the way Washington works: his willing accomplices all knew that once she won, their lawless acts would be shoved under the rug and their lawbreaking would be rewarded instead of punished.

The Clintons have been known for doing that for decades, both to reward and to punish: corrupt and conscienceless hacks like Terry McAullife and Rahm Emanuel are rewarded with powerful offices, whereas people who annoy the Clintons have a peculiar habit of coming to sticky ends.  As rich as Mr. Trump professed himself to be, real Washingtonians know that the joys of a fat bank account are nothing compared to the sheer glee of wielding power over the reins of an almighty government, so they knew which side would inevitably prove victorious.

When to their utter shock and amazement Mr. Trump won, the conspirators had a series of seizures and mental breakdowns that haven't totally died out.  As soon as partial sanity returned, though, they all realized that if Mr. Trump started investigating what they had done, they were in deep trouble - after all, nobody knows as well as they do just what destruction the power of government can wreak!  Accordingly, they have done their very best to destroy his presidency, not just because of philosophical differences, but out of sheer self-preservation.

The Wages of Sin

It isn't working out all that well for them.  There was a conspiracy with the Russians, but like Ted Kennedy's conspiracy to try to get the Russians to help defeat President Reagan, it involved Democrats not Republicans.  The true conspiracy, apparent to all America save the far left, involved Hillary letting the Clinton Foundation accept millions in bribes in return for permission for the Russians to buy a major portion of our uranium assets - which sour deal when down while Mr. Mueller himself was head of the FBI.  This was made worse when the Clinton campaign paid Fusion Research to dig up dirt on Mr. Trump which was released before the election.

Although Mr. Trump was roundly ridiculed when he accused the Obama administration of wiretapping Trump Tower, it turns out that he was correct.  The leaks of his telephone calls and the unnecessary unmasking of American citizens who were recorded while talking to foreign nationals being monitored is indefensible, inarguable, un-American - and, for our leftist media, all but unprintable.  Yet America knows anyway.

The swamp dwellers were right to fear.  Mr. Trump fired FBI Director Comey.  Being fired by the hated Mr. Trump turned Mr. Comey into a Democrat hero - until he admitted the highly political reasons why he had notified everyone that the FBI investigation of her email server had been restarted when classified emails had been found on Anthony Weiner's laptop 10 days before the election.  Even the left finds this odious.

Mr. Comey tries to present himself as the sole guardian of the FBI's reputation for being "above politics," but his politically-driven decision to prevent Hillary's prosecution by soft-pedaling her server investigation gives the lie to his claim of being an honest non-partisan.  To name but one glaring discrepancy, the FBI was refused access to the DNC mail server which was said to have been hacked to reveal embarrassing emails from the Clinton campaign. Some analysts have claimed that the server was never hacked at all and that the emails were downloaded and revealed by a whistle-blower in the Clinton camp. Why didn't the FBI push harder for a close look at it to figure out what really happened?  Maybe they didn't really want to know?

Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe was forcibly retired for illegal leaking and repeatedly lying under oath, and the Inspector General has now recommended that criminal charges be filed against him.  On the evidence presented, a day in court is clearly appropriate, and the threat of going to jail might induce him to continue his many statements about the falsehood of Mr. Comey's statements about him.

FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who repeatedly texted anti-Trump sentiments while investigating both Hillary and Mr. Trump, was reassigned and demoted.  Her paramour and texting partner, senior agent Peter Strzok, was reassigned and demoted along with her.

That's not all.  FBI general counsel James Baker has been replaced.  The former FBI director's chief of staff, James Rybicki, resigned.  Mike Kortan, FBI assistant director for public affairs, took retirement; one hopes we can claw back his pension.

Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr was reassigned and demoted.  The Justice Department's counterintelligence head, David Laufman, resigned, perhaps because of fears of having to answer for gross abuse of the FISA process.  Many others have "unexpectedly" left government "service" for one unconvincing reason or another.  So many high-level career implosions do not happen without a good reason - perhaps a desire to stay out of view and out of jail?

Mr. McCabe, and others who are beginning to tell the public what happened, have inadvertently made it clear that the rot went far higher than the top of the FBI.

The Washington Times confirms that Attorney General Holder and Mr. Obama pressed the FBI to hold back on some of their investigations.

"Eric Holder waged an anti-police campaign that he believed in," said J. Christian Adams, who served as an attorney in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division from 2005 through 2010. "He was so successful in merging his ideology with the Justice Department some people there didn't even realize he was doing it."

"Holder and Lynch totally politicized the Justice Department," said Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department attorney who now works with The Heritage Foundation. "There was no compunction about interfering with a criminal investigation."

Having blackmailed his way to keeping 8 successive presidents from dismissing him, J. Edgar was fully aware of the political uses of the FBI; he wouldn't bat an eyelash at anything these swamp denizens have attempted.  He'd be appalled, however, at the clumsy, ineffective, and above all, visible ways his unworthy successors went about it.

After all, as the Clintons know well, "It's not illegal unless you get caught" - and often not even then.  Director Hoover was never caught because he was always careful to ensure that outing his activities would be far more costly to whoever might have the power and opportunity to catch him, than it would be to him.

As we've pointed out, American voters no longer care much about theft or sexual sins, assuming they ever did.  That makes traditional blackmail much less effective, so other means such as anonymous leaks and outright lies have become necessary in exercising illegitimate power.  J. Edgar's FBI investigated Jack Valenti, an LBJ aide, because of his gaiety; and Walter Jenkins, another LBJ aide, was forced to resign for the same reason.  Can anyone imagine such activities having the same result today?

Voters aren't totally indifferent to matters of gender - Target Corporation has found to its sorrow that many shoppers don't want biological men using the same restrooms as wives and daughters and boycotted Target when it announced their "anything goes" restroom policy.  For all that, when given the opportunity, voters all across the country prefer marriage the way it's been for all of human history, but no elected politician or unelected judge has paid any price for ignoring the moral qualms of their constituents in favor of gay marriages and other libertine policies.

And for all the news about #MeToo complaining about men abusing women at work and in other settings, no politician has been un-elected by the voters over that issue as far as we know.  Sen. Franken and a few others resigned, but we simply don't believe that they were afraid that the voters would have rejected them at the next election.

As for weaponizing the FBI, however, the more we find out about rot at the FBI and in the rest of the Justice Department, the more Mr. Trump's approval ratings go up.  As citizens, we're more than a little terrified by the government's ability to destroy anyone at all simply through malicious prosecution.  Even USA Today has expressed great concern for the integrity of our justice system.

When you take a step back from the dust and noise of political combat, it starts to make sense: An all-powerful, unanswerable and utterly immoral government bureaucratic system is far more of a threat to the average voter than even the most aggressively heterosexual billionaire could ever be.

As we see it, the public is concerned about the Clinton Crimes and the crimes her sympathizers committed on her behalf.  We sincerely hope that enough voters are afraid enough that they keep the pressure on to find out what the swamp has been doing.

Government abuse of citizens has been a problem since there was government.  It's been pointed out that Confucius stated that the Emperor's only job was finding government employees who abused their power and chopping their heads off to encourage the survivors to follow the path of virtue.  He also pointed out that when common people see that government officials are corrupt, they stop cooperating with government and start cheating on their taxes.  A government's sole asset is its credibility, which these conspirators have been destroying without caring for the consequences.

We'll know that Democrats are serious about rooting out sexual abuse when they go after Bill Clinton; we'll know the swamp is actually being drained when Hillary goes on trial.  Just having the perpetrators lose their government positions seems to be a feeble substitute for the Confucian method of draining the swamp, but maybe we can at least get back to the classic chant, "Lock her up!"

We may have to find another agency to do it, though - the rotten foundations of Hoover's FBI have clearly corrupted it beyond redemption.