Earlier this month, Republican California Representative Devin Nunes and the House Intelligence Committee released an earth-shattering memo on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s obvious bias against President Donald Trump and his administration when investigating Trump’s campaign.
However, the memo could be an unverified piece of partisan garbage which reveals nothing substantial, depending on who you ask. The answer lies somewhere in the middle.
To bring the unaware up to speed, the House Intel Communication has been investigating the FBI’s activities in investigating Trump’s campaign after several extremely biased texts surfaced between two FBI agents working on the Trump investigation. After questioning several FBI officials and discovering more sources, Nunes, the head of the Intel Comm. wanted to release a memo on what he perceived as abuse by the FBI.
According to Adam Goldman and Nicholas Fandos with The New York Times, the head of the FBI, Christopher Wray publicly aired his concerns with the memo, which he said the FBI could not verify and believed had misleading information.
Wray, mind you, is a Trump-nominated former federal prosecutor who worked under George W. Bush’s administration, as reported by Matt Ford with The Atlantic. He is not some anti-Trump radical, otherwise, he would not have taken his current position.
As reported by Marc Thiessan with The Washington Post, a second memo written by Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and Republican Iowa Senator Charles E. Grassley recently surfaced to corroborate the information in the Nunes memo, and it seems as if this will not be the last we hear of these memos, seeing as an Axios report by Jonathan Swan says Nunes wants to release five more.
Are these memos a big deal? It is complicated.
On one hand, the FBI purposely withheld information from the courts in order to receive a warrant for a Trump campaign aid, if the memo is true. On the other hand, the FBI publicly questioned the memo’s validity, and Wray has no partisan reason to question the memo, which leads me to think he is genuinely concerned.
If the FBI starts to become untrustworthy, the country has a problem. If the FBI is viewed as untrustworthy, we still have a problem.
The memo has created a lose-lose situation. Trump supporters can now discredit the FBI’s investigation, simply because an unverified memo was released by the very president who is being investigated.
Similarly, it is not a good precedent to start ignoring the advice of the FBI, an organization whose very job is to understand information, and actively try to destroy the credibility of its officials. At this point, the FBI begins to lose authority, and America loses its neutral party in Washington.
Of course, one can claim the FBI is not a neutral party anymore, or people have the right to know if the FBI is misusing its power. I would agree with the latter. However, this information must be corroborated by a source which does not have a horse in the race; sorry, the Republicans have a fairly large horse on the line.