This should come as no surprise:
A new poll released by NPR, PBS NewsHour and Marist University shows that about 3-in-10 Americans think that the FBI is biased against the Trump administration…Sixty-one percent of Americans think that the FBI is just doing its job.
While the number of Americans who distrust the FBI’s motives is growing, I’m actually comforted that the number isn’t higher. After all, the FBI has been under sustained tribal attack from the president, Republicans in Congress, and the organs of the mighty right-wing media wurlitzer. The thirty-one percent number is close enough to the Alan Keyes Constant that it’s within the margin of error. In other words, under normal circumstances, the percentage of FBI skeptics in the population is about as low as you can reasonably expect it to go in any situation where the FBI is under attack from the right.
In a way, it seems obvious that a decent chunk of the electorate will ascribe bias to anyone who criticizes the president they support, especially if that president is constantly calling the whole thing a witch hunt and effort to delegitimize his election. When that view is amplified in people’s news feeds and on the television programs they watch, it’s hard to see how we’d ever get a lower number than thirty-one percent in our present circumstances.
What’s a sign of corrosion in our democracy is not the absolute percentage of FBI skeptics, but the fact that the FBI is under attack at all. When the FBI deserves criticism, they should receive it. That’s how our system self-corrects. But when they try to protect the country from foreign interference in our elections and are called biased for their efforts, that’s a problem. It’s a problem because it’s not something they can correct without surrendering to that foreign power.
Now, James Comey isn’t helping things by going out and doing more than a dozen media appearances where he expresses his disdain for Donald Trump’s character, appearance, and fitness for office. That doesn’t make him look like a neutral or dispassionate observer or strengthen him as an objective witness of fact. When he basically says that the election of Trump made him nauseated, that weakens his standing as someone who stands above and outside politics.
To be clear, his credibility would be attacked regardless of what he did so long as he was testifying to potentially criminal acts on the part of the president, but he’s making it too easy for his opponents to dismiss him. But judgment has never been James Comey’s strength.
On the broader question, the FBI and the law enforcement, judicial and intelligence communities are increasingly hostile to the Trump administration, but it’s for cause. You don’t say that people are biased against a criminal suspect if they have good reason to for suspecting that person of committing crimes. We have people and institutions whose jobs are to investigate and prosecute criminals. We don’t allow those people to cast the verdict. They present the facts they’ve collected, and a hopefully neutral jury renders their judgement. And juries will consider evidence that prosecutors and investigators we’re not open-minded but instead intent on bending the evidence to suit their theory of the case. That’s basically why James Comey isn’t being helpful right now. He should have saved his fire for the courtroom.
I agree with your overall point – in normal times, it would be outrageous to think that the outgoing FBI director would write a tell-all book trashing the sitting president of the US. These are not normal times, and you could argue that the people have a right to know what is going on with Trump, but the situation is still sordid and unseemly.
One thing I would point out, though, is that people have had legitimate concerns with the FBI for years. Hoover’s corruption has seeped into the public consciousness. Moreover, had Clinton won, we would probably be talking about corruption in the NY office and how rogue agents there may have tried to flip the election to Trump. 61% support for the FBI is not bad, all told.
Yeah, I haven’t liked being painted as a unquestioning FBI and/or CIA supporter simply because I support the investigation. But we don’t do nuance in prime time media spaces.
Instead the media and right wing pundits use such polls to manufacture the false equivalence of liberal hypocritical in the face of conservatives consistently switching their support, options, and “core beliefs” solely based on what Sean Hannity said last night even if it contradicts when he said the night before that.
Unfortunately, very few people either care enough, or are thoughtful enough to be able to differentiate all the disparate things that are going on simulataneously, to have anything other than a gut-feeling sense about what is actually happening here. It is a depressing fact that almost everyone just craves simplicity in all this. They want obvious good guys and obvious bad guys. Nationally, the average American has maybe a Junior High level of analytical ability, if that, and once you get into a circumstance beyond that threshold, almost everyone will just fall back on parroting whatever they are hearing in their tribal circle.
So you are right, the gut-feeling person is most likely to have a negative response to Comey’s condemnations of Trump, and therefore anything else which might be linked to Comey will be tainted in its perceived veracity. I, for one, wish Comey would just STFU, and let the process play out, without his input or effect on public opinion.
But I know there is no way in hell THAT is going to happen! There is too much money to be made while the opportunity is ripe.
The one thing Comey and Trump have in common is that they will do what is best for them in any given situation. Comey, to his credit I guess, saw the FBI as an extension of self, whereas Mango Mussolini can’t see beyond his own pee-soaked id. But Comey acted to do what was best for Comey/the FBI, not what was best for the country and the rule of law that he proclaims to value now.
Every word out of his mouth is drenched in sanctimony, but ultimately at the core is collosal ego-centrism
I agree it is ego driving Comey. He is self-aware enough to know the polls turned right after his investigation announcement.
From my own experience, I don’t think he put any more Trumpshirts in the voting booths, but his actions definitely were the “final straw” for many likely Democrat voters I know and killed Hillary’s momentum nation-wide.
He fucked up and he knows it. Now he’s trying to cover his ass to keep his invite to the DC cocktail party circuit.
No he does not, he does not have that much self-awareness. He thinks of himself as a truth-teller, he would say that if he thought that.
To a lesser degree, he shares Trump’s worst traits.
Like Trump, his top priority is avoiding criticism. And, like Trump, his only other real motivation is seeking adulation, or at least approval.
The good of the country, or of the FBI? Not really on his radar.
Sure, I know he needs to pretend to care about the FBI, care about the country as is expected of him. Can’t get that love and admiration from the FBI troops without looking as if he cares about them, he understands that much.
But really, the man is clearly way too narcissistic to truly care about anything beyond himself and his precious reputation and his bogus self-image where he is some paragon of rectitude.
Someone (I think maybe Jeet Heer) noted that he sees himself as this chivalrous white knight who recognizes honor and duty as paramount without realizing that in reality the knights crushed peasants.
I call BS on this entire premise.
30% of Americans would get on their knees and lick the crap off of Trump’s boots. They would also lick the crap off of McConnell’s boots, Ryan’s boots, or any other Republican.
All these people need to hear is that the FBI is investigation a Republicans and they are against the FBI.
Indeed. 30% IS the Republican floor of support. Bush walked out of office at that number and President Stupid has never gone below it no matter how much he betrays the group.
It is time we stopped kidding ourselves about the dark heart of 30% of the electorate and treat it accordingly….but since that is also the core ad revenue demographic for TV and print news, we’ll continue to hear Working Class Anxiety fairy tales.
. . . (allegedly — could be apocryphal!)
RE:
I haven’t kidded myself about that in a very very long time.
OTOH, it probably wasn’t until the 2016 campaign and election forced the recognition on me that I fully recognized — with horror — the proportion that deplorable bigotry contributed to the darkening of that heart.
I heard him on NPR this AM and had to turn him off. He came across as self-serving and as a bullshit artist. The Eddie Haskell routine.
Fuck him. I’m glad that he’s making Trump crazy, but we wouldn’t even be having this problem if it wasn’t for that dickhead.
I hope his wife and daughter didn’t speak to him for a year.
No, we wouldn’t have THIS problem, but we would have another, different problem.
Comey would still be FBI Director, and he would be investigating the hell out of Clinton, and be constantly going before republican congressional committees to be sure they had the ammo to torpedo her administration.
He always has been, and always will be, a practitioner of the `Clinton Rules’.
.
. . . than “The 27% Crazification Factor” Moser derived it from; for accuracy, for its . . . erhm . . . “theoretical underpinnings”, and just for being simpler, more recognizable, more intuitive, more resonant, i.e., just a better name.
Reviewing the originators’ description of the 27% . . .
. . . inevitably recalled Clinton’s deplorable “half” of Trump supporters. Leaving me picturing a Venn diagram and pondering how much overlap/non-overlap there is between The Alan Keyes Constant and The Deplorables . . . and how much must be required to produce a catastrophe like 2016.
*Actually, I’d revise this description to recognize that this first half — the half that in some sense reasons from a false worldview requiring Reality-Denial to conclusions that would be rational if that worldview weren’t false — “may as well be crazy” every bit as much as the second half. This, in fact, is what clinically delusional paranoiacs do.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
James Comey is on a money-making book tour to save face. He will only admit to a few regrets and won’t concede that he cost Hillary the Presidency, but he comes close. I was going to vote for her regardless, and dedicated Democrats were, too, in spite of what Comey did. But any doubters probably saw the email debacle as an excuse to skip voting. He knows he cost her votes.
What I do like about Comey’s self-aggrandizing media blitz is that he’s talking about Trump’s lying, grifting, and outrageous behavior. Republicans can be as dismissive as they want, but Comey’s not pulling any punches when he describes Trump’s demeanor. Trump fired him on TV without his knowlege, so Comey’s savoring the cold dish of revenge.
I won’t buy Comey’s book; I’ve heard what I needed to hear. I expect Comey will move on into wealthy obscurity, another corpse under the wheels of the Trump bus. Most Dems despise him more than I do, but we all have our own axes to grind.
As far as the FBI is concerned, I have it from a real, honest, widely experienced and intelligent country detective…someone I know very well…that most FBI investigators are so full of themselves that they are basically incompetent outside of their own little “F.B.I.ville” world.
F.B.I.ville hasn’t really come very far from J. Edgar Hooverville. Bet on it. It’s just bigger.
So it goes.
I have no trust in them whatsoever, as a true investigative force.
That said…as far as Comey is concerned, he is a typical cop-family, academically intelligent Irish Catholic of his generation. Believe me, I know those folks. I grew up with them, in a somewhat similar family and area.
From Wikipedia
And, after becoming an attorney:
So…practicing Catholic or not, he is the archetype of the “morally correct” Irish lawyers who…along with their Italian Catholic lawyer brethren and a whole host of similar but not-quite-so-smart Irish and Italian cops…successfully fought the mainstream Mafia to a sort of defeat in the later part of the 20th century.
They are true believers, most of them.
I knew him the moment I heard him interviewed on ABC. He is genuinely horrified at the rotted-out morality of people like Trump. Is he also a self-serving son of a bitch? I have no doubt, although I am quite sure that he would put it another way. “You go along to get along” is a concept that is drummed into young Catholics from the get-go. He hasn’t risen through the DC bureaucracy as far as he has managed to travel without maximizing every advantage that he could manage to identify. He’s 55 now and probably realizes that this is his last chance to really cash in, and he’s pushing all his chips onto the table. Also imbued in young Irish Catholics particularly is the concept that a good offense is the best defense. Like most successful Irish boxers, he’ll take a few punches in order to get in one really good one.
But is he in any way lying?
I don’t buy it.
But at he same time, is he telling the whole truth?
I doubt it.
Remember, he’s a
liar…errr, ahhh, I mean lawyer, of course.He’s arguing his own case, but I think that he believes in it at a cellular level.
Make up your own minds.
He’s certainly the best anti-Trump witness to appear in public so far.
By miles!!!
I hope he helps to take Trump down, cashes in and retires to some form of the Irish Riviera, myself.
He’s earned it.
Good on him!!!
Later…
AG
I’ve been thinking about this – for some reason it stuck in my mind – and think it is a bulls-eye. I’m from this culture too (well, close enough) and I can recognize it. Comey was an altar boy too, wasn’t he?
I see him as somebody from the Kennedy administration who somehow showed up a half century later. Good, bad, and the out of place feeling he projects. “Good on him”, musha.