Trump Comments Damaging Morale At The FBI
The Time Magazine cover story on the FBI is much longer than what is posted here. I took out a lot of the sections that pertain to investigations unrelated to politics, just for space sake. I recommend everyone read the entire article which is very informative.
http://www.time.com/5264153/the-fbi-is-in-crisis-and-america-is-paying-the-price/
In normal times, the televisions are humming at the FBI’s 56 field offices nationwide, piping in the latest news as agents work their investigations. But these days, some agents say, the TVs are often off to avoid the crush of bad stories about the FBI itself.
The bureau, which is used to making headlines for nabbing crooks, has been grabbing the spotlight for unwanted reasons: fired leaders, texts between lovers and, most of all, attacks by President Trump. “I don’t care what channel it’s on,” says Tom O’Connor, a veteran investigator in Washington who leads the FBI Agents Association. “All you hear is negative stuff about the FBI … It gets depressing.”
Many view Trump’s attacks as self-serving: he has called the renowned agency an “embarrassment to our country” and its investigations of his business and political dealings a “witch hunt.” But as much as the bureau’s roughly 14,000 special agents might like to tune out the news, internal and external reports have found lapses throughout the agency, and longtime observers, looking past the partisan haze, see a troubling picture: something really is wrong at the FBI.
The Justice Department’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, will soon release a much-anticipated assessment of Democratic and Republican charges that officials at the FBI interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign. That year-long probe, sources familiar with it tell TIME, is expected to come down particularly hard on former FBI director James Comey, who is currently on a high-profile book tour. It will likely find that Comey breached Justice Department protocols in a July 5, 2016, press conference when he criticized Hillary Clinton for using a private email server as Secretary of State even as he cleared her of any crimes, the sources say. The report is expected to also hit Comey for the way he reopened the Clinton email probe less than two weeks before the election, the sources say.
The report closely follows an earlier one in April by Horowitz, which showed that the ousted deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, had lied to the bureau’s internal investigations branch to cover up a leak he orchestrated about Clinton’s family foundation less than two weeks before the election. (The case has since been referred to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., for potential prosecution.) Another IG report in March found that FBI retaliation against internal whistle-blowers was continuing despite years of bureau pledges to fix the problem. Last fall, Horowitz found that the FBI wasn’t adequately investigating “high-risk” employees who failed polygraph tests.
There have been other painful, more public failures as well: missed opportunities to prevent mass shootings that go beyond the much-publicized overlooked warnings in the Parkland, Fla., school killings; an anguishing delay in the sexual-molestation probe into Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar; and evidence of misconduct by agents in the aftermath of standoffs with armed militias in Nevada and Oregon. FBI agents are facing criminal charges ranging from obstruction to leaking classified material. And then there’s potentially the widest-reaching failure of all: the FBI’s miss of the Russian influence operation against the 2016 election, which went largely undetected for more than two years.
In the course of two dozen interviews for this story, agents and others expressed concern that the tumult is threatening the cooperation of informants, local and state police officials, and allies overseas. Even those who lived through past crises say the current one is more damaging. “We’ve seen ups and downs, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Robert Anderson, a senior official at the FBI who retired in 2015.
....The bureau’s current director, Christopher Wray, recently said his first priority is to “try to bring a sense of calm and stability back to the bureau.” But the FBI is facing one of the greatest tests of its 110 years. In the coming months, it must fix a litany of internal problems, fend off outside attacks on its trustworthiness and pursue investigations touching on a sitting President, at the same time a growing number of Americans are asking themselves: Can we trust the FBI?
Last May, McCabe, then the FBI’s deputy director, sat down at the table in his seventh-floor office for a meeting with two agents from the inspections division. The agents had some questions about the Clinton Foundation leak just before the election. It was a quick meeting. McCabe, an FBI veteran who rose through the ranks over a 21-year career, told them he had “no idea” where the leak came from. The agents left after just five minutes or so, according to the Inspector General’s April 13 report.
McCabe had offered that same basic assurance months earlier to his boss, then director Comey, investigators said, and had angrily lit into FBI officials under him, suggesting the Clinton leak had come from their offices and telling one senior agent in Washington to “get his house in order.” But as it turned out, McCabe knew exactly where the leak had come from. He personally authorized it, Horowitz’s investigators found, to counter charges that he favored Clinton. (His wife received $467,500 from the PAC of a Clinton ally, then Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, in a failed 2015 bid for state office.)
The McCabe findings have shaken the FBI. The bureau has massive power, and as a result, it has strict rules. Lying to investigators is considered a dire breach in an organization built on trust. The referral to the U.S. Attorney’s office, which emerged a week after the report was released, could result in charges against McCabe of making a false sworn statement. He has challenged the findings, disputing even the most basic elements, like how many people were in the room. The IG said it did not find many of his objections credible, with some elements contradicted by notes taken contemporaneously by an agent. McCabe previously called his firing part of a “war on the FBI” and the Russia investigation. But viewed against the backdrop of other Horowitz reports, McCabe’s alleged rule-breaking looks like part of a much larger problem.
.....Perhaps the easiest problems to address are the internal lapses. Experts say putting assets and management attention back to work on cyber, counterintelligence and traditional crime after Mueller shifted them to counterterrorism would help. “There’s an overextension of the mission,” says Brian Levin, a professor of criminal justice at California State University, San Bernardino, who has worked with the FBI. Most of Horowitz’s reports include measures the FBI can take to address their problems, including stricter rules for investigating polygraph test failures and training to protect whistle-blowers.
A failure of imagination is harder to fix. Mueller’s Russia probe has found that Moscow’s operation against the 2016 election first got under way in 2014, but the FBI failed to grasp the scope and danger of what was unfolding. The bureau missed the significance of the damaging 2015 hack of the DNC database. And when the Russian operation began to heat up in the summer of 2016, the FBI was always a step behind the Russians, struggling to understand intelligence reports they were getting about possible connections between Moscow and Trump aides. The bureau also sat on the disputed “dossier” prepared by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.
A report released on April 27 by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee found that the FBI was slow to confront the election meddling, especially in its failure to notify U.S. victims of Russian hacking quickly enough. The committee also charged that the bureau’s decision to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was influenced by politics. At the same time, the GOP has pointed to text messages between FBI special agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, which were critical of Trump–as well as many Democrats–to argue the bureau is fundamentally biased.
FBI Director Wray says the bureau has started “specific activities” to prevent election meddling by Moscow, but outsiders worry that the U.S. remains vulnerable this fall and beyond.
The most important thing the FBI can do to fix itself? Follow its own rules. In his handling of the Clinton email probe ahead of the 2016 election, Comey acted without telling the Justice Department what he planned to do.
Comey is expected to come under fire in the upcoming IG report for breaking with Justice Department rules and norms by assuming authority usually held by prosecutors and speaking in public about a case that did not produce criminal charges, sources with knowledge of the report tell TIME. He will likely also be criticized for weighing in so close to the election in a way that could impact the outcome, sources familiar with the investigation say.
On his book tour, Comey has defended his decisions as the best way out of a bad situation. Facing what he called “a series of no-win decisions,” Comey says he did what he thought was necessary and transparent to protect the integrity of both the FBI and the legal process in such a high-profile case.
As he faces the crises at the FBI, Wray has told his senior aides to “keep calm and tackle hard.” Asked if recent misconduct cases concern Wray, FBI spokeswoman Jacqueline Maguire said the bureau’s 36,000 employees “are held to the highest standards of conduct–but as in any large organization, there may be occasions when an employee exercises poor judgment or engages in misconduct.” While she declined to discuss specific cases, Maguire said claims of misconduct are “taken seriously [and] investigated thoroughly,” leading to discipline when needed.
At FBI headquarters, agents and supervisors say they are keeping their heads down and focusing on their investigations. But the building is literally crumbling around them–Comey kept in his office a slab of concrete that had fallen off the side. Designs for a new complex were scrapped in February. Visible across Pennsylvania Avenue from the main entrance, with J. Edgar Hoover’s tarnished name above it, is the gleaming, gold-plated sign on the newly renovated Trump International Hotel.
Trump’s attacks on the FBI have been filled with inaccuracies and innuendo, wrongly claiming on Twitter, for instance, that McCabe was in charge of the Clinton email investigation. Trump makes a point of praising rank-and-file agents, but his punches have landed inside the FBI and out. Some worry the damage may take years to repair. “I fear Trump’s relentless attacks on the institution are having an effect on the public’s confidence in the FBI,” says Matthew S. Axelrod, a senior Justice Department official in the Obama Administration.
Mueller may play an outsize role in how his old agency gets through the current crisis. If the special counsel finds that Russia did collude with members of the Trump campaign–the central question in his investigation–and any perpetrators are charged and found guilty in court, it would rebut Trump’s charges of a “witch hunt.” If Mueller finds no evidence of collusion, or declines to make it public, it would open the door for Trump and his campaign to paint the FBI as a band of partisan hacks with a reputation, as he has tweeted, “in tatters.”
http://www.time.com/5264153/the-fbi-is-in-crisis-and-america-is-paying-the-price/
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Two takeaways from this article.
Comey is expected to be heavily criticized by the Inspector General report. But not because he is deep state against Trump, but because he violated Bureau standards and guidelines by speaking out about Clinton when he declined to indict her, and because he re-introduced the email issue 10 days before the election. FBI protocol is to never effect an election.
The second takeway concerns Andrew Mccabe. The political right likes to note McCabe lied, but he didnt lie about something dmaging to Trump, he lied about something damaging to Clinton. He had leaked something damaging about Clinton to a media source, and he evidently lied to agents who were investigating the link. McCabe is believed to have made the link negative to Clinton because he thought people believed he favored Clinton because his wife was a Democratic politician.
Trump has attacked Comey and McCabe and the FBI based on not much other than innuendo and fantasies.
`It's not damaging the morale of the vast majority of the agents, both internally and in the field, who do all the grunt work and investigations. In fact, the rank and file are glad to see that their lying, leaking, dirty, and treacherous "leaders" like Comey, McCabe and Rosenstein are being investigated and dealt with.
FBI has always been political, remember J. Edgar Hoover?
Your only example of "always been", consists of someone from over 80 years ago???
Hoover was founder and director from 1924 to 1972. He died 46 years ago but his ways continued
I was going to cite Hoover too but in the context of Trump's original consigliere Roy Cohn, a very very good buddy of J Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy.
The real irony here is that conservatives are the ones who happily supported the very worst abuses committed by the FBI under the orders of Hoover or a corrupt president like Nixon. The secondary irony is that conservatives today are whining that the FBI is now sufficiently professional that it can fairly conduct an impartial investigation of a corrupt president.
According to you??
you think they didn't?
do you trust them?
I have not seen any evidence to suggest they do.
Yes.
Trump's comments aren't the cause of all the hits to the FBI's morale. It is the actions and lack of following procedures by Comey, McCabe, Strozk, Page, and Rosenstein that is the cause of this loss of morale. When you have people using the FBI as a political weapon and they get caught doing so, it actually lessens the importance and trust for the FBI. NONE of this is at Trump's feet. The people that should be blamed are all members of the Obama Administration as they were in charge when the Hillary Clinton email investigation began.
Your conspiracy theory booshwa is not impressive.
Can you explain why, or are you just a drive by commenter?
Prove that any of the allegations against Comey, McCabe, Mueller, Clinton, Obama, Lynch, etc. , concerning their deep state criminal attempts to destroy Donald Trump, have any factual merit.
Please.
For example , one of the most prominent allegations is that Comey wrote a memo saying it was unlikely that Hillary Clinton would be indicted a couple months before the final decision was announced. This is supposedly "proof" that Comey put the fix in in favor of Clinton. This is utter nonsense. Comey has spoken about this numerous times and it is clear that he considers this theory to be silly if not ridiculous. When Comey wrote that memo, the FBI had looked at all the relevant evidence for more than a year. Do you really think that they were not forming preliminary conclusions? Comey says that the preliminary conclusion was reached by the entire team at the FBI, and not just by him. Plus, it was open to be changed if anything happened in the closing weeks of the probe that indicated Clinton's prosecutable guilt. This is a nothingburger if there ever was one, but right wing conspiracy nuts grab onto these things like this like a dog chewing his first bone.
That is from your first comment you know the vaunted Number 1 comment on this seed. That is all we need to know to point to the ACTIONS of Comey and we know all about the ACTIONS of the others and they were all working for the Obama Administration at the time. There is NOTHING conspiratorial about my comments, YOU opened the door for it and actually made the case that the ACTIONS of Comey et al are the basis for the loss of morale not Trump's comments as those ACTIONS opened the door for Trump to make his comments about these people.
Your comment is a bunch of words signifying nothing. Please provide proof that Comey , McCabe,Clinton, Obama, Mueller, etc. had a conspiracy to destroy Donald Trump.
Cite where they have been held accountable by proven facts or that comment is just bullshit rhetoric.
A politicization of an agency to be used as a weapon doesn't necessarily need to be aimed at destroying someone, it can be used to try to cover-up for another. You think that there was a conspiracy to destroy Trump, my comments only talked about how they supported Hillary Clinton with how they dealt with her email investigation. I said nothing about how they were trying to attack Trump. I pointed out that Trump's words have had little to do with what has been going on with morale; because it was the actions of the agents that I listed that is the cause. That is not pointing to a conspiracy at all; but you are the one that is thinking along the lines of a conspiracy, so you must believe that they were out to destroy Trump instead of covering for Hillary's violations of the Negligence Clause of the Espionage Act of 1917.
Didn't you folks and your Glorious Leader all chant that you were going to "lock her up"? Seems like y'all have had fantasies about the NUMEROUS crimes she's committed from espionage to uranium smuggling to pizza pedophilia to strangling Vince Foster with her bare hands. Yet now that y'all control Congress and the Executive branch (including the DOJ and FBI) you still seem unable to stop the Almighty Hillary. She must be one darn strong woman. Or is it because the courts would just laugh at you?
Maybe you need to invent a new loony conspiracy theory in the hopes that a wingnut judge will bite? I've heard that she invented a time machine so that she could go back and erase all her parking tickets and overdue library books from the record so that she'll be able to win the presidency in 2020, but then a black guy stole it and used it for some nefarious purpose in 1961.
I guess you never read the FBI report that was released on Sept 2, 2016?
It laid out a case for her to be charged with lying to investigators along with violating the Negligence Clause of the Espionage Act of 1917. But, let's ignore the report and focus only on what Comey said should happen despite his being required to hand over any such evidence to an actual prosecutor to determine if she should be charged.
Whoever you are, you are hallucinating.
You lot are always soooo impatient. As has been pointed out innumerable times, the Mueller probe is barely into its adolescence compared with how long the Watergate investigation took and already has more convictions on its belt. And no one outside of the Mueller team have a clue on how much he's got. So, prepare yourself and be careful for what you wish for.
Maybe the FBI should stop worrying about mean tweets and start worrying about the things the can control, like stop fudging DNA tests to get convictions, stop violating discovery rules in criminal trials, and not allow members of one political party to lie to them without consequence while charging members of the other with the exact same crime.
Everything and everybody that 'brushes' against The Trump Syndicate eventually ends up being used and demoralized.
Trump wants to join 'the oligarch clique', but the true oligarchs view him as weak, all hat and no cattle and a genuinely despicable sort.
The name 'Trump' will eventually become known as 'the American Quisling.
I think the name itself will become an epithet as in: "Dude! Gross! That's totally Trumped up!"
Children will soon be ridiculed on the playground if they have the same name as that orange sociopath, and if phone books exist a few decades from now there will be no listings for anyone with a last name of "Trump".
Humpty Trumpty truly behaves like a mob boss (although one without any real power to frighten his enemies). As with every other one of his "personas" it's constructed out of tissue paper.
From some of the stories I've read over the last while, like collusion and negligence in the matter of the Garland Muhammud cartoon attack, incompetence or negligence with respect to the Parkland school shooter, incompetence concerning the Las Vegas shooter investigation....Maybe the FBI needs a kick in the ass.
The FBI’s hits just keep coming. The latest being their failure to follow up on a warning on Parkland shooter Nicolas Cruz.
They are an agency in crisis but unfortunately it really isn’t anything new.
People are just collateral damage to Trump. He could care less as to he pisses on, abuses, or throws under the bus.
That's why my new pet name for donny is Totic Trump.
Anyone else notice how the FBI suddenly became corrupt at the same time trump figured out he was under investigation? Seems weird, must just be some kind of coincidence.
No the FBI became suspect when come said that Clinton wasn't to be prosecuted then explained just how she broke several laws. It was suspect because it happened just days after Bill and Lynch meeting on the plane. It is especially clear after he admitted the he expected her to win the election and was looking to keep his job .
unfortunately for the FBI rank and file Comey and the leadership of the bureau are it's public face and they blew it.
How is it HELPING clinton by announcing the investigations when trump was under investigation at the same time, and nothing was announced? Nothing illegal about lynch and clinton meeting anywhere, Sorry.
Didn't say it was. Oh I bet that you believe all they talked about were the grandkids too.