FBI Agents Are Attempting to Sway a Presidential Election. That’s Horrifying.

Spencer Ackerman reports:

Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.

Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.

“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.

This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.

(emphasis mine)

The FBI and all who work within it are sworn to serve all Americans, without regard for personal political beliefs. Using the powers we grant the FBI for political purposes is a violation of the trust Americans place in the bureau. If FBI agents can do this sort of thing to influence an election and get away with it, what can FBI agents do to average Americans? The implications of this terrify me.

“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.

James Comey has either lost control of his bureau, or he’s implicitly approving these politically motivated leaks that are likely violations of the Hatch Act. In either case, he is unfit for his position, and should resign immediately.

“Justice department officials — another current target of FBI dissatisfaction — have said the bureau disregarded longstanding rules against perceived or actual electoral interference when Comey wrote to Congress to say it was reviewing newly discovered emails relating to Clinton’s personal server.”

If there is any hope of restoring faith and confidence in the FBI, an independent investigation must happen as soon as possible. Every agent at the FBI who was involved in this effort to influence our election should be fired, and perhaps prosecuted for violations of the Hatch Act.

Edited to add this from today’s WaPo:

You have a situation where a group of FBI agents is in direct conflict with prosecutors who believe the agents have a weak case in their attempt to find evidence of corruption that can be used against Clinton. The agents, in an atrocious violation of FBI policy against injecting the Bureau into an election, begin leaking dark innuendo to reporters. That convinces the FBI director that he has no choice but to go public with the fact that the Bureau is looking at some emails that might or might not have something to do with Clinton, though no one has actually read them. That news lands like a bombshell, despite its complete lack of substance.

And then it turns out that these agents are basing their investigation on a book called “Clinton Cash” by Peter Schweizer. Schweizer is the president of the Government Accountability Institute, an organization co-founded and chaired by Steve Bannon. Who is the CEO of the Trump campaign.

(emphasis mine)

Trump partisans are behaving like the FBI has a mountain of smoking gun evidence to put Hillary Clinton into jail forever, but somehow she’s using her magical powers to prevent it from coming out. Forget that there is just nothing at all in reality to support this notion, because whenever I point that out, they call me names and cite totally discredited websites as proof that they’re right and I’m an idiot.

The power and inherent respect of the bureau is being abused by a small group of people who want to create their own reality, inspired by a book whose premise was conjured out of thin air explicitly to be a political hit job.

It’s frustrating and demoralizing that we seem to be living in separate realities. I, of course, believe that I live in actual reality and they live in Breitbart reality … but I keep remembering how Karl Rove said to a reporter that the Bush White House was no longer concerned with facts, because they could create their own reality. Based on my interactions with Trump partisans this year, it seems like Rove was right.

So that’s why this FBI scandal is so upsetting to me. The power and inherent respect of the bureau is being abused by a small group of people who want to create their own reality, inspired by a book whose premise was conjured out of thin air explicitly to be a political hit job.

According to The Post’s account, when the FBI agents took their desire to probe the foundation to higher-ups, they were advised the evidence was thin. Nothing abnormal about that; prosecutors and officials use their judgment about what cases to pursue all the time.

But this group of New York agents apparently was unsatisfied, and someone decided to prosecute the case through leaks days before the presidential election. Most irresponsible of all was Fox News anchor Bret Baier, who declared an “avalanche” of evidence is “coming every day” and an “expansive” investigation into the foundation was ongoing and would lead “to likely an indictment.” Without any substantiation whatsoever — indictments are returned by grand juries, not by special agents of the FBI — the headlines took off. The false report of an impending indictment was then repeated by Donald Trump. Mr. Baier apologized on Friday for a “mistake,” but the political damage had already been done.

(emphasis mine)

So, one more time, Trump partisans: Agents at the FBI read that ridiculous book, pursued an investigation as a result, and when they bought their “evidence” to the grown-ups, the grown-ups told them that their fantasy was just a fantasy. Undeterred, they did was is probably the most predictable thing imaginable, and went straight to a friendly personality (there is no way Bret Baier deserves to be called a journalist or a reporter, at this point) at Fox News, the reliable propaganda outlet, because they knew that just the implication and suggestion that something nefarious was going on would be enough to sway a substantial bloc of voters, because that’s how it’s been since the 90s where the Clintons are concerned. Baier apologized, and was forced to retract his bogus story, but it won’t make any difference. These FBI agents got what they wanted, and threw the final eleven days of this election into chaos. Because of their personal vendetta against the Clintons.

It’s incomprehensibly dangerous to have any government agency act upon totally false and imagined things because those things fit their ideology. It is terrifying when it’s an agency that has the power to arrest and detain and investigate people. These FBI agents abused their power. They abused our public trust. They have damaged the entire bureau’s reputation. They will probably get away with it, and they (or others in similar positions of power) will do it again.

And not that it matters, I guess, but what these FBI agents did, and what Trump’s campaign is apparently complicit in, is a violation of the law. It is specifically a violation of the Hatch Act, which was written and passed to prevent exactly what these people are trying to do.