David Warsh: How some rebellious FBI agents pushed Comey into tipping 2016 election to Trump

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

Donald J Trump is unlikely to win a second term.  It may seem beside the point to dwell on the circumstances in which he was elected in the first place.  It isn’t.  Understanding the events of the last days of the 2016 campaign is essential to understanding some of the difficulties that lie ahead.

To be clear, two quite different controversies have been unfolding over the last four years. Both involve the FBI. One concerns the investigation of connections among Trump, his businesses; his campaign and Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, Paul Manafort, the Steele dossier, Russian hackers, WikiLeaks, shadowy  Russians promising dirt,  the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, future short-lived National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump attorney Michael Cohen, and all that.

The other revolves around accusations of political partisanship, one way or another, within the FBI: Director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, agent Peter Strzok, FBI attorney Lisa Page, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz,  former U.S. Attorney and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and so on. The two stories overlap occasionally, but not much.

When it comes to the second, more important story, the place to start is October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election (Public Affairs, 2020), by Devlin Barrett, of The Washington Post.

As a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Barrett wrote four crucial stories in  ten days on the eve of the election.  One of them has been at the center of the battles surrounding the FBI ever since. Now, after nearly four years as reporter for the WPost, Barrett has written a book that makes intelligible the whole tangled affair. October Surprise is an important book.

Barrett’s first article, headlined “Clinton Ally Aided Campaign of FBI Official’s Wife,” appeared 10 days before the election.  It disclosed that Deputy Director McCabe’s wife, Dr. Jill McCabe, a 2015 candidate for Virginia Senate, had received $467,500 from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s political action committee. (She was defeated.)  McAuliffe was a long-time ally of the Clintons and, until he was elected governor, in November 2013, a Clinton Foundation board member.  Barrett noted that McAuliffe had been under investigation by the FBI’s Washington field office in a probe of $120,000 of donations to his campaign by a Chinese businessman with no specified charge.

The second story, “FBI Reviewing Newly Discovered Emails in Clinton Server Probe,” described the letter that FBI Director James Comey had sent that day to Congress. He was reopening the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email he had unilaterally closed three months before, because of the discovery of a laptop computer. Byron Tau had the first byline; Barrett apparently contributed essential background on the “dysfunctional relationship between Justice Department and the FBI.”

Barrett’s third story, “FBI in Internal Feud over Hillary Clinton Probe” appeared eight days before the election. It revealed the existence of a previously undisclosed FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation. The probe had begun a year before; by early 2016 four field offices – Little Rock, Los Angeles, New York and Washington were investigating charges that financial crimes or influence peddling had occurred at the charity. Some agents had grown frustrated, believing that FBI leadership balked at the probe, perhaps ordered by Obama administration Justice Department officials to close it down.

In fact, Deputy Director McCabe had turned aside Justice Department inquiries in August 2016, Barrett reported, “according to people familiar with the conversation.”  At one point, McCabe had challenged a supervisor, “Are you telling me that I need to shut down a properly predicated investigation?” After a pause, the official replied, “No, of course not,” according to Barrett’s unidentified source. The investigation continued, though in a low key way, in the months before the election.

Barrett’s fourth story, “Secret Recordings Fueled FBI Feud in Clinton Probe,” confirmed details of stories that had appeared the day before and added some of his own. The Clinton Foundation investigation had been predicated on, among another things, a book, Clinton Cash, written by a former George W. Bush speechwriter, Peter Schweizer, and bankrolled by Steve Bannon, a couple of years before he became Trump’s campaign manager. A secret recording of a source boasting of deals allegedly done by the Clintons was another element, according to Barrett.

All that in the two weeks before the election.

It was Comey’s decision to reopen the email investigation that dominated the news, but Barrett’s second and third stories had disclosed the existence of a much more complicated battle within the FBI. The significance of the laptop emails themselves quickly evanesced, but the anger about Clinton’s private server was renewed. It seems likely that the reopened investigation, not Russian tampering, provided the push that put Trump over the top.

The Clinton Foundation investigation has flitted in and out of the public eye ever since, most recently as the basis for Trump’s increasingly urgent exhortations to Attorney General Barr to indict one or both Clintons for felony influence-peddling.  John Huber, the U.S. Attorney in Utah, tasked by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to review the Clinton investigation, has been reported to have found nothing worth pursuing, and forwarded his report to Barr. The matter is now in the hands of FBI Director Christopher Wray, former Connecticut US Attorney John Durham and Barr. Barr’s decision is expected not long after the election.

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Every complicated story requires a timeline. Barrett took this truth to heart and built the timeline into the narrative.  His book is divided into three parts.  The first involves stage-setting and background. The middle part starts with Comey’s unilateral decision on July 5 to make public his recommendation that no charges be filed against Clinton for her email practices. It ends with the November election. It takes up 60 percent of the book’s 324 pages; the chapters are dated (including named days of the week) and sequential. The third part relates what happened over the next four years. Barrett has an advantage in the telling, especially myriad details established by the Justice Department Inspector General’s review, including the real-time intimate commentary on matters via the work-phone texts of agent Strzok and FBI lawyer Page. The result verges on point-of-view ubiquity.  You know, or like to think you know, what nearly everybody is thinking.

Thus Barrett begins his account with the 2012 drone-missile strike against suspected terrorists meeting in a tent in the wilds if Waziristan, a mountainous region of Pakistan, a few details of which were incorporated in emails that eventually wind up on Hillary Clinton’s private server.  In a few pages Barrett follows the path of their discovery to an FBI manager’s determination, in July 2015, to pursue a criminal investigation instead of a more easily finessed “spillage review.”

There follows a chapter on Comey, another on McCabe, the man he chose as his deputy, and a third on Loretta Lynch,  whom Comey had known and liked since both were young assistant US attorneys in Brooklyn in the 1990s. In 2016, as Attorney General, she was Comey’s boss. A fourth chapter is devoted to Lynch’s decision to meet with former President Bill Clinton, whom she knew to be under FBI investigation, when, in their respective planes, both were delayed by a storm in Phoenix, Arizona.  These are commodious chapters and allow Barrett to equip the reader with all sorts of relevant knowledge: the divisions arising from the rapid expansion of the FBI’s responsibilities after 9/11 to include counter-terrorism duties as well as traditional law enforcement work; the effect on Comey of his brief sabbatical from government work as chief of security at Bridgewater Associates, a successful hedge fund; and a description of changing attitudes about race and gender at the Justice Department.

The middle part, the timeline, proceeds at a breakneck-pace, one astonishing development after another, on the Clinton and Trump campaign trails (30,000 emails said to be non-job-related had been deleted from the Clinton server; “Russia, if you’re listening…,” said Trump), down to those final four weeks,  week-by-week, finally day-by-day, beginning on September 27. That was the day on which FBI agent John Robertson, a specialist in child abuse, assigned to search Anthony Wiener’s laptop computer in New York (one of Wiener’s texting partners was 15 years old), discovered a trove of 141,000 previously unexamined Clinton emails that had been forwarded to her friend and close State Department associate Huma Abedin, Wiener’s wife.  Robertson forwarded the news to Washington the next day, where the discovery was shared among thirty senior managers in a conference call.  (This is the point at which begin the portions of the manuscript published by The Washington Post, starting on page one, last month.)

There follow three weeks in which nothing was done to search the emails. So much else was going on – a tug-of-war over the Steele dossier, the first Wikileaks of the Democratic National Committee emails. It turns out that inattention to the laptop was the result of a stand-off. New York agents wanted a warrant.  McCabe, though he consulted Strzok, didn’t seek one; nor did he tell his boss, who had been at a hearing on Capitol Hill on the day the discovery was announced, being grilled by Republican members of the Freedom Caucus. By Wednesday Oct. 19, Robertson was getting nervous.  He consulted FBI lawyers, who warned him that if he leaked news of the laptop, he could go to prison. He composed a memorandum to himself.

On Monday, Oct. 24, the first of Barrett’s bombshell stories, appeared, “Clinton Ally Aided Campaign of FBI Official’s Wife.” At this point Barrett’s play-by-play of six chapter, 62 pages, becomes too intricate to describe – and too absorbing to put down. On Tuesday, Nov. 8, the election was held. Trump won, by the narrowest of margins. The rest is the third part of Barrett’s book.

The last section of October Surprise describes the fallout from those few weeks. The very day Comey was fired, May 9, 2017, McCabe told bureau internal investigators that he had “no idea” where the leak in Barrett’s third story came from.  Confirming that the Clinton Foundation was under investigation was a serious breach of the rules.  It turned out he had himself authorized two of his aides to travel to Manhattan to make the disclosures in person to Barrett. McCabe was fired, and subsequently nearly indicted for lying under oath. Robert Mueller began his investigation. The extra-marital affair between Strzok and Page was discovered, their emails belittling Trump widely read. They were humiliated and reassigned. In his final chapter, Barrett comes down hardest on Comey as a well-meaning moralist, who without intending to, opened Pandora’s box. “Whoever wins the 2020 election, the once-sacrosanct ten-year term of FBI directors may be cut short again,” Barrett concludes.

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Quite aside from the light it casts on the election, October Surprise must be one of the best books ever written on the practice of newspaper journalism. Certainly I’ve never read a better one: only The Making of the President (1960), by Theodore White, and All the President’s Men (1974), by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, compare.  Its virtue, however, obscures a weakness.  Barrett’s book is a strictly internal history.  From whom does the FBI seek to “save itself,” as the subtitle asks?  From itself; from departures from its own ideals of Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity; from blemishes to the reputation it had largely regained in the years since Watergate.

Surely it is equally true that the bureau’s top managers were trying to insulate both the agency and its Justice Department overseers from outsiders seeking to persuade its agents to act for illegitimate political purposes. These outsiders don’t appear in Barrett’s account. There is no Freedom Caucus of scapegoating Congressional Republicans, no Fox News, no Bannon, no Breitbart, and no Wall Street Journal editorial page. The story of criminalizing political behavior reaches back to special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater Investigation, and the “Contra-gate” scandal of the Reagan years.

Thus in some ways the most interesting figure in Barrett’s book appears only once, at the very beginning.  He is Mike Steinbach, assistant director for the FBI’s Counter-Terrorism Division.  It was he who made the decision to investigate certain disclosures of classified matters on Clinton’s email server as a possible criminal matter, rather than a much less serious “spillage case.” He then circulated news of what he had done in a memo to his colleagues. What was he thinking? It is pointless to ask. The FBI has 34,000 employees. You can’t call those among them who disapprove of Hillary Clinton “mutineers.”  It is an organization that has to be led.

But the take-away lesson of Barrett’s book is that a spreading campaign among a relative handful of rebellious FBI agents stampeded the director into a disclosure that tipped the election to Donald Trump. That is a considerable blot on the Bureau’s escutcheon to live down.  And after the inauguration? That is part of the story, too. As noted  in Lawfare, Inspector General Horowitz’s report including this exchange of texts between two agents on Nov. 9, 2016, both of them working on campaign issues:

Handling Agent: “Trump!”

Co-Case Handling Agent: “Hahaha. Shit just got real.”

Handling Agent: “Yes it did.”

Co-Case Handling Agent: “I saw a lot of scared MFers on…[my way to work] this morning. Start looking for new jobs fellas. Haha.”

Handling Agent: “LOL”

A persuasive external account of the factors leading to Comey’s fateful decision will be many years in coming. The author must aspire to the same high standards as Barrett’s internal account. In the meantime, get ready for Attorney General’s Barr’s decision with respect to the Clinton Foundation investigation, and to President Trump’s reaction to it. If Biden is elected, no Cabinet appointment that he makes will be more important than Attorney General.  Follow the story in The Washington Post.id

David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this first appeared.

David Warsh: The FBI's 'October surprise' and Trump’s election

SOMEVILLE, Mass.

As a citizen, I feel fairly confident about leaving judgment of Donald Trump’s presidency to American people in the November election.  As a journalist, I’m professionally acutely interested in the ongoing battle over the FBI, because it seems central to American’s faith in in its government institutions.

The story received another jolt last week when Atty. Gen. William Barr said the Justice Department would move to close the government’s case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Then on May 8, the president expressed dissatisfaction with the conduct of current FBI director, Christopher Wray, in a telephone interview with Fox News, as reported by The Washington Post.

Economic Principals readers have probably read enough about what critics think Attorney General Barr did wrong. If not, here’s a well-informed take is from the well-regarded online Lawfare site.

I wanted to know more about what its critics think the FBI did wrong. So after I read the commentary on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal – more on that some other day – I turned to Barr’s interview with CBS correspondent Catherine Herridge, in which I thought that he gave a pretty good, if incomplete, account of his decision.  It was, he said, based on a review of the events of December 2016 and January 2017, undertaken at his request by Jeffrey Jensen, U.S. attorney for eastern Missouri.

Those events, between the election and Trump’s inauguration, transpired long before Barr became attorney general.  Looking back on it, Barr argued that the dominant opinion at the time had been mistaken.  He asserted that, since Flynn was a designated adviser to the president-elect at the time, his call to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016 had been “perfectly appropriate and legitimate…. He was saying to the Russians, you know, ‘Don’t escalate.”’

The Obama administration earlier had imposed sanctions in retribution for Russian meddling in the U.S. election. When Russian President Vladimir Putin apparently took Flynn’s advice, the Russia controversy entered a new dimension. The rest of Barr’s reasoning for moving to vacate the charges of lying had to do with the timing of the FBI interviews that produced them.

It took pages of interview transcript to lay out Barr’s reasoning in the intricate matter. Even then, his argument was less than a convincing job. When Herridge pointedly asked, “Did senior FBI officials conspire to  throw out the national security adviser?,” Barr answered, “That’s a question that really has to wait an analysis of all the different episodes that occurred through the summer of 2016 and the first several months of President Trump’s administration.”   Presumably that would be the review that Barr asked John Durham, U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to undertake. Durham’s assignment is understood to include an examination of the circumstances and events that led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

As previously noted, The Washington Post has reported that a third outside review, by John Huber, U.S. attorney for Utah, this one of the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation, has been completed, and awaits action by Barr.

One other first-person account by a participant in these events remains to appear, this one by a dispassionate newspaper reporter. Devlin Barrett was working for The Wall Street Journal when he obtained an interview, with assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe it turned out, in which the existence of the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation was confirmed for the first time.  McCabe was subsequently fired for having made the disclosure. Barrett moved a few months later to The Washington Post and has remained an energetic contributor to the story ever since.

Barrett’s October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election. (Public Affairs) is scheduled to appear in October. Its description on Amazon says this:

The 2016 Election, which altered American political history, was not decided by the Russians or in Ukraine or by Steve Bannon. The event that broke Hillary’s blue wall in the Midwest and swung Florida and North Carolina was an October Surprise, and it was wholly a product of the leadership of the FBI. This is the inside story by the reporter closest to its center….

October Surprise is a pulsating narrative of an agency seized with righteous certainty that waded into the most important political moment in the life of the nation, and has no idea how to back out with dignity. So it doggedly stands its ground, compounding its error. In a momentous display of self-preservation, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and key Justice Department officials decide to protect their own reputations rather than save the democratic process. Once they make that determination, the race is lost for Clinton, who is helpless in front of their accusation even though she has not intended to commit, let alone actually committed, any crime.
A dark true-life thriller with historic consequences set at the most crucial moment in the electoral calendar, October Surprise is a warning, a morality tale and a political and personal tragedy.

Barrett believes, to judge from the flap copy, that the FBI cost Clinton the race. And, as a proximate cause, Comey’s letter notifying Congress that he had briefly reopened the investigation of her email probably did.

EP has argued from the beginning that various field offices of the FBI, as well as headquarters units, were torn, no less than the American electorate, by deep partisan divisions. Outsiders exploited these schisms with varying degrees of success.

Leadership sought to keep lids on warring factions, with profoundly mixed results. The November election will decide possession of the White House for the next four years, but neither Barr nor Durham nor Barrett will settle the battle over the FBI. Much remains to be learned.

David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.

David Warsh: Pelosi might be Democrats' strongest presidential candidate in 2020

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

The Mueller report seems ready to take over the headlines for the next month or so. However much we learn of whatever it contains, the special counsel’s report is a distraction from the main event on America’s calendar, which is the 2020 election.

President Trump’s war on the FBI will be an issue for many years to come, whether or not he is re-elected. But the path of events going forward, including the incumbent’s decision whether or not to run again, depends above all on who the Democrats nominate to run against him.

The Washington Post’s quarterly list of the top 15 Democratic presidential candidates, published Saturday was not encouraging, at least to those who consider Trump’s presidency to have been a disaster. Reporter Aaron Blake ranked Sen. Kamala Harris first among contenders, Sen. Bernie Sanders second, Sen. Elizabeth Warren third, Sen. Cory Booker fourth, former Vice President Joe Biden fifth and former Congressman Beto O’Rourke sixth.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg ranked tenth; Hillary Clinton, who has not said whether she is running or not, ranked eleventh.

The list thus contains seven young and/or inexperienced legislators, four of them women; two governors, Gov. Jay Inslee, of Washington (ranked thirteenth), and former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, of Virginia (fourteenth); and four elderly veterans – Biden, Bloomberg, Clinton and Sanders.

So it seems a good time to point out that the Democrats have a candidate who has already beaten Trump once, and who. leading their ticket, would almost certainly thrash him again.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is not on The Post’s list. Maybe the political pros know more than I do. Only those close to Pelosi can gauge her stamina. Were she to run and win, she would be, at 80, the oldest president ever elected, and unlikely to serve more than a single term. That in itself might be a virtue, in that it would give voters four years to assess the current crop of hopefuls.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that the Democratic nominee will have to stand toe to toe with Trump and punch it out. Lingering over Trump’s El Paso rally the other week, Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger described what he saw as “political performance art at a high level.” He concluded, “Progressives and their media affiliates can produce all the Trump fear and loathing they want. If their candidate can’t hold a stage with him, they won’t win.” Pelosi, who has little to prove, could run a front porch campaign.

As a candidate, Pelosi would represent a more businesslike future. She would also represent the durable past – Congress’s 75-year record of legislative achievement in cooperation with the executive branch, for one thing. The long ascent of women to positions of great responsibility, always against long odds, for another. For all the talk of new social programs costing hundreds of billions, the two most pressing items on the domestic agenda are to shore up Social Security and tackle health insurance once again. An experienced consensus-builder could lay the groundwork for both.

Pelosi’s single biggest asset as a candidate would be that her campaign would be the least divisive. She wouldn’t need to dismiss the concerns of Trump voters. with questions of border security, she could embrace many of his positions and put them in perspective. Nobody is going to be able to intone the fateful sentence for a second time – “our long national nightmare is over.” Pelosi, better than anyone else, could at least begin the healing.

It may not happen. Clearly the country is ready for a new generation. Might voters delay the turning of the page for four years in exchange for a pattern-setting woman president? This much seems clear: a back-room deal wouldn’t be possible once the primaries have begun. The possibility of Pelosi’s candidacy should undergo a careful thinking over at the highest levels of the Democratic Party, whatever that means, and in the press.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran. He’s based in Somerville.

David Warsh: The lingering mysteries of the Clintons

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

Donald Trump continues to advertise his itch to fire Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, presumably in hopes of short-circuiting Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russian probe. There is another reason thsat replacing Sessions is a bad idea.  The practices of the Clinton Family Foundation during the period  when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state remain under investigation by the FBI.

The existence of the Clinton probe was established a week before the 2016 election by reporter Devlin Barrett in The Wall Street Journal. A few months later, Barrett left the WSJ for The Washington Post. Earlier this year, Barrett and Matt Zapatosky reported that the investigation had continued after the election.

Confidence in the attorney general’s decision-making is thus doubly important. Sessions has shown himself to be sturdily perpendicular with respect to the Russia investigation; there is reason to expect his judgement will be level with respect to the Clinton matter as well.

Meanwhile, sniping at the FBI has continued, from Congress and in the conservative press. The feud within the Bureau apparently continues as well. Last week The Post’s Zapatosky reported that federal prosecutors had been using a grand jury to investigate charges that former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had lied when he denied authorizing the disclosure of the Clinton investigation in the first place, placing his own interests above those of the Justice Department, at least according to Michael Horowitz, the DOJ’s inspector general.

If the provenance of the FBI’s Russia investigation was somewhat tainted – Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid for the so-called Steele Dossier, which helped prompt the investigation of Russian influence on the Trump campaign – the predicate of the Clinton Foundation investigation was apparently equally suspect. Agents in four FBI field offices had read copies of Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, by Peter Schweitzer, president of a foundation created by Breitbart editor Steve Bannon, and financed by the right-wing Mercer Family Foundation.

It has been clear since the 2016 election that the political legacy of Bill and Hillary Clinton is due for a full-scale reappraisal, as background to the 2020 campaign and beyond. Too few experts are working on the narrative of their foreign policies, chiefly NATO expansion and various humanitarian interventions; fewer still on the successes of their domestic policies; and fewest of all, I suspect, on the sources of the virulent opposition they faced, and their reaction to it. The Clinton Foundation seemed like a bad idea since the beginning. Whatever it concludes, the FBI investigation won’t make it any easier to begin to locate the Clintons in American history. That process will take decades.

David Warsh, a long-time columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this first ran.

David Warsh: Comey tried to play referee in a dangerous game; see widely ignored context here

The report of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice on the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email practices has been extensively hashed over since it was published.   You can read about it, if you like, here or here or here.

What’s lacking is vital context. Yet tucked away on the last two public pages of the 568-page report are some tantalizing findings destined to eventually become the fundamental background to the story.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report covered eight broad topics, as described by its executive summary –

• The FBI investigation, code-named “Midyear Exam,” of former Secretary of State Clinton’s email server.
• Former FBI Director James Comey’s go-it-alone statement about the FBI’s findings in July, 2016.
• The Department of Justice’s subsequent decision not to charge Clinton with a crime.
• The discovery in September of some unexamined Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop computer, and the month that passed before the FBI sought a warrant to examine the machine.
•  Comey’s decision to notify congressional leaders in October that the investigation had been reopened,
• Some recusal issues.
• Various text messages among agents.
• And the FBI’s policies regarding Twitter announcements.

Indeed, the report presents an unusually thorough re-examination of the issues.  Agents assigned to the IG’s office sifted through 1.2 million documents and interviewed more than 100 witnesses, some of them more than once.

News organizations concentrated on two aspects:  Comey’s decision to make a unilateral announcement of FBI findings on July 5, in which he scolded candidate Clinton for having been “extremely careless” while recommending publicly that no charges against her be brought; and  his decision to notify Congress on Oct. 28 that new emails had been found.  Both decisions are held by partisans to have influenced the election to some unknowable degree.

In both cases, Horowitz was blistering. Of the July statement, its contents undisclosed in advance to his Justice Department superiors, the IG wrote that Comey had been both insubordinate and heedless of well-established FBI rules. He should have made his recommendation privately and allowed (or forced) President Obama’s Justice Department to make the call (and take the heat) that no charges would be brought.  Of October, Horowitz wrote:

"… Comey’s description of his choice as being between 'two doors,' one labeled 'speak' and one labeled 'conceal,' was a false dichotomy. The two doors were actually labeled 'follow policy/practice' and 'depart from policy/practice.' His task was not to conduct an ad hoc comparison of case-specific outcomes and risks. Rather, the burden was on him to justify an extraordinary departure from these established norms, policies, and precedent.''

Receiving slightly more attention, at least in conservative media, was a text exchange between the agent leading the investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russian connections and a high-ranking FBI lawyer, then his girlfriend.  Lisa Page wrote on Aug. 8, “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?”  “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” replied special agent Peter Strzok.

(Remember, Paul Manafort was still managing the Trump campaign at the time; 10 days later he resigned.) In September Strzok was promoted to deputy assistant director of the Espionage Section.  In October, he drafted Comey’s letter to congressional Republicans – the one widely seen as harmful to Clinton’s candidacy.)

Overlooked entirely in the coverage, as far as I could tell, were four pages at the end of Chapter 12 -- “Allegations that Department and FBI Employees Improperly Disclosed Non-Public Information” – in other words, leaks.

Horowitz expressed “profound concerns” about the “volume and extent” of unauthorized communications, despite “strict limits,” which had been “widely ignored.” The IG’s ability to identify leakers was hampered by two factors. Horowitz wrote:  Sensitive information was widely shared, often involving dozens, and in some cases, more than a hundred persons; second, the normal strict rules governing disclosure appeared to have been widely ignored during the month before the election.

Which leads to those two pages at the end of the report. (I couldn’t think of a way to link them but you can easily scroll down here to find them at the bottom – Attachments G and H.) They contain two “link charts,” or schematic diagrams, depicting verified communications between FBI employees and media representatives, in April/May and October 2016.

Why April/May? That was a period in which Comey was pressuring the Department of Justice to move more quickly to obtain possession of the laptops that Clinton lawyers had used to sort personal from State Department messages, telling DOJ supervisors that he might appoint a special prosecutor if he couldn’t obtain them. (Horowitz found no evidence that he seriously considered it.) Already Comey had begun to contemplate the unilateral announcement he would make in July, fearing that the Obama administration could no longer announce a decision not to prosecute Clinton in a way that the public would find objective and credible.

Why October?  That was the period of intense behind-the-scenes maneuvering over the existence of the Weiner emails. After Comey revealed their existence in his letter to congressional leaders, Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett followed up with a blockbuster story, FBI in Internal Feud over Hillary Clinton Probe. Barret disclosed, among other things, that an FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation had begun.

Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe was later fired, at the IG’s instigation, and referred for possible criminal prosecution, for having confirmed the existence of the second investigation to Barrett, and for having been less than candid when interviewed about his actions. McCabe has said that he was defending the FBI (and himself) against earlier unauthorized leaks accusing him of resisting the investigation.

No details are included in those diagrams about the identities of the callers and the called, but it seems a reasonable bet that the centerpiece of “Network Two” is reporter Barrett.   Whoever it is, you get from those 112 calls a pretty good idea of what true shoe-leather reporting looks like these days. And remember, the charts reflect FBI contacts only with journalists; congressional staffers are not mentioned.  (They may yet be if the Democrats regain the House.)

Comey has insisted, both in his book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, and in interviews with agents working for the IG, that the threat of leaks had no effect on his decision to write that letter on the eve of the election. Some senior officials who worked for him weren’t so sure.  His general counsel, James Baker, told the IG, “If we didn’t put out a letter, somebody is going to leak it.”  Rudolph Giuliani, a U.S. attorney before he becoming mayor of New York, was widely involved as a go-between between FBI-connected sources and reporters at the time.

In each case, Comey’s defense against the Inspector General’s criticisms has been that he felt the FBI – and perhaps the nation itself – were  caught in a “500-year flood” and that extraordinary measures were required to deal with it.   Precisely this sense of the extraordinary is missing from Horowitz’s report.

The last word in these events will belong to journalists, first, and then historians. Among the former, reporter Barrett will likely be the most important. He left The WSJ  for The Washington Post in February 2017 and the next year helped The Post share a Pulitzer Prize with The New York Times for national reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and Russia's connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.

Comey sought to play the role of referee. My hunch is that eventually he will be seen to have performed a service similar to that of another outsize regulator with an independent streak.  Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, also 6 feet 8 inches tall, began a costly campaign against price inflation in the late 1970s.  Despite expert skepticism and political criticism, he won his battle over a 10 years and subsequently was celebrated at a hero.

Upholding post-Watergate standards at the Justice Department (Comey was deputy attorney general 2003-05) and the FBI during three presidential administrations is not the same as making monetary policy..  Yet there may be something in the experience of growing up tall that predisposes some men to act in certain ways when confronted with emergency. Whether you think the comparison is apt depends on what you expect will happen to President Trump and the congressional Republicans who support him.

David Warsh is a longtime business and political columnist and economic historian. He is proprietor of Somerville, Mass.-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first appeared.

David Warsh: The pro-Trump mutiny in the FBI before the 2016 election

You didn’t have to be a news junkie to recognize that the FBI was deeply involved in determining the outcome of the 2016 election, or a statistical whiz to believe the law enforcement agency’s influence was greater than the Russian cyber-mischief that undoubtedly occurred.

Only yesterday, though, when a 35-page report by FBI Inspector General Michael Horowitz revealed that former Director James Comey and his former deputy, Andrew McCabe, contradicted each other about a critical Wall Street Journal background interview in October 2016 that McCabe had authorized, did the dimensions of the problem come clear.

McCabe was fired last month, a day before his planned retirement, for having confirmed the existence of an FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation, and for having lied to investigators about his role in the affair. For all the detail it included, Horowitz’s report was completely unpersuasive – for all the background it left out. It seems clear that McCabe misled investigators. But then, the formal investigation of his role began the day President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, when incentives within the FBI began to shift.

In the closing days of the presidential campaign, FBI leadership was caught between opposing factions: the Obama administration’s Department of Justice, on the one hand, to whose senior officials and prosecutors it reported; and an unknown number of its own rebellious agents on the other, eager to pursue an investigation of the Clinton Foundation, and who were abetted by retired agents, Congressional Republicans and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.

WSJ reporter Devlin Barrett, citing campaign-finance records, reported (subscription required) on Sept. 23, 2016  that Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a strong Clinton ally, had donated nearly as much as $675,000, through the political organization he controlled, to the 2015 Virginia state Senate campaign of pediatrician Jill McCabe. As associate deputy director, her husband was uninvolved in Clinton investigations at the time, but months after his wife’s defeat was promoted to deputy director.

The same day the story appeared, Barrett wrote an FBI spokesman to ask whether, in August 2016 McCabe had ordered agents investigating the Clinton Foundation to avoid drawing attention to the probe, or even to “stand down.”  Barrett wrote, “[H]ow accurate are these descriptions?  Anything else I should know?”

By the end of the week, McCabe authorized two aides to undertake a background interview in which they disclosed a testy confrontation with an unnamed senior Justice Department official in which McCabe had refused to halt the investigation, and thereby confirmed the existence of the investigation. Citing “people familiar with the matter,” Barrett wrote, in “FBI in Internal Feud over Hillary Clinton Probe” (subscription required), that no fewer than four field offices – New York, Washington D.C., Little Rock, and Los Angeles, were investigating foundation practices.

Two days later, Barrett disclosed further details (subscription required). But by then a furor had developed over Director Comey’s disclosure, three days before, that some new Hillary Clinton emails had been discovered which could be relevant to a previously closed investigation. (They turned out not to be.)

There is abundant evidence in news accounts that a low-key but aggressive mutiny was underway in the summer and autumn of 2016 among FBI field agents.  It aimed at damaging Clinton’s candidacy and furthering that of Donald Trump.  Comey and McCabe sought to control it, together and in separate ways.  Implicit threats of further leaks probably played a role in forcing Comey to reveal the existence of the trove of recently discovered Clinton emails.

McCabe told the Inspector General that he had disclosed to his boss his decision to authorize the background session. Comey denied that he had.  Inspector General Horowitz sided with Comey.  His report took a narrow view of McCabe’s motivation, ascribing it to self- interest. The decision to respond to the leakers’ charges “served only to advance McCabe’s personal interest, and not the public interest, as required by FBI policy.”

I haven’t read the Comey book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, but, from the early accounts, it seems clear that he chose not to surface the incipient mutiny that forced his deputy’s hand and, perhaps, his own.  That’s understandable enough: Comey continues to seek to maintain discipline and preserve the apolitical reputation of the nation’s chief law-enforcement agency. Keep in mind the mutineers were a relative handful of highly-placed executives.  They may have enjoyed a certain amount of tacit support, but the vast majority of the FBI’s 13,400 agents and 20,000 supporting staff went about their jobs with professional disinterest.

That means that the outsider who knows most about what happened inside the FBI in those few months before the election is reporter Barrett. In February last year, he left the WSJ for The Washington Post. There he has kept up a steady stream of scoops, most recently last weekend, a joint byline with Philip Bump,“Criminal investigation into Trump lawyer’s business dealings began months ago.”

The Post has many other reporters working on the story; so do The New York Times and the WSJ: Barrett is no one-man reincarnation of star reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who took charge of the Watergate scandal nearly 50 years ago.

He is, however the author of the Rosetta Stone-like story through which the outcome of the 2016 election eventually will be deciphered.  Like many others in the news trade, I was dumbfounded by the election of Donald Trump.  Until this week I thought of it as essentially accidental – two bad candidates decided by the hangover from globalizationNow I am more interested than before in the thumbs upon the scale.   Never mind however much is left of the Trump administration. Not until Barrett finally publishes his account will we be able to form a clear idea of how Trump’s victory came to be.

David Warsh is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.

David Warsh: Trump's war on FBI might gradually become the dominating story of his regime

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

What’s going to turn out to be the ultimate story of the Trump presidency? The respective philosophic stances of the four most important English-language dailies could be glimpsed on  March 24’s front pages:

· The New York Times: “Trump Seethes, But Signs Bipartisan Spending Pact”; “President Unbound, Aides Bewildered, Capital Reeling”; “A 1.3 Trillion Deal Flies in the Face of His Agenda”; “Icy Maneuvering by U.S. and China in Tech Cold War”

· The Wall Street Journal: “Trump Relishes Off-Script Approach”; “Stocks Sink to the Worst Week in Years”

· Financial Times: “Bolton’s rise signals eclipse of moderates under Trump”; “China ready to hit back with tariffs”

· The Washington Post: “Budget is signed, with a dose of drama”; “Trump aide [George Papadopoulos] got campaign guidance on foreign efforts”; “In Bolton, President gains an old hand at bureaucracy game”

There was nothing that day about the porn star or the Playboy model. But a couple of days earlier, The Post had tucked inside its front section a story about the FBI. “McCabe was asked about media contacts on the day [FBI Director James] Comey was fired” shone a narrow beam of bright light on a dark corner of what I believe will in the end become the dominating story of Trump’s time as president.

Deputy director Andrew McCabe was fired earlier this month by Atty. Gen. Jeff Session, on the advice of the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which relied on information developed by FBI Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Cited was a “lack of candor” in various interviews with FBI investigators working for Horowitz – a cardinal sin among FBI agents. 

The Post article, written by Matt Zapatosky and Karoun Demirjian, presented several new facts. The IG’s team questioned McCabe that day President Trump fired Director Comey. They asked him about the role he played in sourcing of a story that appeared the autumn before in the WSJ, 10 days before the election. His alleged lack of candor that day, May 9, may have been the first of several examples ultimately cited in his firing, a day before he was slated to retire with fully vested pension benefits.    

That WSJ article, “FBI in Internal Feud over Hillary Clinton Probe,” by Devlin Barrett, revealed a series of disputes, both between Justice Department prosecutors and the FBI, and among factions within the bureau itself, about whether and how to pursue investigations of the Clinton Foundation. Reporter Barrett disclosed that, according to “people familiar with the matter,... Early this year, four FBI field offices – New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and Little Rock, Ark. – were collecting information about the Clinton Foundation “to see if there was evidence of financial crimes or influence peddling.”

The previously unreported investigation had been a matter of internal debate within both agencies throughout the campaign year, Barrett wrote, before describing the sequence of arguments in unusual detail. The Post hired Barrett away from the Journal in February last year.

Where did Barrett get his information? One vector became clear last week. Zapatosky and Demirjian, similarly citing “people familiar with the matter,” wrote that McCabe, acting in his capacity as deputy director, had

"authorized two FBI officials, the FBI’s top spokesman and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, to talk to a Wall Street Journal reporter [Barrett[ in October 2016, for a story the reporter was preparing on the Clinton email case and a separate investigation of the Clinton Foundation….. McCabe has said publicly that he felt he was “being accused of closing down investigations under political pressure,” and he wanted to push back."

Similar pressures may have led Director Comey to notify Congressional leaders on October 28 of the existence of a small trove of previously unexamined emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server – a headline-provoking move that may have influenced the election results more powerfully than Russian interference.

The Inspector General’s report has not yet been released. Horowitz, a political appointee in the Bush and Obama administrations, has as good a reputation for integrity and independence as does Comey, but the concerns of the two men are not identical. (Trump and his supporters, and some others, routinely disparage Comey’s reputation.)

Conspicuous in the announcement of the scope of the IG’s review were “allegations that Department and FBI employees improperly disclosed non-public information.” How even-hand and thorough Horowitz’s investigation has been of leaks during the campaign year is, for now, anybody’s guess. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has promised hearings once the report becomes public.  

The story of a presidency inevitably settles on a narrative. The Watergate inquiries that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency were furthered by a little-noticed battle over who would replace long-time director J. Edgar Hoover after is untimely death. The public understanding of what had happened was greatly shaped by the legend of “Deep Throat.” Internecine strife of a different sort seems likely to ultimately determine the way the Trump administration is remembered.

A daring mutiny by disgruntled FBI agents as the election neared? Political favoritism by those serving in the Obama administration? As with the Watergate proceedings, the questions go to the heart of what it means to serve with honor and to tell the truth. All they lack so far is a relatively dispassionate public forum in which to be examined. My guess is that they’ll find one next year. In that case, unless military conflagration supersedes it, Trump’s war on the FBI will gradually become the dominating story of his administration.

David Warsh, a veteran commentator on financial, political and media matters, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.

'Economic performativity'

Donald MacKenzie, of the University of Edinburgh, came through Boston last week, presenting a welcome opportunity to stop thinking about the U.S. presidential election for a day.  The author of An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Marketsv (MIT, 2006) is the most interesting historian of the advent of modern finance since Peter Bernstein (Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street (The Free Press, 1990) laid down his pen.

MacKenzie is a sociologist, not a journalist like Bernstein, which means his account comes somewhat encumbered by theory. His background is that of science studies, the broad approach to the history of science, headquartered in Edinburgh, deliberately skeptical of  various claims of science to authority: cultural, social, political, philosophical and so on.

 His Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (MIT, 1990) unpacked the astonishing suite of instrumentation that was developed to guide intercontinental ballistic missiles in the days before GPS. But like Bernstein, MacKenzie had done an enormous amount of interviewing of participants, and it makes for deeply interesting reading.

An Engine Not a Camera is concerned with the relationship between financial markets and the emergence of modern financial theory since the 1950s, at first in Cambridge, Mass., and Chicago, and then in universities and business schools around the world. The title comes from a phrase originally employed by Alfred Marshall to describe the difference between static and dynamic theories —  timeless snapshots of the world at a given moment, as opposed to developmental and therefore potentially generative accounts.

The path that modern finance has taken has been amply highlighted by a series of Nobel Prizes – Harry Markowitz, Merton Miller, William Sharpe, Robert Merton, Myron Scholes, Eugene Fama, Robert Shiller, Lars Hansen (and the equally revealing omission of Fischer Black). Peter Bernstein filled in around the edges.   MacKenzie is more interested in the shadows between the pools of light, specifically the relation between theory and practice.

He recognizes that participants have been building markets for millennia. What happens, he asks, when theory starts catching up with practice and, in some cases going beyond?  When theory becomes prescriptive to a world which to that point has been a matter of trial and error? When analytical and mathematical methods replaced descriptive scholarship in finance after the 1950s, was it all pure triumph?  Or were unexpected new risks and other costs incurred as well?

This aspect of economic ideas that affects the world he calls their “performativity,” following the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin, who distinguished between utterances that actually do something and those that simply report on an already existing state of affairs. Austin:

If I say “I apologize” or “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth” or “I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow,” then, in saying what I do, I actually perform the action.

MacKenzie considers three degrees of economic performativity:  the most basic sort, as when an idea (a theory, model, concept, procedure, or data set) is used by participants as a tool; effective performativity, meaning when the use of the tool makes something happen; and, most interesting, what he calls “Barnesian” performativity, after Edinburgh sociologist S. Barry Barnes, who in a 1988 book, The Nature of Power (anticipated in 1983 by his article “Social Life as Bootstrapped Induction”) identified “self-validating feedback loops” as the fundamental building blocks ofboth practice and theory. Barnes:

If an absolute monarch designates Robin Hood an “outlaw,” then Robin Hood is an outlaw. Someone is a “leader” if followers regard him or her as such.  A metal disc, a piece of paper, or an electronic record is “money,” if, collectively we treat it as a medium of exchange and a store of value.

Thus we are in the realm of the social construction of everything social. The example MacKenzie gives of Barnesian performativity:  widespread adoption of index funds has made “less untrue” William Sharpe’s troubling conjecture that one day everyone would simply buy the market (meaning a broad index fund). For those interested in finance, MacKenzie’s book is edifying reading.  Recently he has begun writing regularly on financial topics for the London Review of Books.

It is, of course, equally possible to approach “performativity” from the other end, as a matter of the evolution of practice. That’s what Lawrence Busch, of Michigan State University, does in Standards: Recipes for Reality (MIT, 2011). What is a standard, after all, if not a Barnesian “self-fulfilling prophecy”? Standards are ubiquitous in social life, Busch says: there are standards for professional accreditation, the environment, consumer products, animal welfare, healthcare, education, acceptable stress on highway bridges, all of them the subject of intense and continuing negotiation.

Busch writes, “While standardization can be traced back to the origins of civilization, it was given an enormous boost by the grand universalizing project known as the Enlightenment.” And while his capsule description of the rise of the tendency to standardization in science, military affairs and, horrifyingly, colonization, is eye-opening, it pales in comparison to the persuasive power of Deidre McCloskey’s 2,000 page Bourgeois trilogy.

I have read only a fraction of each book (Bourgeois Virtue: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006); Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Instructions, Enriched the Modern World).(2010); and Bourgeois Equality: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World; (2016). You can read as much as you like about the project here. In the introduction to the final volume, McCloskey writes:

The modern world was made by a slow-motion revolution in ethical convictions about virtues and vices, in particular by a much higher toleration than in earlier times for trade-tested progress – letting people make mutually advantageous deals and even admiring them or doing so, and especially admiring them when, Steve Jobs-like, they imagine betterments.

McCloskey may give short shrift to democracy as one of the critical institutions of the modern world, along with science and the market (the topic doesn’t rate an index entry in the last volume). But note that we are back at the U.S. elections.  My day of thinking about inductive boot-strapping passed quickly.

                                                                     xxx

Devlin Barrett and Christopher Matthews, of The Wall Street Journal, did an excellent job of reporting on the dissension that exists within the Federal Bureau of Investigation with the respect to Bureau investigations of Hillary Clinton. Beyond her e-mail practices, it turns out that field agents in the New York office had aggressively advocated for a second probe, previously unreported, this one of the Clinton Foundation.  On Nov.  2, Barrett and Matthews wrote:

Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay, people familiar with the matter said.

Agents, using informants and recordings from unrelated corruption investigations, thought they had found enough material to merit aggressively pursuing the investigation into the foundation that started in summer 2015 based on claims made in a book by a conservative author called Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, these people said.

I speculated last week that a desire to mitigate the effects of bitter and widespread controversy within the FBI lay behind Director James Comey’s decision to disclose to Congress the existence of a new and unexamined trove of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, over the objections of the Justice Department.  Comey’s motive may be open to interpretation, but the existence of dissention has been confirmed. Then, of course, a few days before the election, he said there was no smoking gun in the latest e-mails.

David Warsh, a longtime economic historian and financial columnist, is proprietor of Boston-area base economicpri

Robert Whitcomb: FBI right about terrorist's iPhone

The U.S. government has the stronger argument in its battle with Apple over obtaining access to possible information about terrorism in the iPhone of Syed Rozwab Farook. That Islamic fanatic and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, murdered 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., last Dec. 2 before police killed them.

The fact is, as Microsoft founder Bill Gates told the Financial Times, “This is a specific (emphasis is mine} case where the government is asking for access to information.’’

 “They are not asking for some general thing; they are asking for a particular case.”

“It is no different than [the question of] should anybody ever have been able to tell the phone company to get information, should anybody be able to get at bank records” to investigate a crime, Mr. Gates added. 

The government's case, backed by a federal judge, rests on  long-established law holding that "no item -- not a home, not a file cabinet and not a smartphone -- lies beyond the reach of a judicial search warrant"  in investigating crimes, Manhattan District Atty. Cyrus Vance has noted.

There exists no "right of privacy" to withhold evidence of a crime. The idea that the cellphone is a privileged device off-limits to law enforcement is absurd.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym is not telling Apple to create a “backdoor’’ that puts all users in new danger of being electronically violated. She has told Apple to help the FBI get into a single iPhone to obtain information that might save people from being murdered by ISIS-related terrorists.

We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land,” FBI Director James Comey has said.

Judge Pym has ordered Apple to create temporary software to let the FBI try many passwords on the phone without its data disappearing, which it normally would after 10 tries because of the company’s security walls.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook complains that such a “backdoor” could be used on other phones. But it stands to reason that Apple could control its software to unlock specific  devices, after the government obtained warrants detailing compelling circumstances.

Apple’s hypocrisy in this is impressive.

Consider its close cooperation with China, a police state. There, Apple has moved its local user data onto servers run by state-owned China Telecom, which mines such information with abandon. And Apple submits to security audits by Chinese officials. But then, Apple hopes to continue enjoying 40 percent profit margins by expanding further in China -- the company’s second-largest market.

Apple – at least for public consumption -- worries that if the U.S. government forces it to let authorities into Farook’s phone that China will demand the same right, which might scare away some potential iPhone buyers there. But there’s little indication that Apple will not continue giving the dictatorship whatever it wants.

James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted in the Los Angeles Times:

"What's driving this is Apple's desire to persuade the global market, and particularly the China market, that the FBI can't just stroll in and ask for data.  {But} I can't imagine the Chinese would tolerate end-to-end encryption or a refusal to cooperate with their police, particularly in a terrorism case."

Law enforcement must have the tools to keep up with criminals, who increasingly use such tools as encryption, Bitcoin currency and disappearing messages. In this case, Apple, rather than worrying that the publicity connected with letting the U.S. government get into a criminal’s cellphone might hurt profits, should focus on saving lives. (Do tech execs, shielded by wealth and gated communities, not feelquite as threatened by terrorists as the poorer people (e.g., in San Bernardino) who are usually the victims?)

Meanwhile, let’s worry more about how private-sector organizations such as Apple, Microsoft,  Google and Yahoo, invade our privacy and follow us wherever we go. As Fortune magazine columnist Stanley Bing wrote: “It's just the beginning, guys. Every breath you take. Every move you make. Every bond you break, every step you take, Apple will be watching you.’’

Robert Whitcomb, a fellow of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, in Newport, R.I., is overseer of New England Diary and a former editor at the International Herald Tribune and The Wall Street Journal.

Don Pesci: Your credentials, please

VERNON, Conn. “Dr.” Michael Sharpe, the CEO of the Family Urban School of Excellence (FUSE), padded his credentials; it turned out he was not a “Dr.” at all. Moreover, a cautiously concealed stint in prison -- for embezzlement --  further marred Mr. Sharpe’s record, which was, before journalists began snooping into his past, fairly substantial.

It is said that the FBI is now examining FUSE with jeweler’s loops screwed into its many eyes. FUSE, according to its mission statement http://fuse180.org/, is “an education management organization formed in 2012 to continue, guide and expand the work of Jumoke Academy, a high-performing urban charter school in Hartford’s north end.”

Mr. Sharpe’s credentials were not in order. He permitted himself to be called “Dr. Sharpe,” and the honorific was used by him on several occasions. Like Malcolm X, there was a prison blotch on his escutcheon, which Mr. Sharpe apparently took some care to conceal. Thrown from the balcony, he has now come under FBI scrutiny. If there are accounting irregularities during his FUSE years, he likely will find himself cooling his heels in prison.

How low are the mighty fallen!

In the age of educational credentialism -- when success is not determined by measurable objective criteria (Is Jamoke Academy, one of the schools managed by FUSE, an improvement on the usual inner city public school?) but rather by the number of educational degrees its administrators have amassed -- there is no greater offense against propriety than the pretense that one is festooned by academic credits. Credentials, after all, are the lock on the indispensable educational “closed shop.” And the closed shop, of course, has both a fiduciary and moral responsibility to see to it that frauds do not slip past its barriers. Mr. Sharpe’s fate, like Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ s A Street Car Named Desire, will, going forward, depend upon the kindness of strangers, in his case strangers from the FBI.

Some strangers are kinder than others.

In 1981, when Thirman Milner was running in a primary for mayor of Hartford, the Journal Inquirer, of Manchester, discovered that Mr. Milner, who later won the mayoralty contest and became the city’s first African-American mayor, had claimed he had received from Rochdale College in Toronto, a degree that seemed exceedingly dubious.

The Journal Inquirer disclosed that Rochdale College was in fact “a student owned dormitory on the edge of the University of Toronto’s campus that was opened in 1968 as an educational experiment. There were no entrance requirements for any of the unaccredited school’s 850 students, no curriculum, no examinations --  and no degrees.'' A little more than two years earlier, other wide-awake media outlets had disclosed that the town manager of Agawam, Mass., had claimed a Rochdale diploma as proof of his college education when, in fact, he had never graduated from college. Five months after the disclosures,  the town manager, finding himself under considerable media pressure, quite rightly resigned from office.

The university affairs officer of  the Provincial Ministry of Colleges and Universities, J. P. Gardner, was quoted at the time to this effect: “… asking for a list of the degrees purchased [from the dormitory scheme] is like asking how many people bought socks at Sears yesterday.”

The fraudulent degrees were sold at $25 a pop. Said Mr. Gardner, “during this period [from the 1970s forward] Rochdale issued ‘degrees’ as a money-making venture. These had no academic basis or credibility and were considered a joke locally.”

The Journal Inquirer contacted Mr. Milner for a response. Mr. Miller said he had received his degree from Rochdale in the late 1960s, before the “college” began awarding purchased “degrees” through the mail.

“I didn’t get it through the mail,” Mr. Milner said of his “degree.” The Rochdale “degree,” according to the Inquirer report, accounted for Mr. Milner’s only college education. He claimed to have attended the experimental college “while stationed with the Air Force in Geneva, N.Y., about 200 miles from Toronto.” A 200-mile commute is rather long, but of course gasoline at the time was much cheaper than it is today.

Though encouraged to do so, The Hartford Courant, then and now Connecticut’s only state-wide newspaper, did not pick up a story that easily might have destroyed Mr. Milner’s mayoral prospects. Having won the mayoralty contest, Mr. Milner went on to serve with some distinction for six years. Fate – or kind strangers, many of them writing for newspapers – were not overly harsh with Mr. Milner.

Mr. Milner, retired for many years now and a much respected elder statesman, recently emerged from self-imposed obscurity to endorse the candidacy for the state Senate of City Council President Shawn Wooden of Hartford. He needn’t worry that Mr. Wooden’s credentials are in order.

Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is a political writer who lives in Vernon, Conn.