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.

Peter Montgomery: U.S. right-wing terrorism on rise in the Trump era

Harassment, intimidation, and physical violence against religious and ethnic minorities is on the rise. And some experts worry that the Trump administration is making things worse.

The attack on a Portland, Ore., commuter train by a knife-wielding white nationalist who was screaming anti-Muslim insults overshadowed other recent crimes apparently motivated by bigotry — including a machete attack against a black man in California and the killing of a Native American man by the driver of a pickup truck who was terrorizing a group of picnicking friends.

Just outside Washington, D.C., recently, an African-American student on the verge of graduating from college was murdered by a white student who was reportedly a member of an online “alt-Reich” {neo-Nazi} group. Nooses have been placed in a number of prominent locations, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The Southern Poverty Law Center documented almost 900 reports of harassment and intimidation in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election. “Many harassers invoked Trump’s name during assaults,” the SPLC reported, “making it clear that the outbreak of hate stemmed in large part from his electoral success.”

Similarly, the Anti-Defamation League reported that anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. jumped 86 percent in the first quarter of 2017. There’s also been a surge in violent attacks on Indian Americans and Sikhs, sometimes by people mistakenly identifying them as Muslims or Arabs.

What’s going on?

Violence motivated by bigotry obviously didn’t begin with Trump. But there’s no question that Trump’s rise has inflamed racial resentments and unleashed something dangerous. His campaign excited white nationalists, beginning with his first speech vilifying Mexican immigrants and continuing with his call for a ban on Muslims entering the country.

Trump’s suggestion that the Indiana-born Judge Gonzalo Curiel couldn’t rule fairly because of his family’s Mexican origins sent a signal: Real, trustworthy Americans are white. Trump’s close alliance with some conservative Christian leaders sends another signal: Real Americans are Christians.

Some hateful people take these signals as permission to openly express and act on bigotries that were previously understood to be unacceptable.

Indeed, by putting Steve Bannon in senior campaign and White House positions, Trump made it clear that promoting bigotry is no bar to service in his administration. Bannon’s leadership of a right-wing website was praised by a prominent neo-Nazi leader for making the site “hardcore.”

These signals were amplified by the appointment of Jeff Sessions, a Voting Rights Act critic and promoter of anti-immigrant policies, to be U.S. attorney general.

In the face of a growing bipartisan consensus on criminal justice reform, Sessions is trying to take the country in the opposite direction, pushing aggressively for mass incarceration and undermining previous Justice Department efforts to hold police accountable for racially motivated violence.

Arlie Perliger, a Massachusetts professor who works with West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, argues that right-wing violence grounded in white supremacist ideology should be treated as domestic terrorism.

But the Trump budget proposal released in May zeroes out funding for a Department of Homeland Security program that gives grants to communities to counter violent extremism. Reuters reported that the administration has also frozen $10 million in grants that had already been allocated.

Generations of Americans have struggled and continue to struggle to make liberty and justice for all a reality in our increasingly diverse society. But with Trump as their leader, opponents of pluralism are demanding a return to some undefined period when America was “great.”

They’re at war with what America has been becoming. And while the Trump administration may give proof to the axiom that truth is the first casualty of war, it’s sadly not the last.

Peter Montgomery is a senior fellow at People For the American Way.

David Warsh: Should Trump get his own FBI director?

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 14 signaled what may become the first major battle of the Trump administration, when it called upon FBI Director James Comey to resign.

“[I]f the director has demonstrated anything in the last year, is that he’s lost thetrust of nearly everyone in Washington, along with every American who believes the FBI must maintain its reputation as a politically impartial federal agency.”)  If he doesn’t quit on their motion, the WSJ editorialists continued,

“Jeff Sessions should invite him for a meeting, after {Mr. Sessions} is confirmed as Attorney General, and ask him to resign. If Mr. Comey declines, Donald Trump should fire him in the best interests of the nation’s most important law enforcement agency.’’

In a season of bad ideas, the proposition that Donald Trump should have his own FBI director is the worst one yet.  It should be laughed off and then dismissed.

It won’t be, though, because Comey has become the focal point of dissatisfaction by leaders of both parties and pundits left and right. Democrats blame him for swinging the election by notifying Congress that a small cache of previously unexamined Hillary Clinton e-mails had turned up. Republicans blame him for absolving Clinton of criminal conduct in the private email server.

Last week Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz  announced he would undertake a wide-ranging review of FBI actions before the election.  Comey welcomed the investigation, and the rest of us should, too. It will take a few months to complete.  Horowitz mentioned six areas of specific concern.

The first instance was Comey’s decision last July to call a press conference to announce the results of a year-long investigation requested by Congressional Republicans. He  excoriated Hillary Clinton for “extremely careless” conduct in her use of a private server for State Department business but added that that carelessness didn’t amount to criminal conduct.

The second occasion came in October, ten days before the election, when Comey wrote to the same Congressional leaders to say that a small trove of unexamined Clinton e-mails had been located in an unrelated investigation. Three days before the election, he announced that they had been found to contain nothing new.

The third topic that the Inspector General promised to investigate has to do with the circumstances that led Comey to announce the discovery of the new e-mails.

According to stories by Devlin Barrett, of the WSJ. Comey was dealing with furious dissent over the Clinton investigation in at least four FBI field offices – New York, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Little Rock – offices in which agents had extended their investigation to practices of the Clinton Foundation. Candidate Trump himself surmised as much, telling a Colorado crowd in late October, “I’ll bet you without any knowledge there was a revolt in the FBI.”

A fourth matter concerns whether FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe should have been recused from the case, either before or after his wife, a candidate for the Virginia Senate, accepted a large donation from a prominent Clinton backer, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.

A fifth involved the use of an FBI Twitter account to publicize the release, days before the election, of 129 pages of internal documents under terms of a Freedom of Information Act request – material pertaining to Bill Clinton’s pardon of financier Marc Rich nearly 16 years before.

A sixth pertained to some potentially inappropriate contact between Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Peter Kadzik and John Podesta,  Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair.  WikiLeaks hacks disclosed a series of e-mails between the two;  Kadzik had previously been Podesta’s attorney.

The office of the Justice Department Inspector General, created in 1989, celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary a couple of years ago.  Horowitz, a longtime Justice Department and Sentencing Commission administrator, worked briefly for Comey twenty-five years ago, as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. The fourth attorney to serve as IG, he was sworn in on April 16, 2012.

The irony, as recounted here inOctober, is that Comey is famously perpendicular to the political special interests that routinely test any FBI director. No doubt that the courses that Comey chose in July and October were irregular; in each case he was dealing with an irregular situation – a congressional attempt to stampede the bureau in the summer, the prospect of open revolt among its rank-in-file two weeks before the election. To have explained the matter more fully would have almost certainly made things worse; to have done nothing would have risked mutiny, a disaster.

The FBI, the nation’s top law-enforcement agency, is deeply divided along partisan lines. Some significant faction still want to send Hillary Clinton to prison. Agents have been communicating indirectly with advisers to the president-elect and to the press. Strong and principled management at the top is required. Democrats and sensible Republicans should sit back and wait for the Inspector General’s account.

David Warsh, a longtime financial journalist and economic historian, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com.