"The Memo"

Sydney M. Williams

Thought of the Day

“The Memo”

February 12, 2018

“Giving money and power to government

is like giving whiskey and car keys to teen-age boys.”

                                                                                                P.J. O’Rourke (1947-)

                                                                                                Parliament of Whores, 1991

Democracy is fragile. It must be handled with care. Sunlight is a disinfectant, but too much can be incendiary. Conformity in behavior is critical to civility, but conformity in ideas leads to ignorance. Government is the glue that binds a people into a nation, but when the rule of law is breached by government, tyranny supplants democracy.

The release of “the memo” did not prove or disprove any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. It did not commend or condemn Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, or the dossier. It should not affect the Mueller investigation. It was not incendiary in the way Democrats forecast. But it was revealing in that it showed how usurpation of power can destroy trust in government and damage the fairness and equality necessary to a democratic society. The memo showed that agencies of the federal government (the DOJ and the FBI), in misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), conspired with one political party and candidate (Democrats and Hillary Clinton) to the detriment of another (Republicans and Donald Trump). Whether it was an act of omission or commission is less important than the fact that the FBI and DOJ were not honest in making their case before the FISC, regarding the request to wiretap Carter Page. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal put it well: “We recognize the need for the FBI to sometimes spy on Americans to keep the country safe, but this is a power that should never be abused.” The people who work for the DOJ and the FBI work for the American people, not a specific candidate or political party.

We all have opinions, government employees included. But the latter must not let opinions influence their work. From the start, I have never believed that the Machiavellian Vladimir Putin preferred Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton. I found (and find) the proposition ludicrous. Mr. Trump was an unknown. He was (and is) volatile and unpredictable. Mrs. Clinton was disliked by Mr. Putin, but she was a known known, as Donald Rumsfeld might have put it. Mr. Putin had dealt with her as a Secretary of State and had known her as a U.S. Senator and as the wife of a U.S. President. He had had dealings with the Clinton Foundation. He knew how to handle her, whereas Mr. Trump was a wild card. We have all read Peter Strzok’s (former lead FBI investigator into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia) e-mail of September 2016 to his paramour Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer, about the alleged collusion: “My gut sense and concern is there’s no big there there.” If collusion existed, I believe it was between the Obama Administration/Clinton campaign and the DOJ/FBI, not the Trump campaign and Russia.

Politics is a blood sport. Democrats and the Clinton campaign wanted knowledge of any possible Russian connections Donald Trump might have had, thus the hiring of Christopher Steele. To obfuscate payments for the report they were seeking, they had their Washington law firm, Perkins Coie, pay for the research. Perkins Coie then hired Fusion GPS, a Washington-based commercial research and strategic intelligence firm. In turn, they hired Christopher Steele, a former British agent, sometime FBI informant and known Trump hater, to prepare the dossier, which he did – a 35-page document later described by FBI Director James Comey as “salacious and unverified.” Mr. Steele was allegedly paid $160,000 by the DNC and Clinton campaign. And the FBI paid to obtain the dossier. Despite Mr. Comey’s characterization of the report, he, along with Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, signed three FISA warrant requests to surveil Mr. Page, using the Steele dossier as an essential basis for the request. They did so without disclosing the connection of Mr. Steele to the DNC and Mrs. Clinton. As well, the FISA request cited a news story that had appeared in Yahoo News, but they failed to mention that the article was largely based on an interview with the discredited Mr. Steele, who had also leaked elements of the dossier to media organizations, in violation of FBI orders. The request did not mention that the DOJ official who met with Steele, Bruce Ohr, had a wife who was employed by Fusion GPS and who had worked on the dossier.

Before being released, Democrats claimed “the memo” would damage national security, which it did not. A rebuttal of non-politicized facts should be released, a move supported by Republicans, as should the transcripts to the FISA Court, as well as the name of the judge who authorized the wiretap. Normally such information would be kept private, but these are not normal times. Democracies demand a disinterested press and government employees who are above politics – men and women who accept the will of the people, not those who undermine the democratic process and who try to derail a duly nominated candidate.

The incident of the memo is a reminder of the fragility of democracy. It has become common among the Left to claim Trump as a wannabe dictator. While I believe we must always be vigilant and skeptical, that is not, in my opinion, the risk we face. Of far greater concern is the gradual assumption of power by an administrative state via an unaccountable bureaucracy dependent on big government. It is the growth of regulations that inhibit liberties that should concern us. It is the university that denies conservative viewpoints that should have us worried. It is a media that has foregone any semblance of fairness and disinterested reporting that should cause us disquiet. It is an FBI and Department of Justice that do the bidding of one political party to the detriment of another that threatens liberty. The actions exposed in “the memo” are reminiscent of a time when J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI abused the constitutional rights of those who challenged his authority. Considering risk to democracy in this way, the Obama Administration, with its expansion of agencies such as the EPA, HHS, CFPB and the FCC – not to mention Lois Lerner and the IRS – was far more dangerous to liberty than Mr. Trump.

Authoritarians do emerge. And they can come from segments of the population that have been ignored by elites, like religious, straight, working-class, white males – deplorables, as Hillary Clinton described them – who had been belittled and dismissed by Democrats focused on identity politics. But to succeed, an authoritarian requires an accommodative press and the acceptance by cultural institutions. When presidents have seized special powers, as did Lincoln, Wilson and FDR, it was during a time of war. Franklin Roosevelt came closest to assuming extraordinary powers, when he attempted to expand the Supreme Court, interned Japanese-Americans and ran successfully for president four times. He had the media on his side, but he was stymied by Congress in the first instance. The internment camps ended before the War concluded, in December 1944, and the ratification of the 22^nd Amendment in 1951 prohibited any future President from serving more than two terms. Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” expanded the reach of government, as did Mr. Obama’s focus on “not letting a crisis go to waste.” Nevertheless, it is Mr. Trump who is slammed as a Fascist by the far left, the media, on college campuses and among pseudo intellectuals on cable TV and in Hollywood. What the memo exposed should concern all thinking Americans.

In 1972, five men working on behalf of the Nixon re-election campaign burglarized the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate office complex. That was a crime. The scandal was worsened when an attempt by the Administration to enlist the CIA and the FBI to squash the investigation failed, and President Nixon was forced – rightfully – to resign. In the current situation, the Obama Administration successfully enlisted the DOJ and the FBI in a failed attempt to thwart the election of Donald Trump in 2016. In the first instance, democracy won; in the second, it lost – at least so far, as the only head that seems at risk is that of the victim, Mr. Trump.