The FBI as Intelligence Unit for the Administrative State

  Who knew, only a few short years ago, that staring in our faces in 2023 would be the crisis posed by the title of this essential guide to the politics of our times: The Fall of the FBI: How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy, by former 33-year veteran FBI Agent Thomas Baker? Having followed his insightful columns on the FBI in the Wall Street Journal, I was excited to read Baker's book and see his expanded argument, which is very much in line with my work and the work my colleague John Marini on the administrative state.

Baker presents the FBI as "The good, the bad, and the ugly"-his own war stories, the bureau's injustices, and finally its corruption under Robert Mueller and James Comey, unabated under Christopher Wray, another non-agent who doesn't know what hit him or the FBI. Of interest to students of politics is that Baker draws on the work of AEI scholar Yuval Levin, whose 2020 book, A Time to Build, explains the contemporary crisis in terms of the culture war and the subsequent failure of institutions to produce virtuous characters.

The successors of J. Edgar Hoover had altered the culture of the FBI, transforming it from a law enforcement agency to an intelligence agency, following 9/11. The bulk of Baker's book explains how the "Intelligence-driven" FBI would culminate "In the ugly disaster of the Russian collusion investigation code-named Crossfire Hurricane." It is not surprising that Baker attributes the corruption of the FBI to widespread contempt for the Constitution.

"Although Mueller as a federal prosecutor had worked with dozens of Special Agents-case agents-in both Boston and San Francisco he did not know FBI culture nor how the Bureau functioned ... But Mueller wanted centralization. Everything back at FBI headquarters, all information and decision making." Against the expertise and prudence of the field offices, especially those in New York and Washington, Mueller demanded centralization.

Having the FBI investigate a president, without any justification and, even worse, apparently for partisan purposes, "Was the most damaging decision to the FBI's reputation to date and has jeopardized our liberties in this nation." Here Baker understates the evil: Comey's zealotry wound up affecting the election and, afterward, delegitimizing the president if not the Republican Party.

For a comprehensive analysis of the FBI understood in this way, see Glenn Ellmers' incisive review of a scholarly history of Hoover's FBI. Among other things, the FBI played a role in Watergate not unlike its role in the episode with Trump.

Citing the work of John Marini on the administrative state, Ellmers concludes that "The FBI is an indispensable weapon for the permanent government, which now constitutes the most powerful faction in American society." Baker adds yet more horrors in discussing the role of the post-9/11 CIA: as an unintended consequence, the "FBI is now more likely to accept and act on any referral from the CIA ..." Will the FISA abuses continue? Will individual American rights be controlled by the CIA's overseas sources, say, out of Kyiv? Recognizing the need to separate domestic and foreign investigations need not result in the "Stovepiping" of information exposed in the Pearl Harbor attack by Roberta Wohlstetter over 50 years ago.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/01/the-fbi-as-intelligence-unit-for-the-administrative-state/