President Trump and his allies escalated their war of words against the FBI this week, claiming bias among investigators looking into the Trump campaign as Democrats warned that such attacks could set the stage for the removal of special counsel Robert Mueller.
After days of going after the FBI, whose reputation he said was “in tatters,” Trump took aim at the bureau’s handling of two allegedly biased agents on Friday as he left the White House for an event at the FBI Academy.
“Getting in a war with the nation’s chief law enforcement agency is typically not the smartest political maneuver,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist. “That being said, the FBI under [former Director James] Comey didn’t exactly distinguish itself either. So, we might be entering a new era here.”
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee grilled Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Wednesday over the presence of Democratic donors and allegedly anti-Trump employees on Mueller’s team. Although Rosenstein said he has seen no evidence of “impropriety” related to the number of Democratic-affiliated officials on the special counsel’s team, he struggled to explain away the perception of bias that has sunk in among conservatives.
But Trump’s opponents have characterized his criticism of the FBI as an attempt to undermine the entire institution, rather than an effort to question decisions of the bureau’s past leadership on key political cases.
His allies maintain that the FBI’s top brass is filled with anti-Trump animus.
“I think it is now clear that the FBI has been thoroughly politicized and the president is right in exposing this corruption,” Roger Stone, a longtime Trump supporter, told the Washington Examiner. “The agency’s active involvement in the cover-up of Hillary [Clinton]’s illegal email server is perhaps the best example of the fact that the bureau has been infected by politics and can no longer be counted on for honest law enforcement in lack of bias.”
“This is in no way meant to demean the honesty and integrity of the men and women who serve the bureau at the middle and lower levels,” Stone added. “The problem is with the leadership of the FBI.”
Mueller removed a top investigator, Peter Stzrok, after discovering Stzrok had exchanged anti-Trump text messages with another FBI employee, Lisa Page, with whom he had a romantic relationship. Some of Stzrok’s texts to Page from last year expressed open support for Hillary Clinton, whose private email use was at the center of an investigation Stzrok was overseeing at the time.
The messages, along with donations from members of Mueller’s team to Democratic campaigns and some to Clinton directly, have raised questions about the special counsel’s pursuit of Trump.
Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist, said Trump’s efforts to highlight alleged corruption on Mueller’s team could be part of an insurance policy to protect the White House should any high-level aides face legal trouble in the investigation into alleged Russian collusion.
“This is a classic case of triangulation by President Trump and his allies to guard against the ultimate findings of Mueller’s special counsel,” O’Connell said. “Trump knows that he can’t fire Muller because if he does, pandemonium will be unleashed and the whole special counsel could blow up in his face.”
O’Connell said Trump believes he can win the argument against Mueller “in the court of public opinion”because his allegations against the FBI, that some agents investigating Clinton and the Trump campaign harbored partisan biases, are “based in part in truth.”
Even Republican lawmakers who once supported Mueller’s appoint as special counsel have also begun to raise questions this week about the impartiality of the probe.
“The last couple of weeks have not been good,” Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of House Oversight Committee, told CNN this week.
“That group I’m in, that small group [of Republicans] that has supported Mueller and resisted calls for a special counsel, is getting smaller,” Gowdy said. “The fact that you can’t find prosecutors that don’t have an ‘I’m with her’ T-shirt on to staff your special counsel office, it’s just tone deaf,”
Democrats warned that GOP attacks on Mueller’s team could lead to what they would consider a potentially impeachable offense: firing the special counsel looking into alleged Russian collusion.
“It seems that they’re upset that Bob Mueller is making progress in his investigation,” Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., told MSNBC in an interview on Wednesday about his Republican colleagues on the House Judiciary Committee.
Swalwell described GOP criticism of the Stzrok texts as an “ominous drumbeat to continue to discredit Bob Mueller and his team.”
“Firing Bob Mueller without cause would be clearly obstruction of justice,” Swalwell added.
Clinton’s allies deployed a similar tactic against a government watchdog that investigated the former secretary of state’s private email use at the height of the presidential primary, however.
Democratic lawmakers questioned the role a former aide to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, played in the State Department inspector general’s decision to investigate Clinton’s reliance on a private server. Some of Clinton’s allies also seized on the involvement of a senior adviser to the inspector general who once looked into a Clinton campaign aide accused of filing false finance reports.
Brad Blakeman, a Republican strategist, said the focus on Mueller’s potential conflicts of interest is not about laying the groundwork for removing him.
“This is not about building a case to fire Mueller as it is to create some oversight over a prosecutor with immense power and an unlimited budget,” Blakeman said. “The criticism of the FBI is warranted and should and must be exposed. The FBI should be above reproach without even the appearance of bias or worse. There is no doubt that some FBI personnel and connections involved with the Mueller investigations are at least an embarrassment and at worst unable to carry out their work because of bias, or worse.”
