With the rank corruption of rogue law enforcement actors in “Obamagate” exposed, Republicans finally have a self-interested reason to crack down on the state-sanctioned spying that’s metastasized since the beginning of the war on terror. Whether or not Barack Obama is to blame is dubious. What’s not is that the American bureaucracy allowed explicitly political actors to infiltrate our law enforcement and manipulate ever-expansive FISA courts. FBI overreached to use fabricated information to surveil citizens and instigate perjury traps.
Carter Page shouldn’t have wandered around Russia taking money from anyone who asked him, and Michael Flynn, who absolutely did act as a foreign agent, should never have been considered for Trump’s national security adviser. But there’s little question that the FISA applications that led to the warrant against Page were severely flawed at best and that Flynn was suckered into a sting with little legal basis.
But Trump lost the narrative. Instead of pointing out that a secret court system that rejects a mere 2.5% of warrant requests would inevitably become weaponized by bad political actors and that our law enforcement bureaucracy as a whole lacks necessary accountability, the takeaway from Obamagate has become a petty grievance about the president, personally.
While the Obamagate fiasco provides a lesson about the dangers of surveillance overreach, the alleged murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin provides a lesson about law enforcement overreach in terms of physical brutality. Although the powers protecting Chauvin, in this case the public police union, were different than those in Obamagate, in both cases, bad actors were shielded from accountability. Despite 18 prior complaints against Chauvin, only two were closed with discipline. With the number of cops who get off for killings and misconduct thanks to qualified immunity and sympathetic juries, is there any wonder why he thought he could get away with his actions? Were they not caught on video, he likely he would have.
Obviously, Flynn and Page are hardly the sympathetic figure Floyd is, and the fate faced by the latter is the absolute worst-case scenario, but all are victims of a law enforcement system so broad and corrupt that bad faith actors can run rampant to advance their personal goals, be that racism or political animus.
On a legislative level, the last three months should prove why, conservative or liberal, people shouldn’t want to relinquish a modicum more of power to the government. After all, the inevitable endpoint of most new laws is criminalizing something, and the inevitable endpoint of that is a clash with law enforcement. But law enforcement itself, from a federal to local level, has a problem with both corruption and overreach that can only be solved with bipartisan and systemic change. This moment should unite people of all colors and political stripes to hold a system that enables rogue actors to account, and the last month has only further proved this is a matter of life and death.
