In a liberal democracy, law enforcement agents and prosecutors must retain the highest public confidence. Because they have been trusted with the fearful power to arrest, to conduct surveillance, and to pry into every details of a person’s life, they must not give off any hints of favor, agendas, or partisanship.
Today, at the same time that we have a president whose spoken pronouncements are utterly unreliable, the FBI and the special counsel are losing the credibility as impartial and apolitical, which is dangerous.
President Trump, of course, bears some responsibility for this malady, because of his irresponsible wailing about “witch hunts” and attacking the FBI and the Department of Justice. Trump should understand that this investigation is necessary, as was the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and later the appointment of a special counsel. These things weren’t done simply to undermine the validity of his election or to hamper his agenda. They were done because the law required them.
While this investigation is necessary, the DOJ’s increasingly political management of that investigation reflects poorly on its objectivity.
First, the DOJ’s odd alternation between extreme secrecy and heavy leaking does not convey the image of a fair and impartial investigation. Leaking is understandable conduct from a politician, but it is the antithesis of good conduct for those sworn to uphold the law in public trust.
But the issue isn’t the leaking alone. It’s that at the same time DOJ officers are spilling to the media, they are also resisting constitutionally mandated congressional efforts to oversee them.
The DOJ is making its case to the public while avoiding scrutiny from its lawful overseers in Congress. This politician-like behavior undermines the DOJ more than Trump’s tirades ever could.
Second, the DOJ has failed to clarify the parameters of its Trump-related investigations. This has allowed for wild public speculation as to whether Robert Mueller is investigating collusion, money laundering, inaugural committees, property deals from the 1990s, or perhaps even the president’s tan.
For the president and his inner circle, however, this speculation is no peripheral concern. Trump has no right to be exempt from investigation, but a man with such duties as the president is owed the courtesy of knowing whether and for what he is being investigated.
Third, the DOJ is allocating significant resources to this investigation at the cost of other concerns. The central challenge facing all democratic law enforcement agencies is that they must balance limited resources against a wide array of serious investigative concerns. This requires resource prioritization and the tacit acceptance that some serious criminals will go unchallenged.
But considering the obvious scale of the special counsel’s investigation, we are concerned as to how many FBI agents and analysts have been transferred from other investigations. Considering Mueller’s heavy reliance on the FBI’s already stretched counterintelligence division, we worry in particular about foreign spies operating more freely and Chinese intellectual property thieves going unchallenged. These concerns cut at the nation’s critical interests by rendering themselves in the form of lost jobs and lessened security. We suggest that these things matter to the credibility of those tasked to protect us.
Ultimately, the DOJ will have to grapple with these issues sooner or later. They are not fictions born of Trump’s base, they are exigent concerns of effective law enforcement in a democracy.
