The state of our union is divided and anxious.
We’re sure President Trump will use different descriptors at the State of the Union address on Tuesday night. We’re equally sure that ours will be more accurate. Consider Monday.
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee voted Monday to release publicly a four-page classified memo detailing what they describe as “abuse” of the FISA warrant process. The president has five days to approve or disapprove the memo’s publication; all indications are that he’ll approve. The Intelligence Committee’s Democrats, meanwhile, have drafted their own memo to counter the Republican one. It’s also classified, but the Democrats’ version will initially be made available only to members of the House of Representatives, not yet the American public.
Republicans on the committee believe they have evidence that politics was a factor—maybe the driving factor—of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. This evidence is clear and indisputable, they say, and the Department of Justice and FBI have stonewalled their efforts to investigate.
Democrats dispute all of this. The memo, they insist, is a collection of selective bits of information meant to portray federal law enforcement in the worst possible light. Its purpose is to sow confusion about the various investigations of alleged wrongdoing by Trump associates.
These divergent interpretations of the memo are not surprising. But the memo has the Trump administration divided against itself. The Trump DOJ strongly opposes the release of the GOP memo, arguing that making it public would be “extraordinarily reckless.” The Trump White House favors it, claiming that “the Department of Justice doesn’t have a role in this process.”
In news that may or may not be related, the Deputy Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, resigned Monday under pressure. His departure comes after months of public pressure from the president to clean house at the FBI and the DOJ, driven by his frustration with the Russia investigation. The New York Times reported that FBI Director Christopher Wray “raised concerns” with McCabe about a forthcoming report from Michael Horowitz, the DOJ Inspector General. That report, inherently limited by Horowitz’s inability to compel cooperation from individuals no longer employed by the DOJ or the FBI, is nonetheless expected to offer a critical look at the performance of federal law enforcement’s handling of the probes of Hillary Clinton and the Trump campaign.
In early March, after Trump tweeted that “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower”—an act, he said, of “McCarthyism!”—we called for “radical transparency”: “As charges and leaks fly back and forth, as partisans maneuver in Congress and out, we see only one way out of this crisis: the truth.” It signifies nothing good about the state of our union that our political conflicts can only be resolved by the publication of classified documents. Still, we see no alternative but to release the Intelligence Committee memo and the Democratic response to it. Americans are smarter than the media often give them credit for, and they may well be able to distinguish the just from the unjust in this convoluted contest between two warring interpretations of events. The release of both memos won’t provide the clear picture of what happened that their authors hope, but at this point the availability of more information is better than less.
Nearly eleven months after Trump’s wire-tap claim, the crisis has deepened and the way out seems more elusive than it did back then. Americans don’t trust their government to do the right thing or the media to tell the truth. By a 2-to-1 margin, Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction despite a growing economy and a booming stock market. The national debt is $20 trillion and climbing. Intelligence officials describe threats as dire as we’ve seen in half century.
There are many ways to describe the state of our union. Strong is not one of them.
