I just finished watching a clever movie series on Netflix called The Comey Rule, which covers the period from when Jim Coney became FBI Director in 2013 until he was fired by Trump in 2017. The series gets rolling when the FBI starts investigating whether Hillary Clinton violated the law by installing a mail server in her home to receive classified information, an issue which created all kinds of procedural and informational problems because it happened during the 2016 campaign.
Comey was booted out of the FBI when he refused to go along with Trump’s suggestion that the meetings between Michael Flynn and the Russian Ambassador be swept under the veritable bureaucratic rug. This event made Comey an admired figure in the ‘anyone but Trump’ camp, as well as giving the FBI a beloved institutional presence within the liberal fold.
At some point during the movie, there’s a brief scene where Comey tells Trump about the FBI’s efforts to keep track of an alleged ISIS ‘sleeper’ gang whose members are planning some big, terrorist attack in the United States. As I watched this brief segment, I had a quick thought that substitute the word ‘Communist’ for the word ‘ISIS’ and you have J. Edgar Hoover telling Eisenhower about the ‘red’ threat back in 1956.
My parents were college students in New York City during the late 1930’s, they were children of East European Jewish immigrants who brought with them an Old World culture which combined latkes and potato kugel with Lenin and Marx. They demonstrated on their college campus in support of the Spanish Republic because everyone on a New York City college campus supported the Spanish Republic until it was overwhelmed by Franco and his Fascist partners in 1939.
My parents were never members of the ‘Party,’ but they had friends who joined. My father was twice visited at his company by two FBI agents who just wanted to have a ‘friendly’ chat. Were it not for the fact that my father happened to own the business where he worked, had he been just another employee, the appearance of the FBI might have ended his business career right then and there.
As I watched the scene in The Comey Rule where the FBI Director tells the President that his agency is ‘keeping tabs’ on these Muslims, even though not one of the alleged ISIS ‘sleepers’ had yet to commit a single crime, I wondered, if I were a Muslim living in the United States right now, whether I would feel about the FBI today the way my parents felt about the FBI back when their last name, parentage and religion got them on a watch list and visited multiple times.
What’s the expression? Politics makes strange bedfellows? Is it really the case that the FBI is now a cherished institution among liberals thanks to the antics and goings-on of an idiot like Donald Trump?
Yesterday I was listening to the AM-shock jock program, which was playing an advertisement for Newsmax, an alt-right fount of mis-information available on radio, internet, and cable TV. The ad was promoting an ‘exclusive’ report on how Biden’s dementia is so bad that the entire Administration is now under the control of a group of Socialists and Communists operating not-so-secretly in the West Wing.
So how come, if the government is about to become a pawn of the international Left, there hasn’t been a single demand from Donald Trump or any of the other great patriots to have the FBI start investigating this case? Isn’t the FBI supposed to keep track of such threats to the American way of life?
The FBI is really good at checking license plates in airport parking lots to identify stolen cars. When it comes to other criminality, they know how to invent a threat and then protect us from what they have invented.
Think I’m being too nasty when it comes to explaining what the FBI does and doesn’t do? Try the vendetta that J. Edgar Hoover ran against Dr. King beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 until he was assassinated in 1968. After all, what bigger and more serious threat to the country could exist than a Black minister calling for equal rights?