Tag: Jack Goldsmith

The American people have a right to know if their president is a Russian agent. Now President Donald Trump has had to tell reporters he is not a spy after the New York Times reported that the FBI had launched a counterintelligence probe into the president himself in May 2017. As former FBI general counsel James Baker told House lawmakers in October, the president’s obstruction of the bureau’s Russia investigation “itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security.” Since the Times story hit, some of the president’s critics have interpreted the investigation itself as evidence of the president’s guilt. And he allows that the FBI can have defensible reasons for opening an investigation into the president — namely, that a probe into Trump campaign officials and their contacts with Russia would involve Trump himself. Still, these points of constitutional principle do not address a practical question: What was the FBI’s senior leadership supposed to have done when Trump fired Comey, then went on national television and declared that he had axed their old boss because of their Russia investigation? Nonetheless, if a government official truly believes Trump is a foreign agent and should be removed from office, then he has no choice. It is ultimately up to Congress to decide whether Trump’s decision to fire Comey was a “threat to national security,” as Baker said in his testimony before the House. It is not up to the FBI. Make no mistake, however: This is not something that can be left in the FBI’s hands. Democrats, especially, should be attuned to the danger of allowing the FBI undue influence in electoral politics.