Government agencies can become complacent and sloppy. Sometimes the complacency and sloppiness leads to corruption or worse, someone gets hurt or killed. Though the agency heads may change from time to time as political administrations change, the agency head’s immediate subordinates often remain. Often those immediate subordinates have titles such as Deputy this or Associate that. Complacency, sloppiness, corruption, and criminal conduct occur further down among agency employees because it is being tolerated and sometimes directed by the inhabitants of an agency’s Mahogany Row. Institutional complacency and sloppiness oozes down from the top.
In spite of my using an image of the front page headline from the September 28, 1964, New York Times, this OpenCdA post is not about revamping the US Secret Service. The photo referring to President Kennedy’s murder and the resulting Warren Commission was used to emphasize the importance of federal agencies’ operations being subjected to regular critical Congressional oversight and then making appropriate corrections before official rebuke becomes necessary.
The Warren Commission examination of the US Secret Service after President Kennedy’s murder was necessary. The changes the Commission made were long overdue and were far more expansive than the public, unclassified version of the Warren Commission Report reflected.
Having watched carefully the pre- and now post-2016 election circus back in Fantasyland-on-the-Potomac, I believe top-down, Warren Commission-like examinations of both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Department of Justice (DoJ) are also critically necessary and need to begin soon. There appears to have been DoJ and FBI malfeasance, criminal conduct, and the abuses of investigative authority including misleading and possibly outright lying to the FISA Court to obtain FISA Court warrants to surveil persons associated with the Trump Campaign and possibly candidate, nominee, and now-President Trump himself.
Sensitive information selectively leaked from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and public information found in recent Congressional hearings strongly suggest that before and after November 8, 2016, some headquarters executive and supervisory level officials of both the FBI and DoJ apparently looked into the funhouse mirrors adorning their Mahogany Row office walls. Apparently they saw a messianic face looking back at them. Perhaps believing the image they saw in their mirrors to be above the laws of the United States, they may have concluded they had been divinely anointed to undo President Donald J. Trump’s election, in their minds an unthinkable wrong committed by “deplorable” voters on November 8, 2016.
If the DoJ and FBI abused intelligence assets and statutory authority, the abuses represent a grave threat to the national security. They completely undermine the trust and confidence the citizens of the United States must have in these agencies. (more…)