The FBI looks like Trump’s America
With 67 percent white male agents, the bureau doesn’t reflect the nation. Did its conservative culture play a role in Comey’s decision to reveal the renewed Clinton email probe?
The typical Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent is white, male, and middle-aged, often with a military background — in short, drawn from the segment of the U.S. population most likely to support GOP nominee Donald Trump.
.. However, it’s clear that the FBI director has felt an unusual need to explain those moves to his own work force, perhaps detecting deep skepticism. The director has sent two agencywide memos defending his handling of the email mess.
“The case itself was not a cliff-hanger; despite all the chest-beating by people no longer in government, there really wasn’t a prosecutable case,” Comey wrote in a two-page memo to FBI personnel in September explaining the agency’s conclusions in the case. He seemed to acknowledge that he was getting grief about the decision from former FBI agents he had met around the country.
.. Some former FBI officials saw the messages as an acknowledgement that the FBI’s rank-and-file were suspicious of the decisions being made at the top.
.. Another sign of such trouble: a steady stream of leaks out of the bureau, many of them apparently coming from New York-based agents unhappy with decisions to keep an investigation into the Clinton Foundation in low gear.
“The insurrections usually come out of the New York office,” Smith observed.