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.
Trump’s Fans Have More to Lose Than Trump Himself
If the Republican nominee loses, the millions of Americans supporting him will feel more isolated and disillusioned than ever before.
This is what Trump has done over the last year: He’s whipped up the darkest, angriest demons in the electorate. He has not simply given people permission to indulge any racist, sexist, xenophobic, or religiously intolerant tendencies they may harbor. He has insisted—loudly—that such bigotry is only common sense and mocked anyone who refuses to see the danger presented by “the other” as a blind idiot.
.. “I feel he’s the last chance we have to establish law and order and preserve the culture I grew up in.”
Trump’s Debate Flameout
It takes a tremendous ego and a healthy dose of hubris to believe that you can simply bluster your way through a presidential debate, but if anyone thinks that way, it’s no surprise it’s the uniquely underqualified and overblown king of bragging and whining: Donald J. Trump.
.. “Donald started his career back in 1973 being sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination because he would not rent apartments in one of his developments to African-Americans, and he made sure that the people who worked for him understood that was the policy.”
Trump’s response was not that they hadn’t discriminated, but rather that “many, many other companies throughout the country” were also sued, that the suit was settled “with no admission of guilt” and that “it’s just one of those things.”
No, Donald, racial discrimination isn’t “just one of those things.”
.. He invoked his euphemistic lament that the country needs more “law and order,” which is simply code for flooding poor and minority communities with more officers and giving them a nod of approval to crack down on these communities more harshly.
.. three undercover New York City police officers approached Patrick M. Dorismond, an unarmed, 26-year-old black father of two and asked to buy drugs. This made Dorismond angry, just as it would have made me angry. The incident escalated into a scuffle and one of the officers shot and killed Dorismond.
.. The maleficent Giuliani took the extraordinary step of releasing Dorismond’s sealed juvenile records to show that the dead man who became upset over being propositioned for drugs was “no altar boy.” In truth it was just another attempt to blame and defame the victim.
.. “More than 70 percent think he has flubbed race relations. And most blacks and Hispanics frown on his anti-crime policies.”
.. Trump’s response was not to deny the charge or to decry the language, but to resurrect his old hostility with Rosie O’Donnell. Rosie O’Donnell? That’s when you know the man is grasping at straws.
The Triumph of the Chaos Candidate
And so it came to pass, in the year 2016, on a sunny day in America’s heartland, in a hall smelling of sweat and popcorn and filled with a seething, roaring crowd, that Donald Trump—builder, shocker, demagogue, smasher of certainties, destroyer of the Republican Party, winner—accepted his party’s nomination, with a vow to restore order.
“Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities,” Trump proclaimed, his hand slicing the air, his pompadour gleaming with the reflection of hundreds of lights. “I have a message for all of you: The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon—and I mean very soon—come to an end,” he added.
Yet Trump had just finished presiding over a convention that was anything but orderly.
.. This was something quite different, something rarely seen in the age of lockstep partisanship and spin: a ramshackle, thrown-together, halfhearted spectacle, one that brutally exposed the flimsiness of a campaign that has always been little more than a man, his plane, and his Twitter account.
.. if America is in chaos, Trump seems more a symptom than a remedy.
.. If this election is to be fought over chaos versus order, the convention did not make a convincing case for Trump as the candidate of control.
.. “Trump is anti-establishment, just like punk rock,” he said.
.. at one point, the conspiracist radio host Alex Jones had to be escorted out by police.