Victor Davis Hanson of National Review Online assesses long-term impacts of dubious actions from U.S. intelligence agencies in recent years.
In sum, many within the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ, the NSC, and the state department may have been involved in the greatest scandal in American electoral history, by directing agents, informants, and employees to help one campaign to harm another — and then, even after the election, to work to undermine a sitting president. In addition, these rogue agencies spent two years fighting congressional requests to release incriminating information. And then, when they were forced against their will to cough up some documents, they redacted them so heavily that they’re almost undecipherable. …
… So let us recontextualize the intelligence agencies’ current dilemmas.
Our current agency directors and cabinet are rightly calling universal attention to the ongoing threat of Russian espionage efforts.
They do so in concert because they are apparently worried, though they cannot say such openly, that President Trump himself and the American public are not yet sufficiently woke to these existential threats from Russia.
Such concern for the national security is fine and necessary.
But somewhere somehow, someone must also must explain and rectify the past. For two years, the top employees of these agencies, most appointed during the Obama administration, have been engaged in unethical and illegal behavior, likely intended to throw the election to President Obama’s preferred candidate and then, after the election, to subvert the new presidency.
In other words, those who are warning of Russian collusion efforts to warp an election now work for agencies that in the recent past were doing precisely what they now rightly accuse the Russians of doing. The damage that Brennan, Clapper, Comey and others have done to the reputations of the agencies they ran will live on well after their tenures are over.
