The Real Bias at the FBI
Depending on who you ask, you can get some pretty disparate views of the role of the nation’s most important law-enforcement bureau.
Certain Democrats were or remain convinced that the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email-server case—from then-Director James Comey’s condemnation of her “extremely careless” behavior to his late-October letter briefly reopening the investigation—was intended to hand the election to Donald Trump. Trump sees a conspiracy, too—to hand the election to Clinton. He’s gone so far as to say that texts between FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page constitute “treason.” The bureau’s defenders, meanwhile, would have the public believe that the FBI is an island of objectivity, entirely immune from political considerations and unfairly buffeted by partisans.
Each of these positions is a caricature. Of course the FBI is political—how, as a powerful institution in Washington, with a leader appointed by the president, could it not be?—but its politics are not reducible to partisan allegiance, although its ranks include Democrats and Republicans. Like most bureaucratic institutions, the FBI’s primary loyalty is to its own interests, and when it intervenes in politics, that tends to be in its own service.
That reality comes through
