Bye, Bye, FBI? The Case for Disbanding the Federal Frankenstein’s Monster

English: Standing on Pennsylvania Avenue NW an...
English: Standing on Pennsylvania Avenue NW and look up F Street NW at the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C., in the United States. Español: Edificio J. Edgar Hoover, la sede de FBI (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is always under fire for something. As of late January, that something is destruction of evidence. Text messages between agents involved in the Bureau’s investigations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, from a key time frame during the presidential transition,  are missing. Congress, the Bureau, and the US Justice Department are at each other’s throats over the missing messages and what they might say.

It’s far from the first time, as James Bovard points out at The Hill. In 1973, acting FBI director Patrick Gray was forced to resign for destroying evidence in the Watergate investigation. After the 1992 murder of Vicki Weaver by an FBI sniper, an FBI division chief went to prison for destruction of evidence in that case.

The FBI has  had 110 years to prove its worth. A dispassionate look at its history says that it’s far more often served as a center for blackmail, corruption, and political manipulation than as anything resembling a legitimate law enforcement agency.

In fact, it was a bad idea in the first place.

The FBI — then merely the Bureau of Investigation, or BOI — was created during a congressional recess and without congressional approval by the Attorney General in 1908 for purposes of “investigating” (read: Drumming up a scare over) the role of prostitution in “white slavery,” a forerunner of today’s “human trafficking” panic. It’s pretty much gone downhill from there.

The US Constitution defines only three federal crimes: Treason, piracy and counterfeiting. The first two are military matters and the third is handled by the Secret Service. There’s no room for an FBI in a constitutional law enforcement scheme.

One excuse for keeping the FBI going has been to facilitate investigations of crimes with an interstate angle. But given today’s technology, the states could presumably set up their own clearinghouses to exchange information and track down cross-border bank robbers and kidnappers. The FBI is just another bureaucratic layer inserting itself between the commission of a crime and the arrest of those thought to be responsible.

While the FBI has no particularly compelling, or even legitimate, mission, it certainly has its illegitimate uses. It’s probably not going too far to think of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s first director, as having been a sort of shadow president for much of his 48 years of service. He used agents to get the goods on aspiring political leaders, and apparently used that information to get what he wanted from them both for the Bureau itself and in public policy generally.

One big problem with a federal law enforcement agency as big and well-funded as the FBI is that at some points it’s almost certain to stop working for the rest of the government and start running the rest of the government. Election? Who needs an election? Just ask J. Edgar what to do.

Unfortunately, the second big problem with such an agency is that it’s hard to get rid of after more than a century of nearly uncontested power.

But we should try.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

The Worst Thing About Federal Government “Shutdowns”

Diagram of US Federal Government and American ...
Diagram of US Federal Government and American Union. Published: 1862, July 15. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The second worst thing about federal government “shutdowns” is that they’re almost entirely meaningless theatrical productions  — tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing — from beginning to end.

The worst thing about such “shutdowns” is that they end, usually in a way that undoes most of what little good they accomplished in the first place.

I’m writing this on the first (and for all I know, the last) morning of the latest such “shutdown.” It comes after a fight over a temporary spending bill that, had it passed, would have given congressional Republicans and Democrats a few more weeks to fight over spending in the longer term.

Maybe this “shutdown” will last a day. Maybe it will last a week. I’m guessing it will be a short one. Unlike some, it’s not based on a conflict between a Congress of one party  and a president of the other party, but rather simply on the inability of Mitch McConnell to whip a few Republican Senators into line.

The real effects of the “shutdown,” such as they are, will kick in Monday when “non-essential” federal government activities stop happening and the government workers associated with those activities go home on (supposedly) unpaid furlough.

Some government inspectors will temporarily stop descending on factories and other workplaces to tick off boxes on forms.

The National Park Service will hang up “closed” signs at gatehouses around the country.

About half of the 800,000 civilian workers at the Pentagon will stop pushing the paper that moves money from your bank accounts to the bottom lines of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Some of those who do keep working won’t be paid until the curtain falls on this particular performance of the recurring “shutdown” play.

Those effects will end when 51 US Senators pronounce themselves happy enough with the spending deal to flip the switch back to “on,” and a majority of the US House of Representatives quickly agrees that the Senate bill is close enough (for government work) to the one the House already passed.

When it’s over, all those government employees will go back to work. And if history is an indicator, they’ll all get paid for the time they were off. And as usual, few people will ask the big question:

If all those activities that got “shut down” were “non-essential,” why are they government activities in the first place?

The case for government is, usually, that it does things that must be done and that can’t be done by any other organization. Designating an activity “non-essential” is just another way of saying it’s a way of wasting money on something either unnecessary or better left to the market.

This, too, shall pass. Unfortunately.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

No, I Don’t Really Care Much About Donald Trump’s Sex Life. Here’s Why.

English: This photo depicts Donald Trump's sta...
English: This photo depicts Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In October of 2016, Wall Street Journal article claims, Donald Trump’s lawyer paid $130,000 to buy the silence of Stephanie Clifford, better known to viewers of adult films, at any rate as “Stormy Daniels.” Daniels, it’s alleged, was set to tell the story of a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump on Good Morning America and in Slate.

Now-president Trump and Daniels deny (through the attorney) both the encounter and the alleged payoff, but as I write this In Touch magazine now claims to have the true scoop. In 2011, the magazine claims, Daniels described the encounter in an interview and passed a lie detector test to substantiate her story.

Pretty juicy, I guess … but is anyone really surprised? Does this particular story tell us anything we didn’t already know about Donald Trump? More importantly, does it tell us anything we didn’t already know about Donald Trump before the 2016 presidential election?

Trump has been married three times. His second marriage was to Marla Maples, with whom his affair while still married to his first wife, Ivana Trump, had been covered in excruciating detail in the American press.

Around the time of the alleged payoff to Daniels, a tape of Trump from before the alleged encounter (and from around the time he married Melania Trump) came to light in which Trump was heard bragging about his pursuit of a married woman and that “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything  … Grab them by the …”

I’m sure you can fill in the blank there, which is pretty much my whole point: Is this latest bit really informative?

By Election Day — November 8, 2016 — everyone who wanted to know the truth about Donald Trump’s sex life, marital foibles, etc. had received a crash course on them.

And then America voted.

Case closed.

Those who voted for Trump believed his denials (and will presumably continue to disbelieve them no matter how many breathless exclusives follow this one), or voted for him in spite of what they knew (and would likely do so again), or just didn’t consider the issue important (and probably still don’t).

Those who voted against Trump because of their perceptions of how he treats women or how honest he is when it comes to, among other things, marital vows can feel smug and affirmed, I guess, but their minds were likewise already made up and are almost certainly going to stay made up.

As American philosopher and psychologist William James is (perhaps apocryphally) said to have noted, “a difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.” The addition of the Stormy Daniels story to the legend of Donald Trump is that kind of difference.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY