John Podesta, who was chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, wrote a very pointed op-ed for The Washington Post last week. It was headlined: “Something is deeply broken at the FBI.”
He noted that the former acting director of the CIA has called the Russian cyberattack on Democrats and on our election system “the political equivalent of 9/11.”
So Podesta posed this question: Why didn’t we and haven’t we mounted a 9/11-like robust and independent investigation into what went wrong inside the government to better protect our country in the future?
Podesta says he was surprised to read in The New York Times that when the FBI discovered the Russian attack in September 2015, it failed to send even a single agent to warn senior Democratic National Committee officials. Instead messages were left with the DNC IT “help desk.”
Yet at about the same time, two FBI agents accompanied by attorneys from the Justice Department were sent to Denver to visit a tech firm that had helped maintain Clinton’s email server.
Of course, we all know how that turned out. FBI Director James B. Comey’s “painstaking” investigation of Clinton’s emails found nothing there. No wrongdoing. Nothing, save an opportunity for Comey to paint her email use as “extremely careless.”
Meanwhile, Russia was hacking. Snooping through the DNC files, Podesta’s email, some voter lists, the emails of prominent Republicans who were expected to support Clinton over Trump, dripping those files and emails out to WikiLeaks, composing and disseminating “fake news” stories.
Podesta wrote: “Comparing the FBI’s massive response to the overblown email scandal with the seemingly lackadaisical response to the very real Russian plot to subvert a national election shows that something is deeply broken at the FBI.”
Comey justified his handling of Clinton’s email case by citing “intense public interest” as he broke protocol not once but twice to talk about it.
Yet he has dismissed Russian hacking of our political system and refused to join the rest of the intelligence community in a statement about the cyberattacks because he didn’t want to appear “political.”
Really?
Of course, it’s not just Comey who’s being two-faced about this, as Podesta rightly notes in his Washington Post piece.
“House Republicans who had an insatiable appetite for investigating Clinton have been resistant to probing deeply into Russia’s efforts to swing the election to Trump. The media, by gleefully publishing the gossipy fruits of Russian hacks, became what the Times itself calls “a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.”
Podesta calls for, and we second, several needed actions.
– The Obama administration should quickly declassify as much as possible about the Russian hack, as requested by seven Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
– The administration also should brief members of the Electoral College before they vote. That vote is scheduled today.
– Congress should authorize a far-reaching, bipartisan independent investigation modeled on the 9/11 Commission. Legislation has been introduced by Democrats to authorize such an investigation, but as of Friday the measure had no Republican takers. This might be funny were it not so sad.
– Congress should “more vigorously exercise” its oversight to determine why the FBI responded “overzealously “in the Clinton case and “insufficiently” in the Russian case. And “the FBI should also clarify whether there is an ongoing investigation into Trump, his associates and their ties to Russia.”
As Podesta notes, if ever there were a case of “intense public interest,” wouldn’t this be it?