Max Holland

The FBI’s Culture of Impunity Didn’t Start with Donald Trump

While the FBI is no longer quite the insular and impervious bureaucracy it was under Hoover, the DNA is still there.

John Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972

By Max Holland

 

Published 29 December 2019, in The Daily Beast

 

The revelations about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s disingenuous applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in its 2016 Crossfire Hurricane operation come as little surprise to long-time watchers of the Bureau.

Forty-seven years after J. Edgar Hoover died, the American people are still living with traces from the culture of impunity he instilled in the Bureau. One would like to think the sensitivity of the FBI’s 2016 campaign investigation would have spurred Bureau agents and executives to conduct a blemish-free probe, knowing that every step might someday be subject to intense scrutiny. Yet the Bureau’s history is replete with abuses, some of the worst occurring when the stakes were highest.

Three examples suffice to illustrate the point.

Read the rest of the article here.

 

 

What Adam Schiff Doesn't Get About Watergate

L to R: Minority counsel Fred Thompson, Senator Howard Baker, and Senator Sam Ervin (chairman), Senate Watergate Committee, 1973

 

Schiff sees Howard Baker as a noble, bipartisan impeachment hero. In reality, he was just another attack dog for Nixon. Here’s why Democrats need to get their history right.

By MAX HOLLAND

    Representative Adam Schiff posed a rhetorical question the other week that grated on the sensibility of anyone who remembers well the Watergate scandal.

    “Where is Howard Baker?” Schiff asked plaintively.

    Schiff was evoking the late Republican senator from Tennessee, who died in 2014, in a transparent plea to Republicans’ better selves. Ostensibly, Baker, the ranking minority member on the Senate’s Watergate Committee, put aside partisanship to join Democrats in a search for the truth. The proof lies in Baker’s very first question to John Dean, President Richard Nixon’s former White House counsel and the desk officer for the Watergate cover-up. On June 28, 1973, Baker famously asked Dean, “What did the president know and when did he know it?”

    Yet what many recall as an incisive, if not noble, question about the behavior of a president from Baker’s same political party was anything but. Rather, it was a shrewd and calculated attempt to stem the rising tide against Nixon. Nor was it even Baker’s first assault against getting at the truth of Watergate, and it would not prove to be his most cynical.

     It is true that Baker’s behavior during the Senate hearings does not resemble in the slightest Republicans’ comportment so far. At every good opportunity, which is to say constantly, Baker, oozing border-state charm without being too obsequious, flattered Sam Ervin, the folksy, 76-year-old Dixiecrat from North Carolina who chaired the committee. “It has been a great privilege for me to learn from you and to go forward in this unpleasantness,” typified the remarks Baker directed at Ervin.

     But here’s the thing: Baker was a highly sophisticated, even Machiavellian, partisan. His genuine role was one of collusion with the White House; followed by an attempt at a firebreak that failed; and finally, in desperation, an embrace of conspiracy-mongering.

     Much of what we know about Baker’s true role comes from three books: a memoir by Fred Thompson, the Watergate committee’s minority counsel (At That Point in Time, 1975); a memoir by Sam Dash, the panel’s majority counsel (Chief Counsel, 1976); and a comprehensive history based on primary documents by the late dean of Watergate historians, Professor Stanley I. Kutler (The Wars of Watergate, 1990). In addition to these books, a fine-grained picture of Baker’s behind-the-scenes behavior has emerged as more of the tapes surreptitiously recorded during Nixon’s presidency have been released and deciphered.

    Read the rest of the article here.

Much Worse Than Watergate

 

 

Trump’s appointee Matthew Whitaker and Nixon’s appointee L. Patrick Gray. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by U.S. Department of Justice and Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images.

 

 

It has happened before: the interim appointment of a man unknown and unqualified, except for his open loyalty to the president, to one of the top law enforcement jobs in the federal government.

It was May 1972 when President Richard Nixon abruptly elevated Patrick Gray III, a Justice Department official as colorless as his name, to the directorship of the FBI following the sudden death of J. Edgar Hoover. The announcement came as a shock. The conventional wisdom, both outside and inside the bureau, was that one of Hoover’s hand-picked executives would run the FBI when he no longer could. The naming of Gray, even on an acting basis, was widely criticized. The president “has chosen a highly political and professionally unqualified crony to direct this powerful and semisecret police agency,” the New York Times editorialized.

There is a parallel between Donald Trump’s selection of Matthew Whitaker to be the acting attorney general, replacing Jeff Sessions, and Nixon’s appointment of Gray. Both appear to be efforts to personalize law enforcement if not justice itself. Yet there are also marked differences between the two situations that make Trump’s brazen selection of Whitaker more disturbing in its implications than Gray’s appointment—and nearly every other maneuver, legal or political, that Nixon tried in his desperate effort to survive the Watergate scandal.

  

To read the entire article as published in Slate, click here.

The Post and the Past

 

2 March 2018

 

Here’s What Was Really at Stake in the Pentagon Papers Case

In the sure hands of filmmaker Steven Spielberg, history is often a morality play. Take Schindler’s List (1993), the story of a Czech citizen, Oskar Schindler, celebrated for saving Jews from concentration camps or worse.

An ethnic German who joined the Nazi Party months after Hitler’s partial annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Schindler had already been acting as a spy for German military intelligence for three years before Czechoslovakia was dismembered. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, Schindler moved to Krakow to profit from the “Aryanization” of Jewish-owned businesses in the former Polish state. In late 1944, once the war, from Berlin’s perspective, had taken a decisive turn for the worse, Schindler obtained permission to move his factory west and had an assistant draw up “several versions” of a list of essential slave laborers supposedly needed to operate the relocated plant. In this manner, and at considerable risk to himself, Schindler facilitated the survival of up to 800 Jewish men and 300 to 400 Jewish women who otherwise faced extermination.

Spielberg’s depiction was a misleading beatification for, while Schindler was no Nazi ideologue, men and women were put on or taken off his list depending on what wartime valuables they had to offer. Missing from the movie was that he was an opportunistic businessman through and through (though never a particularly good one).

The liberties taken by director Spielberg and writers Liz Hannah and Josh Singer last year in making The Post—about defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 leak of the so-called Pentagon Papers (formally titled “History of U. S. Decision-Making Process on Viet Nam Policy, 1945-1967”)—are of a similar order. The demarcation line between the bad guys and the good guys (plus one woman) is simple and clear-cut, with complications burnished into nonexistence.

Accordingly, some legal and political history may be in order.

Read the rest of the article here.