The Trumping of the FBI
President Trump and his allies are claiming that the memo released by House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes proves that the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election is a partisan witch hunt motivated by a fraudulent document produced by an anti-Trump source. Trump, who tweeted that he was “vindicated” by the memo, also shared a few lines from a Wall Street Journal editorial that argued “the FBI became a tool of anti-Trump political actors,” that it was “used to influence the 2016 election and its aftermath,” and that the behavior in the memo is “unacceptable in a democracy and ought to alarm anyone who wants the FBI to be a nonpartisan enforcer of the law.”
That version of events might seem confusing to anyone who read the text of the Nunes memo or who lived through the events against taking “overt investigative steps” close to an election by holding a press conference excoriating Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton while declining to seek charges against her, and later announced, days before the election itself, that the FBI was reopening its inquiry into her handling of private information as secretary of state.
