The Phony War Against Donald Trump

Strategic Culture



Daniel MCCARTHY



James Comey’s public testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee revealed both more and less than expected. It revealed less than expected by President Trump’s critics: Comey related no other incidents as eyebrow-raising as his account of when Trump asked him, in discussing the investigation of Mike Flynn, to “let this go.” Comey wrote memoranda to document each of his direct discussions with the president, but based on his testimony to Congress, none of those other memos contains anything comparable to the exchange about Flynn.



In his prepared remarks for the hearing, Comey described President Trump asking for his loyalty. This is one place where Comey’s testimony was more revealing than expected—not in showing that the president might apply vague pressure to his employees but in showing how ill-defined the relationship between a president and America’s intelligence agencies can be. There is a difficulty here that does not begin or end with Trump, a basic, but unexamined, problem of how the executive branch operates. How can it be both political and, at the same time, above politics? How can the president have full legal authority not only to dismiss the FBI director, as Comey testified, even to direct what the FBI does and does not investigate, while the FBI also holds itself to be “independent”? And what does it mean for any intelligence service to be independent of elected leaders—and thus, independent of the public?



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