Historians: Opinions about Donald Trump war with the FBI and intelligence

“Unprecedented”: historians on why Trump’s war with the FBI is so stunning: Penn State, Emory University and others.....

House Republicans have wrongly voted to release a memo alleging anti-Trump bias at the FBI. The classified memo reportedly details how the FBI used the Trump dossier produced by ex-British spy Christopher Steele to unlawfully surveil the president.

As my colleague Zack Beauchamp noted, there is no evidence so far that the FBI was plotting against Trump, and it’s unlikely that the memo will provide any. As it stands, the president has until Saturday to decide whether to release the memo. (The FBI has privately and publicly urged him not to do so.)

If the president decides to release the memo, the White House and the FBI will be in open war with each other.

Commentary published in Vox.com

Douglas M. Charles, professor of history, Penn State University

Regarding the current antagonism between the White House and FBI, there is no good historical precedent. Never has a president of the United States attacked the FBI so publicly. Furthermore, congressional committees with oversight responsibilities have also never openly attacked the FBI in this way.

In the J. Edgar Hoover days (1924-1972), the FBI worked in some cases to advance the political interests of the White House: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s foreign policy interests, Eisenhower’s anti-communist interests, Lyndon Johnson’s and Nixon’s political intelligence interests.

When Harry Truman was president and allegedly was “soft on communism,” FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover secretly worked with congressional committees and Sen. Joe McCarthy to advance the anti-communist cause, but there was never a public rift between the FBI and the White House. 

The idea that a president would so publicly condemn the FBI and its work is unprecedented, and does appear to be an effort to pull the FBI back into the presidential orbit as an agency doing its bidding....

Carol Anderson, professor of history and African-American studies, Emory University

Yes, the independence of the FBI is under siege. Bringing an independent judiciary and investigative branch under the domination of the executive is one of the first moves of regimes that do not respect the rule of law. Pinochet’s Chile. Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union. Putin’s Russia.

The rationale is simple. Besides the military, the judiciary and law enforcement branches are the most powerful in a state. 

Control and politicization of that wing allows the ruler to criminalize his opponents, to label them enemies of the state, when in fact those so-called enemies are really defenders of a more viable, democratic nation. That is why they are a threat.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, professor of history, University of Edinburgh

There have been tensions in the past between the White House and the FBI. For example, President Johnson made it known that he was disappointed the FBI could not prove there were communists behind the domestic protest movement against the Vietnam War. The CIA concluded the same, and LBJ had to abandon any urge he may have felt to fire the bureau’s director, J. Edgar Hoover. But that fracas was a storm in a teacup compared with today’s confrontation.

It seems to me that there has been incompetence all round. Russian President Vladimir Putin rightly thought there was a chance of an ally in the White House, [and] then, to further that goal, sanctioned interference in the presidential election. Donald Trump indeed wanted to be friends with Russia but suffers from Putin-like hubris ... and has thwarted his own aim in that he cannot now be friends with Russia without appearing to be part of Putin’s conspiracy.

What happens to the FBI may seem a side issue compared with all this, but presidential disrespect for the law is reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s behavior, which led to his resignation in disgrace.

Meg Jacobs, professor of history, Princeton University

The contest of wills between Trump and the FBI is not so much a part of a long-term battle between the president and the director of intelligence as much as it is the latest episode in the GOP effort to sideline and discredit the Russia investigation.

When Christopher Wray testified during his confirmation hearings, he assured the Senate committee he was “not faint of heart.” 

If and when necessary, he would be willing to stand up to the president. And so far, it looks like he’s living up to his promise. However, the fight over the House Republican memo is less about historical precedence or weakening of the checks on the presidency than it is a reflection of the polarized politics we are living through and, more generally, the attack on the credibility of all government institutions.

The memo scandal is a move on behalf of the White House ... to tarnish the reputation of the FBI and of the Justice Department, and by extension call into doubt the motives of the Mueller investigation. In that way, it takes us further down the path of turning every development in the investigation into a partisan ploy.

That, of course, is nothing new — think of the attacks on Kenneth Star by the Clinton White House. But here, the charges are not simply that Mueller is an overzealous prosecutor, but rather that the FBI tried to help throw an entire election. The House memo seems like it will suggest that the FBI was implicated in an attempted coup. The long-term significance of the memo release is that it may confirm for some how few in government can be trusted to act in an independent and honest way, even the FBI —which has historically been seen as beyond the partisan fray.

Carol Anderson, professor of history and African-American studies, Emory University

Yes, the independence of the FBI is under siege. Bringing an independent judiciary and investigative branch under the domination of the executive is one of the first moves of regimes that do not respect the rule of law. Pinochet’s Chile. Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union. Putin’s Russia.

The rationale is simple. Besides the military, the judiciary and law enforcement branches are the most powerful in a state. Control and politicization of that wing allows the ruler to criminalize his opponents, to label them enemies of the state, when in fact those so-called enemies are really defenders of a more viable, democratic nation. That is why they are a threat.

Ivan Greenberg, author of Surveillance in America: Critical Analysis of the FBI, 1920 to the Present

This level of open combat between President Trump and the FBI is unprecedented. In the past, President Jimmy Carter took on the FBI and reformed it substantially, reducing its investigations in politics. That reform followed the death of longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the Senate Church Committee hearings in 1975-’76 on abuse of power by the FBI and other Intel agencies. But Carter did much of the reform behind the scenes. It was not open combat, as Trump is waging today.

Trump is the second president to fire an FBI director. The first [FBI director] was William Sessions in 1993 [who was dismissed by then-President Bill Clinton]. But there was little open feuding like today surrounding that decision. Greenberg says that Trump has a deep-seated suspicion of the US intel agencies, which may be due to contact with them from his days in Atlantic City, or from his father’s experience with the FBI.

The claim that the FBI’s “independence” is a thing to preserve is misguided. In the past, much of that so-called “independence” allowed the bureau to go rogue in its spying on Americans and evade congressional or Justice Department accountability.
Morton Keller, professor of history, Brandeis University

The major theme in earlier FBI-White House relations was the tension between the presidents and an all-but-autonomous J. Edgar Hoover. Strong chief executives like FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, and LBJ contained him pretty well, but there was constant tension.

I have no idea whether there will be an increase or a decline in the FBI’s independence. I do know this: The tension between the Democratic presidents of the past and J. Edgar Hoover closely resembles the relationship between Trump and the current FBI leadership. It appears to be inherent in the institutional relationship of the presidency and the FBI.

Timothy Naftali, clinical associate professor of public service, New York University

Donald Trump is not the first president to have a fraught relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

Trump is, however, the first to launch both a public and private war on its credibility. When Richard Nixon found that there were limits to what J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were willing to do for the White House, he ordered that a White House investigative unit (dubbed “the Plumbers”) be set up to go after his enemies.

But Nixon did not dare take on Hoover or the bureau publicly. After Hoover’s death, Nixon put his own man in the job and expected loyalty. The bureau beneath L. Patrick Gray pushed back when “loyalty” meant obstruction of justice. In the long post-Hoover period, the relationship between the bureau and presidents has seemed less fraught.

The one exception, before the Trump era, was the tense relationship between President Clinton and his FBI Director Louis Freeh, who was very supportive of the Lewinsky investigation. However, that tension remained largely hidden, and no evidence has ever surfaced that the president tried to have Freeh fired.

There’s another phenomenon of the Trump era that portends a real threat to the independence of the FBI. Not since the “season of investigations” of the CIA and the FBI in the 1970s have members of Congress been so suspicious of the bureau. The FBI’s force of dedicated public servants will not be alone in bearing the burden of this hyperpartisan moment. In the end, whether the American people fully recognize it or not, they need an independent, nonpartisan federal investigative force.

H.W. Brands, professor of history, University of Texas

I can’t think of a single time any president has done anything like this. Harry Truman privately worried that the CIA would become an American Gestapo. And several presidents muttered against J. Edgar Hoover. But no one went public the way Trump has.

Stanley Kutler, the historian who knew more about Watergate than anyone, called it the “war of the FBI succession.” The death of J. Edgar Hoover left the bureau in a state where Richard Nixon could try to employ it to cover his misdeeds. But the FBI had its own interests and secrets, and in the tangle that ensued, it was the president who was brought down. The lesson might be that if a president has secrets he wants to keep hidden, he shouldn’t mess with the FBI.
David Stebenne, professor of history, Ohio State University

There was serious antagonism between the FBI and the White House during the Kennedy administration (over Director Hoover’s attitude toward the civil rights movement in general and Dr. [Martin Luther] King in particular).

There was also serious antagonism between the FBI and the White House during the Nixon administration. Nixon believed that Hoover might have wiretapped a conversation dealing with the Nixon campaign and the South Vietnamese government in the fall of 1968, and feared Hoover might release it, implicating Nixon and his campaign chief in a violation of the federal statute that prohibits private citizens from interfering with the conduct of American foreign policy.

Once the Watergate break-in happened, that tension between the FBI and the White House intensified.

As for the current situation, it seems fair to say that the White House appears to be pressuring the FBI, but it’s too soon to tell whether that leads to a significant loss of the FBI’s independence from the White House.

The Nunes memo, explained with diagrams