I want to start with The FBI is out to get Trump (and back pedal from there). Trump slandered the FBI throughout his campaign and – and there is no better way to say this – fucked over the FBI ever since he has been President. The fact that he has actually done this ignores one of life’s cardinal axioms, You can’t fight City Hall and it makes me wonder Why would he do this? I can come up with a theory on the slandering during the election part; he may have thought that it gave him street cred as an outsider – especially compared to Hillary Clinton, who he kept saying, was left off easy by the FBI because she was an insider – it gave the message that his campaign was not just against the Democrats but against the unfair and unresponsive insider government itself, and it was a pre-excuse for why he lost, if he did lose, which, a lot of evidence seems to show, Trump expected. But, once Trump was elected President, Why did he go out of his way to alienate the FBI?. I don’t know but I’ve got a half-baked theory.
Going all the back to 1973, Trump has acted as if he were above the law and reacted to problems by suing and then, often, settling. In that first year, 1973, he was sued by the Department of Justice for housing discrimination and he sued back for 100 million dollars. They settled and he, essentially, agreed to follow the law. As an aside, he didn’t follow the law and he was sued again for breaking the settlement agreement. End aside. Since then, Trump has defended about 1,450 lawsuits and usually settled for less than he would have had to pay if he had honored the agreement (he has also sued about 1,900 times). I think that this has left him with the belief that laws are malleable and law enforcement pretty weak.
Trump has been referred to as a businessman and, while he has been in business, he is not an organizational chart kind of businessman with the kind of checks and balances that implies. He is more of a mafia-type businessman in which he is the absolute monarch at the center of an organization. It was easy for Trump to confused loyalty to him with virtue so that anybody who is not loyal to him is, de facto, not virtuous and shouldn’t be in the organization. He has never had a Board of Directors to moderate his impulses, and, one thing for sure, he is impulsive. That those impulses have largely worked out in the past has emboldened him. The FBI with its loyalty to its own rules and procedures is never going to be loyal enough to Trump for Trump; that aggravates him and he lashes out. Why not? He is now more powerful than ever.
People join the FBI for all kinds of different reasons, to help make society safer, to bring criminals to justice, for some, it is a safe government job and for some, it is a way and place to feel powerful, to feel dominant. I once heard an interview with an L.A. gang member, in talking about the anti-gang unit, he said: “They are the biggest, most powerful, gang; they always win.” Well, the biggest, most powerful except for the FBI.
The FBI embodies the same desires as its agents, it wants to make America safer, jail criminals, and it wants to be dominant, it wants to be the most effective law enforcement agency in the world. This is not an organization that takes criticism well, especially fake criticism. Trump has picked a fight with the biggest gang in the country and it is already not going well for him. To show how serious this is, the FBI has even broken through the client/attorney privilege. That must not have been easy, they had to prove to a judge that they were looking for something, not just fishing for anything, but looking for a specific something that they had a good reason to think they would find in Michael Cohen’s office. In the process, they must now have all his hard drives, and our hard drives know even more about us than Facebook.