A relative of mine who is a pediatrician once said to me, “The patient starts getting better when the doctor walks into the examination room.” There is a psychological life that happens when an authority enters who can help you get to the truth.
So what happens when that authority figure is incompetent or crooked? The patient is nervous, defensive, and prone to staying away.
This is why it is essential that the FBI is a clean organization with a good reputation. Former FBI Director James Comey has been indicted. Old clips reveal him gleefully explaining to delighted media outlets how he leaked bad information about President Donald Trump to the media. Comey is seen speculating about Trump allegedly doing salacious things that were never proven and even deriving the logistics of imprisoning the president of the United States.
No matter what your politics, at a basic level, this kind of behavior makes it more difficult for the FBI to do its job. Imagine you have evidence of a crime, but you’re also a MAGA Trump fan. Would Comey or someone like him treat you fairly and honestly? It’s not certain.
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This is why my own interrogation by the FBI was so harrowing. In the fall of 2018, I was at the center of a national storm. A woman named Christine Blasey Ford accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her while they were in high school. Ford claimed that I was in the room when it happened. I was friends with Kavanaugh in the 1980s, when we were both high school students at Georgetown Preparatory School.
The entire thing closed down after an FBI background check, the seventh, into Kavanaugh over the last week of September. As part of the check, I was asked to voluntarily come in and talk to two agents. I did.
I had two layers of stress to deal with. The first was the media circus surrounding me. The second was the idea that the FBI may be corrupt.
On Sept. 18, 2018, just two days after Ford broke her story in the Washington Post, the Hill reported that Trump was bent on exposing what he called a “corrupt” FBI. John Solomon reported that the president “said Tuesday he ordered the release of classified documents in the Russia collusion case to show the public the FBI probe started as a ‘hoax’ and that exposing it could become one of the ‘crowning achievements’ of his presidency.”
It would be revealed that Comey wrote seven memorandums summarizing his interactions with Trump and then sent one of them to a personal friend and lawyer, directing him to leak the contents to a New York Times reporter. The leak resulted in the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the president.
A 2019 inspector general report torched Comey for creating the memos of his conversations with Trump and using those memos to trigger an independent counsel investigation into the president’s supposed ties with Russia. From USA Today: “Today’s report documents how Comey brazenly violated federal and FBI policies regarding his disclosures. Top FBI officials told the IG that they were ‘shocked,’ ‘stunned,’ and ‘surprised’ that Comey would leak the contents of one of the memos to a reporter. The IG concluded: ‘The unauthorized disclosure of this information — information that Comey knew only by virtue of his position as FBI Director — violated the terms of his FBI Employment Agreement and the FBI’s Prepublication Review Policy.’”
When I talked to the FBI, I wasn’t just rattled from the endless delays the Democrats kept imposing in an attempt to make me break down — lethal opposition researcher Ace Smith put it best: “90% of mistakes are made by people making emotional decisions under pressure” — or the increasingly ridiculous horror fiction that was being spread in the media, stories about drugs and gang rapes and fights on boats; or the threats of extortion that came over the phone.
No, there was an additional piece: the idea that the FBI, under Comey, was corrupt. If Trump was right and the bureau framed him, that meant that it could do anything it wanted to me. The additional burden on my mental state was the direct result of Comey’s actions.
In the medical analogy, I was the patient who was afraid of the doctor.
In the end, the background checks proved that I was telling the truth: that Kavanaugh was innocent. Yet the fear instilled by Comey was a barrier that should never have been there.
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It’s very hard for an organization to come back from something like Comey’s reckless malice toward the president without a total change. Imagine the FBI is investigating a terrorist cell and is working hard to win over a possibly friendly witness who can help its case. The witness is about halfway willing to talk, but something is holding him back. After all, this is the same organization that went after Trump — it could easily do the same thing to him.
The only way out of that kind of reputation damage is a complete purge. The cancer has to be removed in order to regain health.
