Did the FBI Abuse Its Mandate?

Over the course of my working career, I have had several occasions where I have had to settle matters via the court systems. On two occasions I was sued. On both occasions, I asked myself, “What is this? I have done nothing wrong.” Then I proceeded to endure a long, time-consuming and expensive process.
It was educational, to say the least. Prior to these experiences, I was naively of the opinion that one is dragged into court because he has broken the law, or has taken advantage of another person; and, if one had not done those things, he did not have to worry about such things. But, while there are legitimate uses of investigations and the courts, I learned, however, that is not always the case. Some people spin a yarn, hoping to hoodwink others into believing things which are false, to gain something.
It is with those experiences in mind that I read a Wall Street Journal editorial entitled, “The FBI’s Trump Panic — McCabe reveals how officials contemplated a bureaucratic coup.” It appeared in the Feb. 19, 2019, edition, laying out how the Journal sees the government investigations of Donald Trump.
They explain that while the American people have, for the most part, received the Trump presidency in stride, not so America’s elite; they have panicked, according to former deputy director Andrew McCabe.
McCabe says that after Trump fired FBI director James Comey, McCabe himself and senior Justice Department officials discussed whether Trump could be removed under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.
In the Journal’s view, “This is extraordinary, and as far as we know unprecedented. A President exercises his constitutional prerogative to fire the FBI director, and Mr. Comey’s associates immediately talked about deposing him in what would amount to a coup.”
The 25th Amendment deals with what should happen if a president were to become disabled due to an impairment, not because of political differences, “or to let scheming bureaucrats imagine they are saving the country…”
It should be noted that the idea of using the 25th Amendment was “widely discussed in elite media circles at the time.”
“This elite panic was a bigger threat to constitutional norms than anything Mr. Trump is known to have done.
“The McCabe account also fits with what else we know about the FBI during the Comey era. Mr. Comey saw fit to start a counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign based on thin evidence of Russian contacts. His agents then used an opposition-research document financed by the Clinton campaign to justify a warrant to spy on a Trump adviser.”
“After his firing, Mr. Comey arranged a media leak that prompted Mr. (Rod) Rosenstein to appoint Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate Trump-Russia campaign ties. Twenty-one months later we are still waiting for evidence of collusion, as the Mueller probe rolls on seemingly without end. Mr. Trump’s enemies still claim he is a Russian agent while millions of his supporters think there is a ‘deep-state’ conspiracy against him. This is all corrosive to public trust in American democracy.
“The Senate last week confirmed William Barr as Attorney General, and he has no more urgent task than restoring some of that public trust. He could start by explaining to the public, in a major speech, where the FBI went so badly wrong and what he will do to make sure it never happens again.”
We are a nation of laws, and we must insist that our institutions function within those laws, and as I stated in the beginning, not as tools of abuse. Is the Journal’s stance partisan? Maybe. But if America is to get beyond our division, let’s carefully pit the Journal’s view against the view of Mueller’s supporters.