Never did I imagine — not one time in all my years on this good Earth — that we would see the Federal Bureau of Investigation become the target of hate among Americans.
What’s more, the FBI has become the target of a political demographic with a long and eloquent history supporting the agency’s effort to fight organized and other sorts of crime.
We now hear — and this is weird beyond belief — that we need to “de-fund the FBI.” Who’s making that absurd demand? Right-wingers who were so quick to chastise lefties for calling for de-funding the police in the wake of a string of police-involved shootings of Black men and women.
What in the world is happening to us?
The FBI now is a right-wing target because agents obtained a search warrant that enabled them to search the home of a former president of the United States because they had “probable cause” to believe the ex-POTUS had taken highly sensitive material with him from the White House to his home in South Florida.
Earth to right-wingers: That is against the law!
Don’t right wingers believe in the rule of law? That no one is above the law? Didn’t the attorney general, Merrick Garland, pledge to pursue anyone who has broken the law “without fear or favor”?
I must re-state what is obvious to me.
AG Garland followed the letter of the law in seeking a warrant from a federal judicial magistrate. Federal law does not set a terribly high bar; it asks only that prosecutors can prove “probable cause” that a crime has been committed. The feds made the case to the judge, who then issued the warrant.
Moreover, Donald Trump’s legal team met the agents as they commenced their search. There was no “surprise,” no “siege” at Mar-a-Lago. It was done by the book.
For that the right-wingers want to “de-fund the FBI”?
I have said before that politics at times gets turned upside down and, for good measure, inside out. This is one of those times.