Didn't this old fellow have a word or two to say about lawyers ?| Submit your comments on this article |
| Government Corruption |
| The Unspoken Warning In The Durham Report: American Self-Government Is Collapsing |
| 2023-05-19 |
| [Federalist] Yesterday in these pages Margot Cleveland rightly noted that the most damning finding in the 306-page report from Special Counsel John Durham is not necessarily the FBI’s scandalous Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016, but that the egregious abuses of power detailed in the report cannot be remedied "absent a curing of the corrupted hearts and minds of law enforcement and intelligence agencies." For all the FBI’s blatant partisanship, its disregard of exculpatory evidence, and its outright deception to secure FISA warrants on Trump campaign associates, writes Cleveland, "what should terrify the country is not the catalog of malfeasance the special counsel recited — for mistakes and even gross failures can be corrected — but that Durham warned of corrupted hearts and minds, unfaithful to the people and their Constitution." For his part, Durham didn’t recommend any changes to FBI guidelines or policies, because no amount of reform will be sufficient if the people in charge feel free to disregard guidelines and policies whenever they see fit to do so. As such, wrote Durham, "the answer is not the creation of new rules but a renewed fidelity to the old. The promulgation of additional rules and regulations to be learned in yet more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of ’Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity’ are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’s mission of ’Protect[ing] the American People and uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States.’" Durham is right, as is Cleveland. The abuse of power laid out in the report is terrifying, not just because what the FBI undertook in 2016 amounted to an attempted coup, but because it’s unclear how to prevent it from happening again. Indeed, we saw the same kind of abuse of power at play in 2020 when active and former CIA officials saw fit to interfere in the election by soliciting signatures for a letter designed to quash the Hunter Biden laptop story. There is every reason to believe that these kinds of abuses will happen again in 2024, and in every future presidential election. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #8 The Republicans control the power of the purse. If they were seriously concerned about insurrection of the federal workforce, they could defund the offending departments, even down to defunding each offending individual. |
| Posted by: Enver Slager8035 2023-05-19 21:32 |
| #7 Start by making the criminal statutes fewer and utterly clearcut. And absolutely enforceable. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2023-05-19 09:01 |
| #6 Most of the media are ignoring the obvious. They all said, about the Durham Report, there is nothing there. It's all just a Republican witch hunt. |
| Posted by: Deacon Blues 2023-05-19 08:56 |
| #5 Didn't this old fellow have a word or two to say about lawyers ? |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2023-05-19 08:39 |
| #4 Start by making the criminal statutes fewer and utterly clearcut. Eliminate the ability of them to make anything a crime if it suits them. Also, eliminate any "discretion" as to which crimes to pursue and make prosecutable cases for. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2023-05-19 08:11 |
| #3 To me, the question boils down to how to make THEM, actually apolitical and accountable to the same laws they impose on others. While adhering to their oath of office. All in such a way and manner, that it cannot be abused by various Political, or Special Interest Groups ... like a Spanish Inquisition. . |
| Posted by: NN2N1 2023-05-19 07:52 |
| #2 It's not been a representative republic for well over 2 decades, it's an oligarchy of special interests and money. You are not going to fix it. You can hide as you have behind rituals thinking that gives legitimacy and protection when it doesn't. ..it’s unclear how to prevent it from happening again Oh, we do. We're just not up to the stuff the Founders were. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2023-05-19 07:52 |
| #1 The broken institutions are destroyed by the rotten people in them |
| Posted by: Airandee 2023-05-19 06:41 |