Thursday, March 28, 2024
Miles from the Mainstream
D. R. ZUKERMAN, proprietor

The President's Problems with the Bureaucracy

November 5, 2017 --

Rep Trey Gowdy (R.-S.C., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, pointed to President Trump's problems with the bureaucracy, on Fox News Sunday, Otober 29, when he told moderator Chris Wallace: "it's sometimes hard to tell the difference between the Obama Department of Justice and the current Department of Justine in terms of transparency and their willingness to share information with Congress." Gowdy indicated that congressional committees have been trying from months to get information from the Justice Department "and only recently have they agreed to give us the information."

(LPR wonders if the Justice Department hopes that any disclosures will be overshadowed by indictments brought by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III)

Gowdy added that "the battle is not just with House Democrats. Unfortunately, it's also with the Department of Justice." Earlier in the interview, Gowdy indicated that the Democrats are interested only in facts that would show the president to be colluding with Russia, and are not interested in who financed the anti-Trump "dossier" that was compiled from former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele.

Gowdy told Wallace, "I am interested in who paid for the dossier because that helps you understand motive and intent and whether or not you can rely on the document." Gowdy added, " I am much more interested in whether or not the Department of Justice and the FBI relied upon that dossier and initiating a counterintelligence investigation on in court findings."

The Washington Post reported, October 24, "The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump's connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin...." How can one conclude other than that the reported interested shown by the FBI in the dossier suggests that the FBI, very much part of the government bureaucracy, played politics in the 2016 presidential election?

How explain the failure of the Attorney General Jeff Sessions to demand that the FBI cooperate with congressional investigators -- without concluding that the president has yet to take control of the federal bureaucracy -- a bureaucracy allied with "The Resistance" to his election?