Others, including former FBI Director James Comey and Fox News’ Chris Wallace, expressed similar concerns. The memo “will likely harm the credibility and reputation of the FBI and larger U.S. law enforcement bureaucracy,” worries Chas Danner in New York magazine.
Wait, what? Let’s not pretend this memo, accurate or not, is the source of Americans’ skepticism about the “credibility and reputation” or “fairness” of U.S. law enforcement. Our criminal justice system has generated that skepticism all by itself.
Seriously, has no one been paying attention for the last five years? We’ve been having this national conversation about criminal justice reform, fueled by shocking cases of police misconduct and brutality. We’ve been talking about the importance of keeping law enforcement honest and accountable to the public. We’ve been debating whether body cameras are enough to do the job, or if we need further reforms in place.
Lest I be accused of painting with too broad a brush, consider the institutions in question. The FISA court is well known to be a rubber stamp for federal spies. The court approved 99.97 percent of surveillance requests in from 1979 to 2012, denying just 11 petitions out of more than 33,900 and modifying just 502 before approving them.
In theory, the court is concerned only with foreign surveillance (that’s the F in FISA), but in practice, Section 702 of the FISA law lets the government conduct warrantless surveillance on Americans who talk to foreign targets. The data is stored, and federal agencies use it to go after Americans for reasons unconnected to foreign security in a process called the “backdoor loophole.” This mechanism for unconstitutional surveillance just got reauthorized by Congress last month — with support from Trump and Nunes.
And then there’s the FBI, an agency polling shows was not inspiring much confidence even before the memo came out. That’s with good reason. Claiming presidential authorization, the FBI has “open(ed) mail, infiltrate(d) political parties, tap(ped) phones, perform(ed) ‘black bag’ break-ins of homes and institutions, and draw(n) up vast lists of Americans eligible for ‘custodial detention’ during a crisis,” as a 2012 history of the agency documented.
If the FISA court and the FBI are innocent of the Nunes memo’s damning claims, they should be cleared in the court of public opinion. But Americans would do well to remember that innocence here does not mean innocence everywhere. Both agencies, and U.S. law enforcement more broadly, have well-documented records of misconduct. Whatever happens with the memo, we are right to be skeptical and to demand reforms.
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