and that’s the way we are going to play it.”
No, this isn’t Chief of Staff John Kelly
and President Trump talking about special
counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into
Russian election hacking. It’s Chief of Staff
H.R. Haldeman and President Richard Nix-
on in 1972, trying to shut down the FBI’s
Watergate investigation.
This is not to compare the two probes.
There’s no public evidence that Mr. Trump
is connected to any collusion with Russia
to influence the 2016 vote.
The point is that presidents have long
wanted to put the nation’s top cop “un-
der control.” Nixon was far from the first.
Trump is not likely to be the last.
The modern FBI is maddeningly inde-
pendent. On paper, the president may be
its boss. In reality, cabinet secretaries, con-
gressional committees, and the permanent
bureaucracy have a big say in its actions.
Bureau directors have become much more
guarded against political interference.
FBI independence may not have been
what Trump expected. At a dinner shortly
after his inauguration, Trump asked then-
FBI Director James Comey for “loyalty,” Mr.
Comey told a June 2017 Senate hearing.
Trump later asked the FBI to go easy on
Michael Flynn after his dismissal as national
security adviser, Comey says.
Trump disputes Comey’s description of
these conversations, saying they are “lies.”Since then the president has continued to
publicly attack the FBI. Comey, fired as FBI
chief on May 9 last year, is now “lying James
Comey” on Trump’s Twitter feed. The recent
dismissal of deputy FBI Director Andrew
McCabe for alleged lack of candor in an
inspector general investigation was “a great
day for Democracy,” said a Trump tweet.
A cabal of corrupt FBI officials concocted
the investigation into Russian meddling in
the US electoral process as a way to keep
Donald Trump out of the White House,
claim the president and some congressional
allies. That was the theme underlying much
of the so-called Nunes memo, produced by
Rep. Devin Nunes (R) of California, chair-
man of the House Select Committee on
Intelligence, earlier this year.
The FBI has said it has “grave concerns”
about the accuracy of the Nunes memo and
its bias charges. House Democrats have
claimed that the memo cherry-picks bits
of evidence and is misleading to the point ofbad faith. The top Democrat on the Intelli-
gence panel, Rep. Adam Schiff of California,
drew up his own lengthy paper meant to
rebut the chairman’s charges.
For FBI agents this situation can’t be
comfortable. The president is charging
that they’re the heart of some kind of “deep
state” conspiracy to control US politics.
Given the type of people who work at
the FBI and what they do, though, the im-
pact here can be overstated, says one 16-
year veteran of federal law enforcement.
Agents are mostly interested in spending
their 10-hour workday trying to solve their
own cases, he says.
“They don’t worry that much about the
drama that is going on in D.C.... They’re all
big boys and girls,” says Michael German,
who specialized in domestic terrorism and
covert operations at the FBI.
“They realize they are involved in import-
ant matters that are newsworthy and can
be used by politicians to either raise them
up or lower them down,” Mr. German says.
What about the broader voting public?
That’s likely the real target for the president
and his allies, after all. By denigrating Mr.
Mueller and the FBI and Justice Depart-
ment, experts say Trump is likely attempt-
ing to soften the impact of eventual Russia
probe findings while pushing to cut the
probe short. Continued assertions that the
investigation is a “witch hunt” might even
prepare the way for firing Mueller himself.- Peter Grier / Staff writer
WINNIE MADIKIZELA-MANDELAFor many, she was
the true leader
In South Africa, Ms. Mandela
leaves a controversial legacyJOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – As South Afri-
can universities erupted in protests over the
rising cost of tuition in late 2015, it was hard
not to see the echoes of the country’s past
in the young demonstrators’ raised fists and
fearless clashes with authority. And the stu-
dents themselves took that history to heart,
conjuring up the names of the liberation
heroes who inspired their fight.
It was people like Mandela, they said,
who taught them that the world doesn’t al-
ways bend toward justice; sometimes you
have to twist it that way yourself.
But the students’ Mandela wasn’t Nelson,
the peacemaker and father of their “Rain-
bow nation.” It was Winnie, the unapologet-
ically angry activist to whom he was once
married, who bluntly told South Africans
that she believed their beloved story of racial
reconciliation was a fiction.
“To me, it was a myth from the begin-
ning,” she told a reporter last year. “The
rainbow color does not have black.... So itoneweek
FBI AGENTS ‘DON’T WORRY THAT MUCH
ABOUT THE DRAMA THAT IS GOING ON....’- Michael German, former FBI terrorism expert
V FROM PREVIOUS PAGEMARK HUMPHREY/APRemembering Martin Luther King Jr.
PEOPLE IN MEMPHIS, TENN., HOLD SIGNS similar to those carried by striking sanitation work-
ers there 50 years ago to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. April 4. King was in Memphis to support the strike when he was shot.VNEXT PAGE