By Alexander Ishchenko @ Shutterstock.com
Yesterday impeachment vote followed a three-year hysteria over Donald J. Trump, POTUS. There has been nothing like this since the feds nailed John Dillinger, mocks Daniel Henninger in the WSJ.
Surveying the FBI Ruins
Driven by the collusion narrative, the past three years have done significant damage to America’s institutions—especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
On Tuesday, in one of the most astounding public documents in years, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington announced that its relationship with the FBI is broken.
Speaker Pelosi Like Aunt Bethany in Christmas Vacation
The simple, direct title of the court order is In Re Accuracy Concerns Regarding FBI Matters Submitted to the FISC. What follows is the obliteration, by a federal court, of the FBI’s reputation. The order ends with a demand that the government submit in detail what it plans to do to restore that reputation. Like the Horowitz report, you have to read this order’s four pages to get a sense of the substantive drama playing out behind the scenes of the impeachment melodrama, which reached a comic apotheosis with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House-floor recital of the Pledge of Allegiance (shades of Aunt Bethany in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”).
A Paranoid Thriller
One has to be mad to think this sad event was worth what we’ve been through the past three years. Last week a reader wrote to say what has been happening in Washington called to mind Costa-Gavras’s 1969 movie “Z,” a paranoid thriller about a country whose politics and legal machinery have descended into a duplicitous, incomprehensible hall of mirrors. The FISA court order to the FBI, coming a week after the Horowitz report, suggests the American system remains sturdier. Maybe.
Where’s the Liberal Outrage?
Will the FBI’s discredited behavior become the norm should Joe Biden or any Democrat be elected president?
Read more from Mr. Henninger here.
Trailer for: Z – 1969, Costas Gravas
