...I don't know that the Republicans who are suddenly mistrustful of the FBI will absorb any of these lessons, which would require reasoning in a principled way rather than reacting out of partisan reflex. But there is a chance that at least some of them will come away from this episode with a new appreciation for the cracks in "the pillars of the criminal justice system," just as some Republicans embrace sentencing reform after serving time in prison. That would be a heartening development.
By contrast, the uncritical embrace of the FBI by some of Trump's opponents is pretty sickening. The Times portrays Trump's spat with the bureau as a black-and-white conflict between a dishonest demagogue and dedicated professionals who only want to uphold the law:
More than a dozen officials who work at or recently left the Justice Department and the F.B.I. said they feared that the president was mortgaging the credibility of those agencies for his own short-term political gain as he seeks to undercut the Russia inquiry...
"Thanks to this rhetoric, there is a subset of the public that won't believe what comes out of the Mueller investigation," said Christopher Hunter, a former F.B.I. agent and prosecutor who left the Justice Department at the end of last year. Mr. Hunter said he worried that juries might be more skeptical of testimony from agents even in criminal trials unrelated to Mr. Trump. "All it takes to sink a case," he said, "is for one juror to disbelieve the F.B.I."...
David Strauss, a University of Chicago law professor, said Mr. Trump's accusations against the F.B.I. and the Justice Department were not mere political rhetoric, but messages with consequences. "We have a president who seems to have no understanding of the professional ethos of the Justice Department, who has no understanding how these people think about their jobs," he said...
Josh Campbell, who spent a decade at the F.B.I. and worked directly for Mr. Comey at one time, wrote in The Times on Saturday that he was resigning so that he could speak out. "These political attacks on the bureau must stop," he wrote. "If those critics of the agency persuade the public that the F.B.I. cannot be trusted, they will also have succeeded in making our nation less safe."
If you think it is self-evidently a bad thing that "juries might be more skeptical of testimony from agents even in criminal trials unrelated to Mr. Trump," the rest of this self-serving twaddle will not bother you. Question the FBI, the FBI says, and you are endangering national security. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between the dedicated professionals and the dishonest demagogues.
