James Comey Puts Thumb on Scale, Brings Third-World-Style Election To America

Even J. Edgar Hoover never tampered with a contest in the way that Comey’s FBI is doing now.

MICHAEL TOMASKY

10.31.16 1:21 PM ET

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I said this is shaping up to be a Third-World election above. Let me spell that out in a little more detail, because it’s staggering—or used to be—to think of the United States of America in these terms. The FBI is our chief domestic police and surveillance agency. It is our equivalent, in other words, of an interior ministry domestic police force in a developing-world nation.

If we Americans were watching an election unfold in, say, a Latin American country, and the head of the domestic police force did what Comey did, we’d be chortling our heads off at their backward, thuggish ways. The Organization of American States would be launching an investigation (come to think of it, the United States is an OAS member; someone should deliver a complaint to their architecturally enchanting door, just a block from the White House).

If anything, in developing nations, there have been some efforts in recent years to take the power of overseeing elections away from interior ministries and hand it to (ostensibly) independent commissions. In 2013, after some controversies we all know about, Iran took oversight of its elections out of their interior ministry and gave it to a newly created board. Iran.

No, the FBI doesn’t run our elections. But Comey has opened up the possibility that the outcome could hinge on actions taken by our national domestic police operation. It’s constitutionally and ethically shocking.

Yes, the bureau has always been political. And yes, its rank-and-file has always leaned heavily Republican. And yes, there has always been, beyond ideology, a culture clash between the Bureau—with its deep northeastern, Irish-Catholic, working and middle class roots—and the Ivy League toffs who have traditionally run the government, especially when the Democrats win elections. The FBI, Pat Moynihan once famously quipped, is “filled with Fordham graduates keeping tabs on Harvard men in the State Department.”

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/31/james-comey-puts-thumb-on-scale-brings-third-world-style-election-to-america.html