It has finally been revealed what went on behind closed doors when the FBI met with President-elect Donald Trump in January 2017. The details were made public by Yahoo News columnist Michael Isikoff, who cited Jim Baker, former chief counsel at the FBI.
According to this new information, it appears that senior officials of the FBI were attempting to blackmail President-elect Trump by threatening him with a tactic notoriously associated with J. Edgar Hoover – and this is completely unacceptable.
As Isikoff recounted in his column, these senior FBI officials had already decided how they were going to approach the meeting even before it began. It seems clear that their goal was not simply to inform President-elect Trump about an allegation that he had consorted with prostitutes in Moscow; instead, they wanted to use this allegation as leverage against him. This means that they did not go into the meeting as neutral observers – rather, they entered the room with an agenda of their own and attempted to use their power as a form of coercion against President-elect Trump.
This type of behavior is something that should never be tolerated by any institution – especially one as powerful as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It is especially concerning that these officials would employ such tactics, given the fact that J. Edgar Hoover was known for using them against political opponents during his tenure as director of the FBI from 1924–1972.
Isikoff recounted the interview in yesterday’s Yahoo News column:
Senior FBI officials were concerned then director James Comey would appear to be blackmailing then President-elect Trump – using tactics notoriously associated with J.Edgar Hoover – when he attended a fateful Jan. 6, 2017, meeting at which he informed the real estate magnate about allegations he had consorted with prostitutes in Moscow, according to Jim Baker, the bureau’s chief counsel at the time.
“We were quite worried about the Hoover analogies, and we were determined not to have such a disaster happen on our watch,” said Jim Baker, then the FBI’s top lawyer in an interview with the Yahoo News podcast Skullduggery. But he and Comey determined the bureau had an obligation to tell Trump of the uncorroborated allegations because “the press has it; it’s about to come out. You should be alerted to that fact.”
The fact that anyone in an organization like the FBI would attempt something similar today is appalling and needs to be addressed immediately through a full investigation into what happened during this fateful meeting in January 2017.
No matter what your political affiliation may be, everyone can agree that this type of behavior from members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is unacceptable and should never have occurred under any circumstances.
We must now demand answers from those involved and ensure that no other person or organization feels empowered enough to engage in such unethical tactics against our democratically elected leader ever again. Anything less would be a disservice to our democracy and our great nation itself.