The path to American autocracy runs through the Justice Department. As Conor Friedersdorf and Ben Wittes detail in a frightening article in The Atlantic, while we are rightly concerned with the erosion of our civil liberties by our national security apparatus, the investigatory and criminal justice powers wielded by the Justice Department pose a far greater threat to the majority of Americans.
Our understandable obsession with the palace intrigue surrounding Trump’s effort to shortcut the FBI’s investigation into his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia is blinding us to the greater implications of Comey’s firing, in the context of the other moves this week by the Trump administration. We forget, at our peril, the FBI’s sordid history of surveillance, infiltration and destabilization of civil rights and social justice movements — from sending Martin Luther King a letter urging him to commit suicide to COINTELPRO, the operation that systematically infiltrated and worked to destroy The Black Panther Party. More recently, we should remember that part of the impetus for James Comey’s curious October 28th disclosure is said to have been his fear that rogue FBI agents in the New York bureau were poised to leak the existence of a new cache of Hilary’s e-mails in an effort to damage her candidacy.
Thus we need to look at the other reasons why Trump may have wanted Comey gone. While it is true that the FBI has more resources than any other government entity to get to the bottom of the Russia scandal, it is also true that it has an unparalleled ability to spy on and build a case against Americans who exercise their Constitutional right to protest the actions of their government. It is not hard to envision the impact of an FBI director lacking Comey’s particular moral compass, paired with an Attorney General like Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. Sessions is singularly committed to an anachronistically punitive approach to law enforcement that seeks to criminalize Americans for being Black or Latino. Sessions has a long track record of using his office to intimidate Black voters and a documented antipathy to Latino immigrants. He has already instructed U.S. Attorneys around the nation to seek the harshest sentences possible and signaled that he will seek draconian penalties for minor drug offenses. We can be sure that the temptation of securing a partner in the enterprise of building an oppressive 30’s era criminal justice system lured Sessions out of his faux recusal to recommend Comey’s termination. The third leg of Trump’s three legged stool of autocracy is his executive order establishing a national Voter Fraud Commission. This “commission” chaired by Mike Pence and vice-chaired by Kris Kobach, the most vicious foe of immigration and voting rights of U.S. officials, is nothing short of a move to federalize voter suppression. This is why so few Republicans have lifted a finger to oppose Trump. They know that he is reverse engineering a conservative white electorate that will permanently consolidate their power. We are watching democracy dismantled in front of our eyes while Congressional Republicans flout their oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic… .” This is why we must DEMAND a special prosecutor. It is on us as citizens to save this republic, if it can be saved.