The media meltdown continues, in the wake of the release of the House Intelligence Committee memo detailing alleged misconduct by the FBI and the DOJ. In “Trump’s Unparalleled War,” a "news analysis" on the front of Sunday’s New York Times, reporters Sharon LaFraniere, Katie Benner, and Peter Baker fancy they’ve uncovered a conspiracist in the White House who has launched “an unparalleled war on law enforcement," while condoning the acts of their new favorite domestic surveillance organization, the FBI.
In the days before the 2016 election, Donald J. Trump expressed “great respect” for the “courage” of the F.B.I. and Justice Department for reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Sixteen months later, he has changed his mind.
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The war between the president and the nation’s law enforcement apparatus is unlike anything America has seen in modern times. With a special counsel investigating whether his campaign collaborated with Russia in 2016 and whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice in 2017, the president has engaged in a scorched-earth assault on the pillars of the criminal justice system in a way that no other occupant of the White House has done.
The president’s focus on a memo drafted by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee and released on Friday reflected years of conspiracy-minded thinking by Mr. Trump....
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In his telling, that bureaucracy, now run by his own appointees, is a nest of political saboteurs out to undermine him -- an accusation that raised fears that he was tearing at the credibility of some of the most important institutions in American life to save himself.
It’s quite odd and hypocritical for the liberal New York Times, which giddily leaks sensitive information to wreck terror-fighting programs, and published the name of a covert CIA official, to suddenly hallow the nation’s domestic surveillance organization as a vital and sacred institution.
The attacks are having an impact....In interviews, 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 led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.
The reporters gave short shrift to Trump’s defenders.
Mr. Trump’s critics, his advisers argue, are turning a blind eye to government misconduct out of their own partisan animus toward the president. Neither the F.B.I. nor the Justice Department should be above questioning, they say, and Mr. Trump’s willingness to do so should not be taken as a slight against the vast majority of people who work there.
No more balanced was Mark Mazzetti’s Saturday front-page “news analysis” on the memo, “A Battle by Proxy in a Wider War.” Text box: “A push to discredit the law enforcement community.” The online headline: “How Trump’s Allies Fanned an Ember of Controversy Into Flames of Outrage.” His take was summed up in the dismissive line: “It didn’t live up to the hype.”
