The perennial presidential urge to bring FBI 'under control'
The chief of staff was blunt. “The FBI is not under control,” he said.
The president agreed that they would have to pressure the bureau to stop its ongoing investigation. Otherwise agents might turn up information detailing White House involvement – a link that could be embarrassing for the administration, or worse.
“Play it tough,” the nation’s chief executive said. “That’s the way they play it and that’s the way we are going to play it.”
No, this isn’t Chief of Staff John Kelly and President Trump talking in 2018 about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election hacking. (Or as Mr. Trump calls it, the “witch hunt.”) It’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman and President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office on June 23, 1972, trying to figure out how to shut the FBI’s Watergate investigation down.
The point here is not to compare today’s Russia probe with Watergate, per se. They’re entirely different in many ways. There’s no public evidence that Trump is connected to any collusion with Russia to influence the 2016 vote. There’s no proof, as yet, that he knew about any illegal activity on the part of his campaign or governing staff.
The point is that presidents have long wanted to put the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the nation’s top US cop, “under control.” Nixon was far from the first. Trump, with recent Twitter-fueled allegations of FBI malfeasance, is not likely to be the last.
But the modern FBI is a maddeningly independent entity, as Nixon,
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