All We Need Now Is Jack Bauer! Is America’s Deep State Attempting To Influence The Race For The White House?

THE EXTRAORDINARY INTERVENTION of the FBI in the US Presidential Election is unnerving. There is now considerable doubt whether the American republic can survive the events of 2016.

Earlier today, the Director of the FBI, James Comey, announced that his unprecedented intervention of 28 October had actually been a false alarm. For the past few hours he has been doing his best to persuade Americans that: “There’s nothing to see here, folks. So, please, move along.” But this “as you were” strategy raises many more questions than it answers.

Why, for example, didn’t Comey simply obtain a warrant to search the lap-top of Anthony Weiner, and determine confidentially whether there was anything in his former wife’s (and top Clinton aide) Huma Abedin’s e-mails that bore upon the Bureau’s earlier investigation of Secretary-of-State Clinton’s use of a private server? Had Comey done so, he would have (as we now know) found nothing incriminating in Abedin’s e-mail cache, and the enormously destabilising effects of his leaked letter to Republican Party congressmen would have been avoided.

In terms of an answer, America’s leading political journalists are offering the following.

Comey was aware that the New York field office of the FBI was – as one informant put it – “Trumpland”. He was further reasonably sure that one or more agents in New York were briefing Trump’s campaign team about the discovery of Abedin’s e-mails. (How else was Trump surrogate, and former New York Mayor, Rudi Giuliani, able to alert Fox News to the existence of a big story that was about to break?)

This intelligence placed Comey in an impossible position. If he attempted to conduct a confidential investigation, Clinton’s enemies in the New York office would simply leak that fact to the right-wing news media, and Trump’s people would then accuse the FBI Director of corruptly attempting to protect Clinton from the voters’ wrath. Of course, by writing to the Republican congressmen Comey was also inviting wrath – this time from Clinton’s campaign team. But, he must have reasoned, wrath was heading his way whatever course of action he chose. He was damned if he did, and damned if he didn’t.

By tasking his agents to work night-and-day to ascertain whether there was anything pertinent in Abedin’s e-mails, Comey was at least able to clear Clinton before 8 November. In around 48 hours we’ll know whether or not their efforts have afforded Clinton enough time to halt her slide in the polls.

Another, more important, question remains: What does it mean when the FBI is so riven by partisanship that its probity and independence are squandered in the interests of advancing the cause of a political candidate?

One possible answer is that key representatives of America’s “Deep State” have become so alarmed at the drift of events that they are prepared to intervene directly in the electoral process. It is, for example, the contention of WikiLeaks’s founder, Julian Assange, that in the upper levels of both the US armed forces, and the huge National Security apparatus, there is a determination to prevent Trump becoming President.

If Assange is correct, then what we have been witnessing over the past week is an attempt by middle-ranking agents of the FBI’s New York field office to even up the scales on behalf of Donald Trump. Just how far these rogue elements are prepared to go to keep Clinton out of the White House remains to be seen.

One can only imagine the extreme nervousness of the Secret Service agents assigned to protect Hillary. The next time somebody in a campaign crowd cries “Gun!”, the “perp” may turn out to be an FBI agent from New York.