The FBI Needs Adult Supervision

I've generally stayed away the never-ending saga of Hillary Clinton and her emails, because I've never seen any "there" there.

Yes, Hillary should not have done it, and yes it was a byproduct of her Nixonian attitude towards transparency, but I never saw it as likely to produce anything like the "smoking gun tapes.

Basically, the emails that have been revealed are an episode of entitled white people acting badly, but there is no criminality that I can see, and the revelations, that they hate labor unions, working stiffs, and Bernie Sanders have merely been confirmation of the DLC-type politics that is the Clintons.

Even the revelation that there "might" be some previously undiscovered emails on Anthony "My last name is unbelievably appropriate" Weiner's laptop (Because his now-estranged wife Huma Abedin briefly used it at some point, and installed software kept sucking up emails) is to me a nothing burger, but for the fact that James Comey decided to leave this turd in the punch bowl less than 2 weeks before the election, which reflects poorly on him, and on the Bureau, because it appears that his fear that some investigators would leak this to the press led him to make the announcement.

That being said, the recent Twitter episode, in which an FBI account after being moribund for over a year, and then posted links to documents about Bill Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich, is highly problematic.

In fact, it is so problematic, that the FBI is investigating itself over who did this and why:

The FBI has launched an internal investigation into one of its Twitter accounts, according to ThinkProgress.

The account, @FBIRecordsVault, had been dormant for more than a year, but at 4 a.m. on Oct. 30., the account sent out documents related to the candidates in the US presidential election, starting with info on Donald Trump’s father Fred Trump. Two days later the account followed up with a release of files from an investigation into President Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, a case that has been closed since 2005.

In a statement after the receiving criticism about the posts, the FBI said the documents were in response to the Freedom of Information Act. “Per the standard procedure for FOIA, these materials became available for release and were posted automatically and electronically to the FBI’s public reading room in accordance with the law and established procedures,” the FBI said in a statement.

I don't know who did this, but I know why, because the FBI as an institution has never shaken off the cancerous legacy of J. Edgar Hoover, and so behave as if it were a watered down version of the East German Stasi.

Someone did not like Hillary Clinton, and they decided to use their official powers to put their thumb on the scales.

I don't like Hillary Clinton, and I did not vote for her (I wrote in Bernie Sanders), but the FBI is clearly a rogue organization, and it needs to be put back under civilian control, and perhaps broken up into its constituent parts:

Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.
Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.

“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.

This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.
The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”

The agent called the bureau “Trumplandia”, with some colleagues openly discussing voting for a GOP nominee who has garnered unprecedented condemnation from the party’s national security wing and who has pledged to jail Clinton if elected.

The FBI remains the fetid spawn of Hoover, and I think it needs to be taken out behind the barn.