In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth about America's "Deep State"

by David Rohde

Supporters of Bush also blamed Independent Counsel Walsh. Four days before the election, Walsh had filed a new criminal charge against former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger, and revealed an entry from Weinberger’s diary that cast doubt on Bush’s long-running claim that he had opposed trading arms for hostages. The diary entry from Weinberger said that during a January 7, 1986, White House meeting Bush had, in fact, approved of the scheme. Clinton took political advantage of the diary entry, s...

Conservative anger at Walsh, which dated back to Oliver North’s defiant 1987 congressional testimony, had built as his investigation dragged on for five years. Poindexter and North were convicted of lying to Congress, but their convictions were overturned on appeal (due to mistakes made by congressional investigators, not Walsh). Four other figures pleaded guilty. Weinberger awaited trial.

On Christmas Eve, 1992, Bush pardoned four former officials whom Walsh had prosecuted for lying to Congress—Robert McFarlane, Elliott Abrams, Alan Fiers, and Clair George—and two who were awaiting trial—Weinberger and Duane “Dewey” Clarridge. Bush declined to pardon North, Poindexter, and several businessmen who said their goal was to simply profit financially from arms shipments.

“The prosecutions of the individuals I am pardoning represent what I believe is a profoundly troubling development in the political and legal climate of our country: the criminalization of policy differences,”

Bush wrote. “These differences should be addressed in the political arena, without the Damocles sword of criminality hanging over the heads of some of the combatants. The proper target is the President, not his subordinates; the proper forum is the voting booth, not the courtroom.”

“I favored the broadest,” Barr said in the 2001 interview, referring to the number of pardons.

In addition to the pardons, Bush and Republicans in Congress allowed the independent counsel law enacted by Carter to lapse on December 15, 1992.

The pardons infuriated Walsh, who said for the first time that he believed that Reagan and Bush had engaged in a cover-up.

Walsh later wrote in his memoir, “was the fact that a cover-up engineered in the White House of one president and completed by his successor prevented the rule of law from being applied to the perpetrators of criminal activity of constitutional dimension.”

To Democrats and supporters of congressional oversight, the Iran-Contra pardons were an enormous blow to Congress’s ability to act as a check on the president and ensure that executive branch officials did not lie to legislators. Executive branch officials had blatantly lied to oversight committees while carrying out an illegal covert operation that involved the clandestine sale of American weaponry, the div...

The core goal of the Church reforms—public oversight of secretive intelligence agencies by elected repr...

to Barr and other supporters of presidential power, Walsh and other independent counsels were themselves the unac...

there’s something wrong about political officials reviewing cases,” Barr recalled in the 2001 interview. “Actually, this has largely been precipitated by the liberal critics of the Department of Justice and by the Democrats on the Hill. It’s very destructive to personal liberty because what they’re trying to do is to say that political-level people shouldn’t be reviewing cases.” Barr was espousing a view that was the polar opposite of the apolitical approach established by Gerald Ford’s attorney general Edward Levi. Barr argued that having political leaders review whether individuals should be criminally prosecuted would lead to more equitable outcomes. He argued that if elected leaders abused prosecutorial powers, they could be voted out of office. “The second-guessing is not for political reasons,” Barr said. “It’s really because someone is exercising some maturity of judgment, and putting things in perspective and saying, ‘Why would you indict this person over this?’” Skeptics argued that political leaders do not always show maturity of judgment.

Prosecuting one’s political rivals as criminals can prove effective at the ballot box.

the desire to have criminal investigations launched against one’s political opponents can cause an el...

During his two terms in office, anti-government militia movements would form that viewed Clinton as a dictator who used federal law enforcement agencies to oppress Americans.

enforcement, but he eventually chose her after determining that her fifteen years of experience in Miami gave her “enormous exposure to a wide range of issues that the Justice Department deals with.”

laws, and aggressively supported the 1994 Crime Bill that reduced crime but fueled mass incarceration.

At the same time, a raid involving federal law enforcement officers and children in Waco, Texas, marred Reno’s tenure and forever associated her in the eyes of conservatives with a callous, overreaching, and deadly federal government.

A total of 123 people—including 43 children—remained inside the two-story wooden complex where Koresh lived with his followers, including women and girls he had been accused of physically and sexually abusing. As in Ruby Ridge,

Reno expressed her concern to Clinton that Koresh might be sexually abusing the children in the compound or planning a mass suicide.

She was also under pressure from FBI officials, who said they could no longer keep so many resources tied up in one location.

On live national television, as the prairie wind stoked the

Federal agents said they had started no fires and fired no shots. They blamed the Davidians for setting the blaze. Survivors later claimed that one of the tanks knocked over a lantern and ignited the inferno. All told, 76 Branch Davidians—including children ages ten or younger—died in the fire. Autopsies showed that twenty Branch Davidian members, including Koresh and several children, died of gunshot wounds to the head. One toddler died of a stab wound to the chest. Critics later blamed Reno for giving Koresh what he wanted: a final cataclysmic battle that matched his prophecies of an apocalypse and mass suicide.

In the fall of 1993, the Justice and Treasury departments issued reports on the standoff that sharply criticized the ATF’s decision to carry out the initial raid. The head of the agency was fired after it was revealed that some ATF officials lied about the information the organization received before the raid. An undercover agent warned his superiors that Koresh was armed and ready for the raid, but the ATF proceeded anyway. The Justice Department disclosed that the FBI had found no evidence that Koresh was molesting children in the compound during the standoff,

News media reports concluded that the fires had been set by Koresh and his followers. Yet, as time passed, conspiracy theories regarding Waco began to spread. The National Rifle Association, which had been taken over by a more hardline leadership group in 1991, began calling the ATF “armed terrorists” who used “Gestapo” tactics on “honest citizens.”

Steve Stockman, a Republican congressman from Texas, wrote in an article in Guns & Ammo magazine that the Clinton administration had staged the Waco standoff to create popular support for the 1994 assault weapons ban—ignoring the fact that former presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan also supported the ban. Stockman later retracted the claim, but it helped fuel conspiracy theories. (In 2018 Stockman would be sentenced to ten years in federal prison for using $1.2 million in funds from political donors to cover his own personal expenses.) In the Midwest and the western United States, militia

Twenty years after the Church reforms, the oversight mechanisms designed to create public trust and transparency in government—congressional hearings, criminal trials by juries, and news media reporting—were increasingly dismissed by large parts of the American public.

The Reagan administration had ordered the FCC to revoke the “Fairness Doctrine,”

which required radio license holders to present controversial issues of public importance in balanced ways. Rush Limbaugh and other hosts demonstrated in the 1990s that supporting one’s political party and attacking the opposition could be a popular form of entertainment that attracted large numbers of listeners nationwide. Partisan talk radio vastly expanded its audience and influence.

The Clintons denied wrongdoing, but sometimes told half-truths, or failed to fully release records, extending the controversy. Democratic operatives dismissed the investigations as “out of control” and a “witch hunt.” Republicans, in

Fiske found that Foster’s death involved no foul play and was, in fact, a suicide, rebutting conspiracy theories that Foster had been killed because he knew damaging secrets about the Clintons.

Dismissing arguments that independent counsels had become tools for partisan

Republicans gained 54 seats in the House in the 1994 elections, taking control of the chamber for the first time since 1952.

As Scalia had predicted, accusing one’s opponent of being not simply wrong on policy but also a criminal produced political dividends.

On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh, a militia sympathizer and former US army soldier, detonated a truck bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh carried out the attack on the two-year anniversary of the FBI assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. The truck bomb, constructed of 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate, killed 168 people, including nineteen children in a day care center on the second floor of the building. Most of the deaths were from injuries suffered in the collapse of the building, not the explosion itself. Only eight of the victims were federal law enforcement

Initially, the bombing undercut support for militias and Waco conspiracy theorists. Republican leaders criticized right-wing groups that trafficked in conspiracy theories.

After the National Rifle Association refused to rescind a fundraising letter sent out before the Oklahoma City bombing thatt called federal agents “jack-booted thugs,” former president George H. W. Bush resigned from the group. In his resignation letter, Bush said he had known an ATF agent killed in Waco and a secret service agent killed in Oklahoma City. “To attack Secret Service agents or A.T.F. people or any government law enforcement people as ‘wearing Nazi

At the end of the Reagan administration, William Sessions had replaced William Webster as director of the FBI. Five years later, as Clinton took office, Sessions had alienated FBI agents and members of the Bush and Clinton administrations. A lawyer and federal judge from Texas, Sessions was known for having an aloof and ineffective management style. Privately, low-ranking FBI agents complained that Sessions pulled agents away from their law enforcement duties to run errands for his wife, Alice. In FBI vehicles, agents ferried her to get her nails done, shop, and pick up firewood. Agents who refused to cooperate were demoted.

Department practice of not releasing information about criminal investigations that could influence the outcome of an election. A month before the vote, the FBI director announced that the

Forty-eight hours after Sessions announced the FBI’s BNL probe, news leaked that the Justice Department had launched an internal review of potential ethics violations by Sessions, his wife, and a top aide.

Clinton telephoned Sessions and dismissed him on July 19, 1993. It was the first time in the bureau’s seventy-year history that a president had dismissed an FBI director.

Both men were in their mid-forties at the time of the appointment and both were self-made, having risen from working-class families.

been accused of using the Arkansas State Police to ferry women to rendezvous, would demand the same of the FBI.

Republicans accused Clinton of accepting donations from individuals associated with the Chinese government.

several Chinese-American donors to the Clinton campaign and DNC pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws, the donations were returned, and Clinton was not implicated in specific wrongdoing. Many Democrats dismissed the investigations as another Republican effort to smear Clinton.

A new cable news network, Fox News, began broadcasting on October 7, 1996, bringing the message of conservative talk radio hosts to a far larger audience.

overdue antidote to liberal bias at CNN

Tom O’Connor,

The bureau leaked the name of Richard Jewell, an innocent man,