Over the last decade, most of us experienced Hillary Clinton’s email server, the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, and Hunter Biden’s laptop as separate, unrelated controversies.
The FBI opened Midyear Exam, its investigation of Clinton’s private server, which held evidence of influence-peddling, in July 2015. One year later, then-Director James Comey closed it with a press conference, calling her “extremely careless” but recommending no charges; he did so without advising the Department of Justice, which was unusual and inappropriate.
Twenty-six days later, on July 31, 2016, the Bureau opened Crossfire Hurricane, a full counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. Special Counsel John Durham concluded in 2023 that neither the FBI nor the intelligence community “appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
Finally, in December 2019, an FBI field office took possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive, and in October 2020, Twitter and Facebook suppressed the New York Post story about it after FBI warnings of a Russian “hack and leak.”
The news media covered each episode as its own drama with its own unique cast of characters, and framed each incident in such a way so that the very idea that the FBI was abusing its powers lay outside of the Overton window. The media covered the email server as much ado about nothing, at best, and Clinton’s recklessness, at worst. The media framed the Russia story as a case of Trump’s conflicts of interest, at best, and Putin’s direct control of him, at worst. And the laptop story was, at best, about Republican persecution of an innocent man and, at worst, about Hunter Biden’s reckless behavior.
In every case, the media framed FBI officials as, at best, dogged investigators and, at worst, overzealous. Outside of openly pro-Trump right-wing media, few journalists covered the stories as the FBI abusing their powers for partisan reasons.
But it is now clear that a single thread ran through all three investigations, and it was one of partisan FBI agents and officials abusing their power in ways as extreme as J. Edgar Hoover did in the 1960s.
