Talk about scandal....

It has been obvious ever since then-FBI-director James Comey made his extraordinary announcement on July 6, 2016 that the FBI would recommend no charges for Hillary Clinton's violations of security with her emails that something fishy was going on. The announcement was extraordinary because the FBI only has the charter to investigate crimes; it is the prerogative of the attorney general, not the FBI, to decide whether to prosecute or not. It was also extraordinary because the Obama administration had  prosecuted and jailed a number of people over the previous few years for far less  serious violations of security, yet gave Hillary a pass.

Ever since then the scandal has been getting worse. Democrats of course are trying their best to dismiss and downplay the whole issue as a partisan red herring, while Republicans are hyping it at every opportunity.  But if one ignores the partisan spin on both sides and just looks at what has become public since then, it is pretty clear  that there were serious abuses, perhaps even criminal abuses, in the upper management of the FBI and the intelligence community. In fact it appears from a set of emails that the FBI recently released that even president Obama was at least tangentially involved, in that he communicated with Hillary's private email account under a pseudonym of his own, probably including classified materials, and interestingly enough he is shielding those emails from investigators under executive privilege. It certainly shows he was less than truthful when he claimed in March 2015 that the first he heard of Hillary's non-government emails was from the news.

But beyond the immediate scandal, which may in the end lead Democrats to wish they had never opened this can of worms with their Russian accusations against Trump (which so far have uncovered no supporting evidence), there is the very real issue of accountability in this new age of secret Foreign Intelligence Courts (we used to call them "star chambers") and widespread interception of telephone and internet communications, mostly without warrants.

It has been true throughout history, and there is no reason to believe it isn't still true, that giving unbridled power to individuals or bureaucracies with no accountability inevitably results in that power being abused. It is simply human nature. And it is even more likely in this hyper-partisan age, when "true believers" on one side or the other of the political divide think their abuses are justified because of the magnitude of the dangers they think they perceive. 

The current scandal is bad enough, however it is eventually resolved.   The larger lesson we Americans ought to be learning is that we need to become aware of how much we have allowed the government, under both Republicans and Democrats, to put in place policies and secret bureaucracies  that threaten our civil liberties with little or no real accountability, all under the pretext of making us "safer". As Benjamin Franklin wisely said "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"