YOU DON’T SAY: FBI Increasingly Politicized Under Comey and Mueller.

Bill Gertz:

The shift is the result of a bureaucratic culture that emerged in the 1990s and was fueled by its two most recent former directors, James Comey and Robert Mueller, who ran the agency for the past 16 years. Mueller headed the FBI from 2001 to 2013, when Comey took over and served until he was fired by Trump in May.

Both former directors currently are at the center of a fierce political debate over the FBI’s competency and integrity.

“People are finally tumbling to the realization that this [FBI] has become a proto-KGB,” said a former senior intelligence official with extensive experience in counterintelligence. “We’re in a constitutional crisis. These guys are playing out a silent coup against an elected official.”

The problem of the FBI, according to national security strategist Angelo Codevilla, is more the result of careerism and an out of control bureaucracy than liberal politicization of the ostensibly nonpartisan FBI, the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency and main domestic counterspying and counterterrorism agency.

“I’m afraid that the explanation is all too simple: Bureaucrats—employees of large organizations—figure out on which side their bread is going to be buttered,” Codevilla said. “They learn to think, feel, and do what advances their careers.”

And in our highly politicized bureaucracy, career advancement increasingly means following the (Democratic) party line.