Towards a realistic assessment of the FBI’s legacy

Ken R. Brock is alarmed. Earlier this month, Attorney General William P. Barr called the FBI’s investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign “one of the greatest travesties in American history.” Brock, writing for The Hill, concludes on the basis of this soundbite that the investigation must have been truly dreadful because, he writes, “the FBI has made plenty of mistakes, but never in its 112-year history has an FBI investigation been characterized as a travesty.”

Not once, not ever.

So I decided to do a little digging to try and talk him down. And by ‘a little’, I mean very little. What I found, in no particular order:

Is Israel the right model for US gun culture?

Liel Leibovitz, a senior writer for Tablet Magazine, weighed in on last week’s tragedy with a piece that suggests the US should emulate Israel’s gun culture, Why Israel Has No Newtowns. Before I say anything, and just to give you an idea of the author’s tone, here’s his caricature of America’s general response to what happened in Newtown:

Simpler minds insisted that anyone who has ever argued in favor of anything but the absolute abolition of firearms was complicit in the murder of innocent children, while more astute thinkers tried to look past their indignation and heartbreak in search of sensible policy alternatives.

That’s not at all a patronizing over-simplification, oh he of (presumably) astute thought.