Political retribution is being normalized in America.
How else can we interpret the news that the Department of Justice has placed former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan (an MSNBC national security analyst) under “criminal investigation”? NBC News reports that current CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a criminal referral to the FBI regarding Brennan’s handling of a 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) about Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. The New York Times reports, “The bureau is also scrutinizing Mr. Comey for his role in the Russia investigation.” It’s the latest in a long line of Trump administration attempts to quash dissent by punishing the most visible “enemies” for doing their job, and we ignore it at the peril of our individual liberty.
Why should we take someone with a history of spreading conspiracy theories at his word?
Let’s remember the facts. Though Trump, Vice President JD Vance and their coterie of sycophants all refer to Russian election interference as the “Russia hoax,” there is nothing spoofed about it. Ahead of the 2020 election, the Republican-led Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a five-volume report detailing Russia’s interference activities. Its 1,313 pages covered both the extensive Russian cyber and influence operations targeting our democratic processes and the U.S. government response.
The report concluded that the 2017 assessment, including its ultimate conclusion that Russian interference was real and widespread, was not politically motivated. The Foreign Relations Committee’s acting chair lauded the report. “No probe into this matter has been more exhaustive,” he said in a statement. “We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.” That senator was Marco Rubio, now Trump’s secretary of state.
Since then, Rubio and many others in the merry band of amnesiacs serving in the Trump administration have used the inclusion of a summary of the infamous Steele dossier as an annex to the ICA to undermine the rest of its findings. And now, ignoring the reams of open-source evidence of Russia’s continued attempts to undermine our democracy, they’re returning to the ICA as a pretext for a politically motivated criminal investigation.
If Ratcliffe and Attorney General Pam Bondi are so focused on annexes, they should focus on another, more worrying example. Brennan and Comey both appear in an annex titled “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State” from the book “Government Gangsters,” by current FBI Director Kash Patel. The annex has been commonly interpreted as an “enemies list,” though Patel maintained in his confirmation hearing that was a mischaracterization. He also swore that “there will be no retributive actions taken ... should I be confirmed as FBI director.”
I paid special attention to that promise, because I appear on the list. There I am, as “former Executive Director of the Disinformation Governance Board in the Biden administration,” along with Brennan, Comey and over 50 other former U.S. government officials. I didn’t believe Patel’s assurances for a second: Why should we take someone with a history of spreading conspiracy theories at his word?
These actions have consequences. Those targeted are dehumanized.
My instincts were right. In addition to the new criminal investigation of Brennan and Comey, the administration has targeted Chris Krebs, the Department of Homeland Security official whose efforts to safeguard the 2020 election led Trump to fire him by tweet. It has unceremoniously axed dedicated civil servants across the federal government because of their efforts to combat foreign disinformation, their friendship with Trump’s perceived “enemies,” or their involvement in work — now undone — to bring the Jan. 6 insurrectionists to justice.
These developments might seem like wonky Washington inside baseball, sniping between administrations that is normal or expected. They’re not. Retribution has been a feature of the second Trump administration. In an interview with Fox News, Sen. Ashley Moody of Florida went further. “This is not retribution. This is fumigation,” she asserted. “You have had radicals roaming in these institutions like termites.”
Comparing patriotic Americans who did their jobs to pests that deserve to be killed, publishing lists of perceived enemies — these actions have consequences. Those targeted are dehumanized. We face growing legal expenses. We receive death threats, and as we witnessed in Minnesota just last month, such threats can culminate in extrajudicial violence. For us, every day in Trump’s America is a test: When will our constitutionally protected rights — to speak, to protest, to organize — be used instead to target us? How much freedom are we allowed?
Unlike many other members of Patel’s target list, I did not hold a position of significant influence or consequence, despite the false claims to the contrary. I have never had the benefit of a security detail. I do not have vast personal financial resources. But my brief government service and the lies told about it have made my life difficult in a thousand ways, large and small.
Just as the denial of due process for individuals detained and deported by ICE normalizes the denial of due process to everyone, the pattern of politically motivated investigations that the Trump administration is pursuing is meant to desensitize us, to quell outrage and to stifle dissent, because the unspoken message is that there are no limits on which of us “termites” will be “fumigated” next.