Presidential Executive Orders.
I never paid them much attention until they were weaponized, sharpened daggers to impale a president’s perceived enemies—from within.
Worse yet, his “disloyal” list is growing: the FBI and FEMA; special prosecutors and inspectors general; political rivals and bureaucrats; the news media and clergy.
Paybacks are hell.
“Give ‘Em Hell Harry” issued his share of contentious executive orders, but he was a poodle in comparison to Donald Trump. With the stroke of his pen, Harry Truman established the “Federal Employee Loyalty Program,” but instead of demanding unwavering allegiance as president — as Trump commands — the 1947 edict required federal workers take a “loyalty oath” to their country, the goal to root out any communist influences infiltrating government ranks.
Democrat or Republican, nothing mattered to Truman as long as a federal employee’s beliefs and affiliations did not align with America’s enemies.
Both my parents in Truman’s day worked for the FBI, my mom leaving Montana for the Seattle field office before transferring to bureau headquarters in Washington. J. Edgar Hoover was seated just down the hall, as was my dad, an FBI special agent who worked undercover during World War II.
I recall this because at this moment five-thousand FBI personnel, who like my parents dutifully followed orders, find themselves in the crosshairs of a vengeful president who tried to overturn a presidential election that without question he lost.
After ordering the immediate termination of seven FBI employees who were identified by name, Trump directed the bureau’s acting director “to identify … all current and former FBI personnel assigned at any time to investigations and/or proceedings relating to … events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
Talk about presidential overreach.
If not Montana’s doting lawmakers on Capitol Hill, Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania found some backbone. Before being elected to Congress, the five-term congressman was an FBI supervisory special agent, including national supervisor of the bureau’s “Public Corruption Unit” and leading “Election Crimes Enforcement.”
Like my dad decades before, Fitzpatrick also worked in counterintelligence, including deployments to Ukraine and Iraq, where he imbedded with U.S. Special Forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Now he’s sticking up for several thousands FBI agents who simply did their jobs: investigating a violent internal attack on our U.S. Capitol; investigating unprecedented attempts to overturn a presidential election; investigating (and recovering) classified top-secret documents found in a former president’s bathroom and shower.
Fitzpatrick reminded our newly elected president that rank and file FBI personnel “generally have little to no control over the office to which they are sent, the cases to which they are assigned, and the leads which they are asked to cover. Much like the military, they go where they are told, and perform the investigative duties that their chain of command orders them to do.”
Trump is undeterred. As I write this column he is answering reporters’ questions from behind his Oval Office desk, signing yet another stack of far-reaching executive orders.
“Well, I think the FBI was a very corrupt institution,” Trump spouts. “I’m a victim of it in a true sense. I was able to beat it, but other people have been treated horribly [by] what they’ve done in terms of weaponization … We have to have pristine, beautiful, perfect law enforcement. And what we want to do Kash [Patel] is the one to do it.”
Referring to his controversial conspiracy-minded pick for FBI director.
“Who would have thought that the FBI could have been corrupted like they were corrupted?” Trump repeats. “Who would have thought they would have been used to go after, you know, political opponents, essentially me being the No. 1 …
“But Kash will straighten it out.”
The same Kash that Trump’s own former National Security Adviser John Bolton compared to Josef Stalin’s reign of terror.
“Fortunately,” Bolton said of the former Soviet secret police, “the FBI is not the NKVD.”
Let’s hope that remains the case.
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who lives in Bigfork.