G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century By Beverly Gage (Viking, 864 pages, $45) J. Edgar Hoover held on to power for too long. From 1924 until his death in 1972, during the administrations of eight…
Labor Day marks the 50th anniversary of Watergate’s origins, which grew into the greatest political scandal in our history, resulting in President Richard Nixon’s resignation, along with conviction of two dozen members of his administration. Daniel Ellsberg, who was employed…
An earlier essay on today’s dueling accusations of government-sponsored opposition research described past examples of the practice, including how members of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF) had assembled investigatory files on all potential GOP presidential candidates going into the 1976…
Liberals bellyache over what they call “whataboutism.” It’s a handy tactic they’ve embraced to counter conservatives who remind them of unseemly things their icons have done in the past, for which liberals conveniently look the other way. They want to…
The FBI investigated him under the pretext that his aides included people loyal to the Russian government rather than their own. They used electronic surveillance to spy on him. They pored over salacious material of a sexual nature. The administration…
“I am Oz, the Great and Terrible!” — The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum Long ago, as a Special Attorney with the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, I participated in planning and — in a…
James Comey put the bureau in bureaucrat at Thursday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearings. We think of FBI agents as courageous. Comey came across as cowardly, a word he used to describe his dealings with the president. Perhaps it now takes…