As Mark Sumner able explains at Daily Kos, Democrats have good reason to be dissatisfied with and somewhat worried about the culture at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This has been highlighted again in the latest story from the Washington Post on the lead-up to the execution of a search warrant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022, but it’s been a longstanding problem.

There has always been an element within the FBI that has gone out of its way to protect Donald Trump. In the run-up to the 2016 election, as The New York Times was devoting every single column of the front page to the “scandal” of Hillary Clinton’s email server, a story about Trump’s connections between the Trump campaign and Russian agents was consigned to a brief account on an inside page, in part because FBI sources informed the NYT that there was nothing to the story. (Note that The New York Times was well aware that an investigation into Trump’s connections to Russia was underway, but chose not to run the story until well after the election.)

In January, Charles McGonigal, the former chief of counterintelligence at the FBI, was charged with money laundering for a Russian oligarch. McGonigal worked directly with oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was also a major part of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia in 2016, and the source of many of the lies about Joe Biden and Ukraine that Rudy Giuliani tried to push in the 2020 election cycle. (Lies that The New York Times published unchallenged.)

In the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection, top officials at the FBI were warned that “a sizable percentage of the employee population felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol.” They were also warned that the agency might have difficulty investigating those involved on Jan. 6 because many agents believed that going after the criminals who stormed the Capitol was just “political correctness.”

The FBI is broken. It remains broken.

The Washington Post article focuses on counterintelligence professionals and prosecutors in the Department of Justice who faced strong pushback from elements in the FBI when they sought to search Mar-a-Lago. The short version is that FBI agents in the Washington field office which was responsible for the investigation into Trump’s possession of classified material were extremely wary of executing a search warrant unannounced and wanted, at a minimum, to give Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran advanced notice.

On one side, federal prosecutors in the department’s national security division advocated aggressive ways to secure some of the country’s most closely guarded secrets, which they feared Trump was intentionally hiding at Mar-a-Lago; on the other, FBI agents in the Washington field office urged more caution with such a high-profile matter, recommending they take a cooperative rather than confrontational approach.

Now, none of this is particularly surprising, and I’m not ready to ascribe some kind of cultural affinity for Trump within the FBI as the explanation. What’s most notable about the Washington Post piece is that it names names.

Steven M. D’Antuono, then the head of the FBI Washington field office, which was running the investigation, was adamant the FBI should not do a surprise search, according to the people.

D’Antuono said he would agree to lead such a raid only if he were ordered to, according to two of the people. The two other people said D’Antuono did not refuse to do the search but argued that it should be a consensual search agreed to by Trump’s legal team. He repeatedly urged that the FBI instead seek to persuade Corcoran to agree to a consensual search of the property, said all four of the people.

I’m trying to put this all in context. As the article notes, many agents in the FBI were suffering from a Crossfire Hurricane “hangover.” The investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia, led by former FBI chief Robert Mueller, hadn’t been good for the career advancement of many of the agents who participated, and it’s understandable that folks were concerned about the fierce political blowback that would inevitably result from a search of an ex-president’s property. There’s a difference between being pro-Trump and being afraid of Trump, although these things are not mutually exclusive.

The main thing is, I’m wondering why this article is appearing now. Is this story being pushed out by people in the Department of Justice or people in the FBI? And what is their motivation? Who is the target audience?

I suspect this is a signal that special counsel Jack Smith is nearing the end of his investigation and indictments are coming, including of the disgraced ex-president. This is making people nervous, especially at the FBI, and they’re trying to set the narrative ahead of time. Alternatively, however, there has been criticism that the probe into Trump has taken too long and that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department has been too cautious. And it’s also perhaps not coincidental that the article appeared on the same day that Garland had to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The truth is, the information about the rift between the FBI and the DOJ cuts many ways, depending on your perspective. If you think the Mar-a-Lago search warrant was an outrage, now you have reason to focus your rage against the DOJ rather the than the organization that actually executed the warrant. If you think Merrick Garland and the Justice Department dragged their feet too long, you now can blame Steven D’Antuono, who was in charge of the FBI Washington field office in the relevant time period.

If you want to undermine the legitimacy of the coming indictments, maybe you want to highlight that the decision to go into Mar-a-Lago was far from a slam-dunk decision but rather was highly controversial even within the administration. On the other hand, if you want to protect against the charge that this is a partisan witch-hunt, maybe you want to emphasize that the search was thoroughly debated and far from a rushed job.

There’s a sense to the article that people have scores to settle with D’Antuono, but he only looks bad to half the population. Sumner, for example, sees this as evidence that “the top law enforcement agency in the nation is coming down on the side of those trying to overthrow the legitimate government.”

The other half of the country, however, will see D’Antuono as the voice of reason who was overruled by overzealous DOJ prosecutors.

I can’t really decide how to pick between these options, but I have a strong feeling that this is being hashed out now because people in the know are expecting the shit to soon hit the fan. Some are worried about themselves and their institutions. Others are just trying to prep the field for how the debate over the indictments will begin.

I don’t see the same cause for alarm that Sumner sees, even if his overall criticism of FBI culture has a lot of merit. I just see the first ripples from the coming tsunami.