RUTHFULLY YOURS

Some former agents, once defenders of the ousted FBI director, aren’t fans of his current high-profile persona.

When President Trump suddenly fired FBI director James Comey in May 2017, quite a few retired bureau officials eagerly defended Comey’s record as director, and denounced Trump’s abrupt, seemingly self-serving decision. But some of those same retired FBI agents are now turned off by the pugnacious, high-profile persona of the former director as he prepares to launch the book tour for his autobiography, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership.

In 25 years at the FBI, James Gagliano handled a wide variety of duties — criminal investigator, undercover agent, supervisory special agent, SWAT team leader, member of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, acting legal attaché at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, and head of a bureau satellite office. He’s currently an adjunct assistant professor at St. John’s University and a CNN contributor. Back in June 2017, when Comey was preparing to testify before the Senate, Gagliano said, “Nobody’s going to question Comey’s honor and his character” and said he was “disgusted” with the way that Trump treated the former director.

Now, Gagliano says he was once a “mild fan” of Comey, but has been unhappy with the former director’s decision to venture into the public eye, writing a tell-all book and promoting it on a highly visible press tour.

“This current effort to meet the president in the public square, at his own game of slinging mud and punching and contributing smugness to the debate, it’s a bad look for him,” Gagliano says. “I think it’s going to diminish the FBI, and I think it’s going to diminish whatever’s left of Comey’s reputation.”

Former special agent Bobby Chacon, who now works in Hollywood as a technical advisor and story consultant, has had a similar change of heart. Back when President Trump didn’t even tell Comey that he was fired in person or by phone, Chacon bristled. “Nobody deserves to be treated like that,” he told the Guardian. But since then, he has come to concur that Comey is burning through the goodwill he accumulated over the course of his career in the bureau.

“I liked him when I worked at the bureau, although who the director was never really impacted my day-to-day life in the bureau too much,” Chacon says now, adding that he began to develop some concerns about Comey beginning with the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. He wondered why a grand jury wasn’t empaneled in that investigation, a move that he contends would have somewhat insulated the bureau from political controversy by leaving the decision to indict or not indict in others’ hands.

The concept of free speech, so central to the American experience, is facing a trial in our society. This is not the first time, and surely won’t be the last, in which competing interests wrestle to define the term.

But it is our time to debate it, and those who would trammel speech in the name of justice, or patriotism, or anything really, are relying on several very flawed premises in their attempts to silence their fellow citizens. It’s time to tackle them, one by one, and establish a positive argument for free speech that recognizes it is a blessing, not a burden.

Much of the confusion regarding the idea of free speech stems from a fundamental misunderstanding that somehow the First Amendment of the Constitution invented and constrains the idea. This is hogwash.

In 399 BC, Socrates was tried, convicted, and executed for violating speech codes. For more than 2,000 years since then, Western culture has played a game of tetherball over speech, sending it this way and that. But the heart of the issue has nothing to do with government. It has to do with whether we, as individuals, value tolerance for perspectives we disagree with.

In the past decade or so, many people — usually but not always those on the Left — have distorted the concept of free speech in an effort to suppress it. Their arguments are not deep; they are not even shallow. It is useful, however, to look at and dismantle them so we are not tempted to snatch from ourselves the rights generations past established for us.

Not being willing any longer to be manipulated is not succumbing to isolationism. Wondering whether the United States can afford another liability is not mindless nationalism. Questioning whether America can afford the status quo here and abroad is not heresy. Assuming we can borrow our way out of any inconvenience is largely over.

What helped elect Trump was a collective weariness with demands put on a country $20 trillion in debt. America is currently running a $57 billion a month trade deficit.

The poverty of inner-city Detroit, or rural Central California, or West Virginia does not suggest an endlessly opulent nation, at least as a visitor might conclude from visiting Manhattan, Chevy Chase, or Presidio Heights.

NATO was designed to protect Western Europeans from Soviet expansionism and to allay fears of traditional Russian nationalism. It transmogrified into a vital Western alliance that might use collective deterrence and action to preserve shared democratic values.

But if a distant United States is to continue anchoring such a key defensive league, then surely its front-line member states of a prosperous Europe must meet or exceed their own freely agreed upon levels of defense spending.

Instead, until recently, most did not.

The unspoken premise for such nullification was that the United States needs NATO more than the NATO states in Europe need the United States. Or given that America is so big and powerful a patron, surely it could always afford to subsidize an errant client.

Mexico assumed that a rich neighbor could, in perpetuity, serve as a refuge of last resort for its impoverished citizens, thereby providing a safety valve and precluding any need for its own internal reform.

The United States was supposedly so affluent that it could both offer entitlements to illegal aliens and, given such aid, not care whether many of them sent $60 billion back home (what is a mere $60 billion out of a multi-trillion dollar economy?) to Central American and Mexico.

When occasionally the United States recoiled a bit, Mexico could always accuse an essentially open-border America of being restrictionist and xenophobic. One wonders how exactly would Mexico’s hostility be expressed—by vows not to receive remittances, or to demand repatriation of its lost citizens, or unilaterally to leave NAFTA, or to elect a nationalist president who would build a wall?