The innocent don’t react this way

I’m glad the FBI opened a counter-intelligence investigation of President Trump. He had appealed publicly for Russian hacking of American emails and met with Russian diplomats without a notetaker, reportedly spilling the beans on an ally’s secrets. If any other government official had done those things, the FBI would open an investigation in a heartbeat.

Of course there are risks in doing so when the subject is the President. He is the commander in chief and is normally allowed great latitude in what he says and does. I doubt there were many counter-intelligence investigations opened on Trump’s predecessors. But that is because they were cautious in using their latitude. Trump is unable to exert the same kind of self-discipline. He says what he wants.

That is dangerous, not least because what he wants is always something he views as redounding to his personal benefit. So if he spilled the beans to the Russian ambassador, there was surely a self-aggrandizing reason. It might have just been show-boating. But it might also have been an expectation of something in return: financing for real estate, for example, or preventing the Russians from pulling the plug on his condos and golf clubs.

We’ll have to wait for Special Counsel Mueller’s report to find out, because he took over the counter-intelligence investigation. What we know now is that Trump’s assaults on the FBI were not unmotivated. He has been trying to back them off. My guess is the impact has been the opposite. FBI agents likely redoubled their efforts to unveil the full extent of the President’s relationship with Russia as a result of the Comey firing, the McCabe early retirement, and the tweet attacks. That’s their job: to discover whether Trump has been compromised, and if so how.

One thing however is already clear: Trump is not behaving like an innocent man. Most people subject to an counter-intelligence investigation they thought ill-founded would cooperate to the fullest, providing whatever evidence they could and resisting the temptation to blast the agents carrying out their duty. Sure you might get aggravated, but you would also want to make sure the investigators were not aggravated. Trump, to the contrary, has done everything he can to ensure their job is as hard as possible. Do the innocent do that?