Tobin Harshaw, Columnist

Washington's Never Seen Anything Like the Comey Crisis. Or Has It?

Tim Weiner, chronicler of U.S. intel agencies, points out that in showdowns with a president, the FBI is 4-0.

June 10, 2017 at 12:00 PM UTC

Tobin Harshaw is a Bloomberg Opinion senior editor and columnist on national security and military affairs. Previously, he was deputy editor at the op-ed page of the New York Times and the newspaper’s letters editor.

He knew a thing or two.
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Journalists are warned to never use the word "unprecedented" in their articles, and for good reason: There is very little that is new under the sun. That said, plenty of commentators have used that adjective to describe the Great James Comey Roadshow in recent weeks, be it about his firing as FBI director by Donald Trump, his seven-page advance statement to Congress on Wednesday or his appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday.

So, is this a legitimate exception to the "unprecedented" rule? To answer that question, I decided to talk to someone who knows a thing or two about the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation: Tim Weiner, author of "Enemies: A History of the FBI." Weiner, a former colleague of mine at the New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his reporting on a secret Pentagon "black budget" and a 2007 National Book Award for a history of the Central Intelligence Agency. Here is an edited version of our interview: