Benjamin Wittes wants to find out if the FBI really did hate former Director Comey, as the Trump Administration has claimed – or loved him:
… a thought occurred to me: this is a factual dispute with a large body of objective evidence behind it. When you decapitate an organization like the FBI, managers have to tell their staffs, after all. They do this, I imagine, by writing an email to their staffs. In an organization “in turmoil,” one run by a “nut job,” in whom the rank and file have “lost confidence,” one might expect such an email to have a celebratory flavor, to talk about how the long national nightmare is over, say, or how there’s a great opportunity to restore sanity to the organziation. On the other hand, when a beloved leader is removed by a President in what is seen as an attack on the institution, one might expect an email with a very different tone. The FBI has lots of managers who will have had to send emails to their staffs.
What’s more, like many institutions, the FBI does regular employee surveys that ask employees across the institution about their views of, among other things, its senior leadership. The bureau has been running these surveys for years, so we might expect data from them to reflect on the question of whether confidence in the leadership on the part of the rank and file is increasing or decreasing over time. I suspect these surveys also give employees the chance to comment on things. It would be really interesting to see employee comments, positive and negative, about Director Comey.
So I submitted a series of FOIA requests for this material.
Gotta love it. Probably not meaningful in the greater scheme of things, but will fill out the story nicely. And perhaps boost Comey’s ego.
