Yale lecturer says Trump wrong to claim FBI workers ‘great’ but not its execs

There are times when even the brightest-looking leaves on the Ivy League’s vines say the damnedest things. 

Take Yale University alumna, Asha Rangappa.  

She was a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Now she is admissions director of Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and a national security law lecturer at Yale.

What elevates her above the radar nationally is her on-camera role as CNN national security analyst, which she performs with precise articulation, taking her lines from the same page in the same hymnal as CNN chief intellectual-in-residence Fareed Zakaria.

One possible — though not necessarily correct — take on this is that if you have a son or daughter who is possessed of right-of-center political inclinations and who is seeking admission to Yale’s Jackson Institute —  well,  it might be better to keep those inclinations under wraps.

With all these leaves glistening on Ms. Rangappa’s vine, it should have come as no surprise that in her appearance on CNN chief intellectual-in-residence Fareed Zakaria’s GPS show, she uttered this Sunday’s top talk-show absurdity.

She said President Trump is wrong to suggest that some of the FBI’s top officials and investigators have politicized the bureau’s process in favor of Democrats while the FBI employees just do their jobs and so are what Mr. Trump, flashing his lexicological breath, calls “great.”  

Knowing from past experience whereof she speaks, Ms. Rangappa assures us the FBI is one united team that is from top to bottom apolitical. Its management and rank-and-file pull together for one non-partisan cause — to advance truth and justice.

Of course that sums up the bureau — except perhaps when it doesn’t. 

Think Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and his unsuccessful Democratic candidate wife, Jill. 

Think Special Agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

Come to think of it, didn’t ex-FBI Director James Comey just say “American history shows that, in the long run, weasels and liars never hold the field, so long as good people stand up”? And didn’t he just add: “Not a lot of schools or streets named for Joe McCarthy”?

Was he calling the president of the United States and House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes weasels and liars? Or do you think maybe he was actually alluding to his local TV station’s weather prognosticators. 

Don’t know for sure; he didn’t elaborate.

Elaboration isn’t a preoccupation of Mr. Comey’s. He didn’t elaborate when in describing  the kind of negligence he found Hillary Clinton guilty of, he changed it from a prosecutable variety to one that isn’t.

The FBI rank and file were apolitical when Ms. Rangappa was in the bureau and they are now, she says.

So you have to wonder if Ms. Rangappa thinks the U.S. corporate chiefs whom juries and judges have fined for millions of dollars and sent to the slammer were the same morally and legally as the thousands of employees they oversaw.

You also have to wonder if she thinks those employees, whom logic would say couldn’t possibly have known about management’s cheating and lawbreaking, were actually in on the secret transgressions of top management.

Think Enron’s Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers, Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, Adelphia Communications’s John Rigas, Computer Associates’ Sanjay Kumar, Cendant’s Walter Forbes, HealthSouth’s Richard Scrushy, Qwest Communications’ Joseph Nacchio and Rite Aid’s Martin Grass.

You can’t be blamed for thinking she is responding as if she is an intensely partisan Democratic answering questions from another intensely partisan Democrat.

Nothing wrong with that — except perhaps for pretending you’re not intensely partisan and intensely loyal to the Democratic Party.