WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump is at war with his own law enforcement officials. More than ever before, he has backup from his party.

And law enforcement has started pushing back.

The day after Trump’s State of the Union address was dominated by an extraordinary series of developments in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice challenged Trump both on the record and through what appeared to be anonymous leaks to CNN.

The until-recently-unusual spectre of the “law-and-order” party attempting to undermine law enforcement agencies comes during the ongoing special counsel investigation of the Trump campaign’s links to the Russian government. Democrats, and others, see Republicans’ criticism as an attempt to protect the president by diminishing public faith in Robert Mueller’s probe.

“We’re no longer dealing in the realm of facts and reason when it comes to grave matters of security and justice,” Amanda Carpenter, a Republican former communications director for Sen. Ted Cruz, wrote in Politico. “We are, at Donald Trump’s behest, fully engulfed in a narrative explicitly designed to impugn and destroy the credibility of the law enforcement agency tasked with investigating the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia during the 2016 election.”

In seeking short-term political gain, Trump and his allies will do long-term damage to federal law enforcement, said Matthew Miller, Justice spokesperson during the Obama administration. He pointed to the effects of conservatives’ attacks on other pillars of U.S. society.

“The first one they went after, starting decades ago, was the media. Now Republicans don’t believe what they hear on any channel other than Fox News. Then they moved to scientists … and now you see in polls Republicans who just don’t believe in scientists. They’ve turned on universities, and you see this rising discontent among conservatives about university. They are now turning on federal law enforcement,” Miller said in an interview.

“And if a significant percentage of the population — 35, 40 per cent — believes that federal law enforcement is biased, you’ll see those people less likely to co-operate with investigations, less likely to blow the whistle, and less likely to believe DOJ prosecutors when they sit on juries. It is extremely damaging to the long-term ability of those institutions to do their jobs.”

Others said Trump’s actions were risking deep damage to his own government.

“The growing and dizzying array of threats by Trump, and threats by officials to resign in response to Trump’s threats, suggest that this is not a stable situation (how could it be?),” Jack Goldsmith, an assistant attorney general in George W. Bush’s Republican administration, said on Twitter on Saturday.

“When Trump finally gets tired of being ignored and follows through on something stupid, the executive branch meltdown will be severe, to his enormous detriment (and hopefully not the country’s).”

The Republican attacks have been encouraged by increasingly conspiratorial Fox coverage centred on what hosts have called a “Deep State” attempting to topple Trump. Senior Republican politicians who once kept their distance from such arguments have begun to echo their language.

“Cleanse the organization,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said of the FBI on Tuesday.

The most dramatic developments on Wednesday centred on a secret four-page memorandum, authored by aides to pro-Trump chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, that Nunes claims will reveal “abuses” by the FBI in investigating Trump’s campaign.

Republican politicians have made a rallying cry of the phrase “release the memo.” (Ryan made his “cleanse” remark while speaking about the memo.) And they voted last week to do so despite the formal objections of a top Justice Department official who said a release “would be extraordinarily reckless” if Justice was not given a chance to review the memo and advise of possible harm.

Donald Trump was overheard Tuesday telling a GOP lawmaker he is "100 percent" in favor of releasing a classified memo on the Russia investigation that has sparked a political fight pitting Republicans against the FBI and the Justice Department. (The Associated Press)

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Trump has not made a final decision. But when a Republican congressman urged him after his Tuesday speech to release the memo, he breezily said, “Don’t worry, 100 per cent.”

Trump’s hand-picked FBI director, Christopher Wray, and hand-picked Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, pleaded with Trump’s chief of staff on Monday not to release the memo, the Washington Post has reported. And then they went further.

In a move that has no obvious recent precedent, the FBI made its objections public on Wednesday — and effectively endorsed the view of Democrats who have called the memo highly misleading.

“As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy,” the FBI said.

Later in the afternoon, CNN broke two stories that further called into question Trump’s interactions with and statements about law enforcement.

The first reported that Trump had asked Rosenstein if Rosenstein was “on my team” — a request that echoes his widely criticized alleged request for “loyalty” from then-FBI director James Comey — and suggested to lawmakers questions they could ask Rosenstein to try to discredit the Mueller probe.

The second reported that Peter Strzok, the FBI agent removed from the Mueller probe over text messages in which he criticized Trump, had supported the FBI’s late-campaign decision to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Republicans, including Trump, had previously seized on Strzok’s texts as evidence of FBI bias against him.

All of this comes just two days after the FBI’s deputy director, Andrew McCabe, stepped down under fierce pressure from Trump, who had accused him of bias because his wife’s Democratic campaign for a seat in Virginia’s state senate received political donations from allies of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, an ally of Clinton.

That, in turn, came four days after the New York Times reported Trump had ordered Mueller’s firing but backed off when White House counsel Donald McGahn threatened to quit.

All of the turmoil raised bipartisan fears that Trump would attempt another round of firings — of Rosenstein, with whom he is now engaged in a multi-front battle, or perhaps of Mueller once more. Democrats have warned that terminating Mueller would create the biggest crisis of Trump’s presidency.

If Trump refrains or is restrained from self-harm, however, his Fox-aided campaign to persuade Americans not to trust law enforcement may create an outcome that works for him personally even as it hurts the country more broadly.

If Republican voters have scant faith in Mueller and the Justice Department, their representatives are especially unlikely to pursue justice in the form of impeachment or resignation pressure, no matter what the facts say.

Said Miller: “When Bob Mueller finishes his work, he may have damning evidence against the president — and there will be a certain percentage of Americans who just refuse to believe him.”

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