Todd Purdum: “The aggressive Republican attacks on the FBI are the latest sign — if one were needed — that President Donald Trump has upended the longstanding norms of Washington, as he and his allies in Congress seek to undermine the one institution of government that conservatives have typically seen as a bastion of integrity and law-and-order. Since at least the dawn of the New Deal, Republicans have excoriated any number of government entities — the Tennessee Valley Authority, the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — as woolly-headed, hyper-regulatory and riddled with liberals — or worse.”

“But for decades — from J. Edgar Hoover’s 47-year reign, through the McCarthy era, the civil unrest of the 1960s and right down to the Clinton impeachment — the FBI and the GOP have almost always been in sympathy, and often in sync. Not even at the height of the Watergate scandal, when the bureau’s investigation was imperiling Richard Nixon’s presidency, did Republican loyalists mount any serious effort to sow doubt about its work. No more.”