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It has become clear over the past week that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s angry and partisan testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee helped rally Republicans to his side, including Never Trump Republicans who have never fully reconciled themselves to the president. This is a striking development given the fact that Kavanaugh’s performance replicated many of the elements of Trumpism critics have objected to: tribalist animosity, a willingness to play fast and loose with the facts, and a contempt for institutional norms.

“President Trump’s fight for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is breaking up the ‘Never Trump’ coalition of GOP leaders and pundits, many who are now uniting behind the president in advance of Saturday’s Senate confirmation vote,” the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard reported. “Rocked by the wall of Democratic opposition no matter what evidence supporting Kavanaugh is presented and impressed with Trump’s solid backing amid a brutal media attack, Never Trumpers are abandoning their opposition in a show of support for the man they once mocked.”

Those ranks include blogger and radio host Erick Erickson, who told Bedard, “For the first time I see myself voting for Trump in 2020. And it has a lot to do with Kavanaugh. He’s not the only reason, but he’s definitely the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

To be sure, some Never Trump conservatives have turned against Kavanaugh’s nomination. “Kavanaugh could have presented his case with dignity and controlled anger. Instead he chose to be aggrieved and petulant, more Sean Hannity than Felix Frankfurter,” Charles J. Sykes wrote in The Weekly Standard. Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes, who knows Kavanaugh personally and had supported his nomination, made a similar point in The Atlantic, decrying Kavanaugh’s “outburst of emotion” and “raw, undisguised, naked, and conspiratorial” partisanship. “His performance, was wholly inconsistent with the conduct we should expect from a member of the judiciary,” he wrote.

Jennifer Rubin, whom some conservatives want to expel from their movement, warned that “in producing a worthless investigation and declaring open season on sex-crimes victims, Republicans push women out of the party and onto political war-footing.” And David Frum on Twitter echoed the complaint of liberals about the hamstringing of the FBI probe into sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh:

“We searched everywhere except where lawyers for the accused told us not to look. We didn’t find anything where we were allowed to look. So that proves there was nothing there.”

But voices like Sykes, Rubin and Frum were few and far between. The opinion from conservative pundits was overwhelmingly pro-Kavanaugh, frequently echoing the jurist’s claims of a partisan conspiracy to destroy his Supreme Court bid.

“In the eyes of those who would destroy his nomination, Kavanaugh and his family are no longer human beings, if they ever were,” Sohrab Ahmari wrote at Commentary. “Instead, they stand in for every social evil, every unearned privilege, every ‘structure of oppression,’ every historical injustice. The Kavanaughs are political demons.”

Bret Stephens, once among the foremost Never Trump conservatives, penned a column that was especially useful for explaining how the Kavanaugh debate has moved former critics of the president into his camp.

“For the first time since Donald Trump entered the political fray, I find myself grateful that he’s in it,” Stephens wrote in The New York Times. “I’m grateful because Trump has not backed down in the face of the slipperiness, hypocrisy and dangerous standard-setting deployed by opponents of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. I’m grateful because ferocious and even crass obstinacy has its uses in life, and never more so than in the face of sly moral bullying. I’m grateful because he’s a big fat hammer fending off a razor-sharp dagger.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board similarly waved away the president’s behavior and implied that liberals’ behavior was even worse. “Donald Trump didn’t help Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation with his crude mockery of Christine Blasey Ford on Tuesday night in Mississippi, but then this Supreme Court moshpit isn’t about this President,” the editors wrote. “The left’s all-out assault on the judge is clarifying because it shows that the ‘resistance’ is really about anything and everything conservative in America. Mr. Trump is its foil to regain power.”

One of the core insights of the Trump era is that the president can maintain control of the Republican Party by presenting all politics as a binary choice of friend versus enemies: Once Republicans realize that they have to choose between Trump or the dastardly Democrats, they will rally to the GOP standard bearer no matter how much they dislike him. With the binary choice of yes or no to Kavanaugh, Trump seems to be winning over some of his remaining foes on the right.

Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley summed up the FBI’s reopened background investigation into Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in a single sentence on Thursday: “There’s nothing in it that we didn’t already know.” The American public has no way of knowing this, as the bureau’s completed report is a closely guarded secret; only senators and a handful of key staffers are being allowed to review it. But there’s no reason to doubt Grassley’s description. Knowing nothing was the goal.

The investigation wasn’t meant to uncover anything new. Republican Senator Jeff Flake, who struck the compromise to reopen the investigation last week after being confronted on Capitol Hill by survivors of sexual assault, only demanded an extra week for the FBI. The White House, which had to approve the reopening, initially imposed strict conditions on who could be interviewed by FBI agents. White House officials relaxed those constraints after moderate senators raised concerns, but did not drop them entirely.

As the FBI probe wrapped up on Wednesday, it became clear that the constraints worked. NBC News reported that more than 40 people with potentially relevant information had not been interviewed by FBI agents, including dozens who reached out to the bureau’s field offices. Two of the most conspicuous absences from the FBI’s interview list were Ford and Kavanaugh themselves. According to The Washington Post, the White House forbade the FBI from looking into whether Kavanaugh may have lied to the Senate about his college drinking habits.

The ultimate result is an investigation that will leave questions unanswered, witnesses unquestioned, testimony ungiven, and stones unturned. A thorough FBI inquiry was never likely to provide conclusive or definitive evidence about the alleged sexual assaults, thanks to the years that have since passed. But it could have filled the gaps in evidence and testimony caused by the haste to wrap up the confirmation process. That chance is now lost. As a result, Republicans have given Democrats all the justification they need to investigate Kavanaugh themselves if they retake the House of Representatives this fall.

A key House Democrat has already raised this possibility. “If he is on the Supreme Court, and the Senate hasn’t investigated, then the House will have to,” New York Representative Jerrold Nadler told ABC News on Sunday. “We would have to investigate any credible allegations of perjury and other things that haven’t been properly looked into before.”

Nadler’s words carry more weight than most: As the House Judiciary Committee’s current ranking member, he’s all but guaranteed to become its chairman under a Democratic majority. The committee is traditionally responsible for handling articles of impeachment in the House. Now that the half-hearted nature of the FBI inquiry is apparent, his case for investigating Kavanaugh is even stronger. House Democrats could bring witnesses before the committee, subpoena documents and other records, and hold public hearings into the allegations.

Republicans wouldn’t have a leg to stand on if they criticize a deeper inquiry into Kavanaugh’s behavior. Democrats spent weeks calling for the FBI’s background-check process to be reopened due to allegations against Kavanaugh. After Flake forced the White House to reopen it last week, Republicans took a different approach. The goal clearly wasn’t to find the truth, or even the nearest approximation to it, but to construct a simulacrum of that truth: to gather testimony from a selective group of witnesses, stitch it together with the FBI’s institutional credibility, and mask its obvious flaws with incredible secrecy. In doing so, they manufactured political cover for wavering Republican senators like Flake, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski, and for red-state Democrats like Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp.

Plausible deniability has been the dominant theme of Kavanaugh’s confirmation process. From the start, Republicans have offered a selective, incomplete, and potentially misleading picture of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. Instead of relying on the National Archives, the committee turned to a partisan review process to release only a portion of Kavanaugh’s voluminous White House records. The Trump administration also shielded 100,000 pages from public release by invoking executive privilege. Democratic senators raised concerns that the process gave Kavanaugh the opportunity to mislead the committee about his role in Bush-era scandals.

When the FBI report finally came out on Thursday, Republicans made it basically impossible for senators to read and digest. They placed a single classified copy in a secure room on Capitol Hill for only the senators and a handful of staffers to read, then set the first of two votes on Kavanaugh for the following day. It’s hard to imagine a better encapsulation of the extraordinary bad faith that Republicans have shown during the confirmation process. They got the veneer of legitimate inquiry without the risk of actually finding something.

Despite the evident gaps in the background check, key senators quickly praised the report. “It appears to be a very thorough investigation,” Collins told reporters on Capitol Hill after perusing the copy on Thursday morning, adding that she would read through the actual interviews later in the day. “We’ve seen no additional corroborating information,” Flake said after his turn in the Senate chamber where the sole copy of the report sits. Flake’s conclusion is unsurprising—and the product of his own choices. After all, you can’t see what you weren’t trying to find in the first place.

The FBI has completed its rushed investigation of allegations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh committed sexual assault as a teenager. While senators will begin reading the agency’s report Thursday morning, and portions may leak soon thereafter, it’s possible that the public won’t see it in full for years. But with the White House crowing that the report does not support Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations, it’s likely that its findings will be underwhelming—no more conclusive about Kavanaugh’s guilt or innocence than last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearings were.

What is inevitable, however, is that the FBI will be thrust into yet another political maelstrom, mere weeks before a nationwide election. In fact, that’s already happening, as Democrats question the thoroughness of the investigation while Republicans treat it as definitive. The Kavanaugh case highlights the agency’s dilemma under President Donald Trump: whether or not it can restore broad credibility in a divided Washington.

The recent politicization of the FBI can be traced back to this month two years ago, shortly before the presidential election. James Comey, the FBI director at the time, was faced with a difficult decision. He could break protocol and publicly announce that the agency’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server had been re-opened, or he could remain quiet, ensuring that Republicans, who were likely to maintain majorities in Congress, would seize upon that decision once it became public (likely after the election). Anticipating that Clinton would become president, he opted for the former, a decision played a potentially decisive role in Trump’s victory less than two weeks later.

In seeking to protect the agency’s independence, Comey guaranteed that the agency would be seen as overtly political. After the election, many Democrats blamed him for Clinton’s loss, while Trump treated him as an ally, embracing him in the White House upon their first meeting. (Comey would later tell his friend Benjamin Wittes that he attempted to blend in with the drapes to avoid Trump’s attention.) But after Comey was fired by Trump—purportedly for his mishandling of the email investigation, but also because of the FBI’s Russia investigation—the former director established himself as a prominent critic of the president’s assault on law and order, endearing him to Democrats.

As Comey’s criticisms of Trump became more pointed, the investigation into Russian interference by the special counsel, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, was beginning to ensnare many of the president’s closest advisers and associates. The Russia probe has only further endeared the agency to those Democrats, who view it and the special counsel as their best chance of removing Trump from office.

While Democrats were embracing the FBI, however, Republicans—long defenders of the agency—began to sour on it in large part due to Trump’s furious tweets and public comments about Comey and the alleged “witch hunt” against him by the FBI and other members of the “deep state.” This reversal came to a head in February, when House Democrats and Republicans were bickering over the release of memos detailing alleged misconduct within the FBI during its investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. During that spat, Republicans led by Congressman Devin Nunes criticized the FBI’s mishandling of that investigation, while Democrats such as Congressman Adam Schiff defended the agency—and, more unusually, its need for secrecy. A poll released that month revealed that 69 percent of Democrats thought the FBI was doing a good job, while only 49 percent of Republicans agreed. In 2003, a poll asking the same question found nearly opposite results, with 63 percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats favoring the FBI’s performance.

Now, at the White House’s behest, the FBI has prepared yet another politically charged report—one that appears to favor Republicans, for several reasons. The time constraints on the investigation have prevented the FBI from pursuing many leads. But it’s not clear that more time would yield resolution. The alleged assault happened more than three decades ago, and the three people that Ford says were in the room at the time of the alleged assault have had very different responses to the allegations. Ford alleges that Kavanaugh held her down and attempted to strip off her clothes, while Kavanaugh, and his friend Mark Judge claim that no such incident ever took place. While Ford’s friend Leland Keyser, who was allegedly with her the night of the assault, says that she believes Ford, she does not remember the incident. Still, the FBI reportedly didn’t contact more than 40 potential sources who claimed to have information about the allegations against Kavanaugh.

A more thorough report would have been more credible. In that event, the agency would have investigated not only the incident, but Kavanaugh’s claims about his youthful behavior and alcohol use, which are relevant to his credibility—both as it pertains to Ford’s allegations and to his fitness to serve on the Supreme Court. In tearful, angry testimony last week, Kavanaugh not only claimed that the allegations were baseless, but that he was something of a choir boy in high school—an occasional drinker, yes, but not the aggressive drunk that some have alleged. If these and other claims made under oath are shown to have been inaccurate, Kavanaugh’s defense would be damaged. He may even have committed perjury. Without investigating those claims, however, the FBI cannot be said to have fully investigated Ford’s accusation.

The problem is that if the agency had investigated Kavanaugh more fully, it would have been attacked again by Republicans, who would have accused it of leading yet another witch hunt against one of their own. But the White House precluded such a scenario by insisting that the FBI complete its investigation by the end of this week and imposing other constraints designed to limit its scope. Democrats and Ford’s attorneys are already attacking the White House for refusing to allow FBI agents to interview Ford and Kavanaugh. Notably, they are not attacking the agency—something that Republicans would surely do, if the report did not favor them—which only highlights how drastically the political situation has changed since Trump’s election.

Given this pressure, it’s possible that the agency is once again attempting what Comey did—to thread the needle politically in an attempt to preserve its independence. As the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s emails and Trump’s Russia connections have shown, though, both parties will champion the agency when it suits their purposes and abandon it when it does not. That’s not going to change, no matter what the FBI has found—or not found—about Brett Kavanaugh.

One spring during the Obama administration, I sat with a group of Yemeni farmers in Sana’a. I’d contacted them after a U.S. drone flying over the village of al-Sabool struck a bus full of shoppers, killing twelve civilians. One of the farmers, Abdullah, told me how he’d rushed to the scene to find his neighbors, grievously wounded, struggling out of the wreckage. He carried survivors to hospital. 

A man reached into his pocket and pulled up a grainy video on his phone. Together we watched the aftermath of the attack. The shell of a Land Cruiser was aflame. A woman’s charred remains had fused to those of her ten-year-old daughter in her lap. Her surviving son, Ahmed, told me he’d only recognized his sister from a clump of her hair. My colleague stepped out of the room to vomit.

Beyond the ashen bodies, one image from the farmer’s video stayed with me: a semicircle of men, all holding glowing smartphones, filming the wreckage.

During the Obama years, these videos became the local equivalent of American videos of police shootings. The viral images came, for Yemenis, to symbolize the brutality and incompetence of American drone policy.

The target of the al-Sabool attack wasn’t in the bus. Several further strikes apparently missed him, too.

In the past eight months, another front has opened in the CIA’s “war on terror.” This time it’s Niger. The agency has quietly erected a drone base in Dirkou from which to surveil and strike the Sahara, a conduit for drugs, arms, and migrants hoping to cross the Mediterranean.    

Drones remain a popular counterterrorism tool: no risk to the pilot; no flag-draped coffins. But as I learned in years investigating the drone wars in Yemen and Pakistan, the ripple effects, while less visible to Americans, are real. Drones heighten locals’ suspicions of foreign meddling and can destabilize fragile nations. And a new wave of progressive Democrats, in 2016, has the opportunity finally to call a halt, reversing one of the most troubling legacies of their party’s time in power.

No national security policy is more associated with President Obama than “targeted killing.” In his first year alone, the U.S. carried out more drone strikes than took place during the entire Bush presidency. By the end of his term, the rate of strikes had increased by a factor of ten, enjoying support from Congressional Democrats and aggressively defended in court by the Obama-era Justice Department.

All told, Obama’s drones killed thousands. The best independent estimates number the innocent dead in the hundreds, far in excess of the 120-person tally administration published in a nod to transparency at the end of Obama’s term. 

Under President Trump, the U.S. government has stopped issuing such reports altogether. Trump has not hesitated to expand the drone wars he inherited. This year the U.S. has conducted drone strikes in at least eight foreign countries: Niger, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Iraq.

This year, progressive challengers have beaten established Democrats by pressing for more left-wing policies at home. But the midterm challengers have been markedly quieter on national security and foreign policy.

If looking for a way to burnish their credentials in this field while distinguishing themselves from the establishment, the new progressives have a ready-made issue in targeted killings. To win this debate, they would need to accept that the drone wars began with Democrats. They would need to talk with Americans about terrorism: where it comes from, how to fight it, how much of our national oxygen it should be permitted to consume. 

The incoming generation of leftists could wean the party from the drone.

How did airborne assassinations become the key tool in our intelligence arsenal?

An American drone first killed someone outside a theatre of war in November 2002. But encouraged by technological advances, and hemmed in by the president’s campaign positions against on-the-ground entanglements, it was President Obama’s White House that truly embraced the drone—with CIA director Leon Panetta memorably calling drones “the only game in town.”  

Counter-terrorism remained a top priority as Obama came into office: Only swift action by passengers stopped Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, allegedly working with the Al Qaeda branch active in Yemen, from bringing down an airline full of Christmas travellers over Detroit in 2009. Drones offered a seductive promise: a cheap, limited weapon to reduce the risk of terrorism (something Americans want) without risking American blood (something Americans oppose). Moreover, unlike messy diplomacy or human intelligence, they offered clear, measurable results: names crossed off lists.

Perennially at risk of looking weak on national security, Obama protected his flank by running many more lethal counter-terror operations than his predecessor, backed by a public-relations campaign that sold Obama’s image—to party and public—as a calculating but ruthless warrior. “A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s image and derail diplomacy,” ran the New York Times article revealing the existence of a kill list. However grey the ethics of drone killing, Obama’s supporters argued, Americans should thank themselves that a cautious president—a former constitutional law instructor—kept the policy tightly under personal control.

But this also meant that the legitimacy of Democrats’ drone wars was vested in Obama’s morality and judgment. Few considered how the violence might grow in the hands of the nationalist hard right.

Support for the drone program ran deep among Democrats. Dianne Feinstein, then-chairwoman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, staunchly supported the CIA in the drone wars even as she clashed with them over torture. Only a handful of Senators—Rand Paul from the libertarian right, and Ron Wyden from the left—questioned whether it was wise, forty years after the Church Committee report, to let the CIA back into the assassination game.

By 2016, Obama began to voice concerns. “I don’t want our intelligence agencies being a paramilitary organization. That’s not their function,” Obama said in a 2016 exchange with students at the University of Chicago.

National security leaders, after retirement, also began to cast doubt on the drone war’s effectiveness. Many felt that drones’ promise—low-risk national security on the cheap—was proving a mirage. The weapons were not as accurate as initially hoped, and there was a problem of perception. Stanley McChrystal, the former commanding general in Afghanistan warned in 2013 that American drone strikes “are hated on a visceral level, even by people who’ve never seen one or seen the effects of one.”

The first academic study into the drone war, a 2012 collaboration between the Stanford and New York University law schools, found drones depressed school turnout in targeted communities, and kept terrified farmers from their work—neither outcomes ideal for creating stability in conflict zones. They caused an epidemic of anxiety and depression.

Although the second Obama administration seemed more conflicted than the first about its policies, only two bereaved families ever received a presidential apology for a drone strike: the relatives of the American and Italian
hostages killed in a strike on Al Qaeda in Pakistan in 2015.

For those at the sharp end of the drone wars, this double standard has festered, fueling resentment that only helps the region’s radicals.

The number of Yemenis in the local branch of Al Qaeda increased severalfold during Obama’s war. “I would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined the lines of Al Qaeda as a result of the latest drone mistake,” one Yemeni activist told CNN after an attack in September 2012. The average young man in Niger or Yemen is increasingly aware that a drone pilot in the United States can kill someone’s wife and children before driving home to his own at the end of a shift.

And the results of that realization give the lie to one of the fundamental assumptions of drone warfare: that there is a way of picking off the people who threaten us without the hard work of engaging the societies from which they come.

In President Trump’s first year in office, strikes in Yemen and Somalia have tripled. He’s boasted of having “totally changed [the] rules of engagement” for air war, with predictable results: over six thousand civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria alone. In April, The Washington Post reported the president had watched a video of the CIA strike, only to ask why the agency had waited until the target was away from his family.

But with the 2018 midterms, a new class of Democrats may tilt the balance of power in Congress. The leftists in their ranks have a chance to seize the opportunity Democrats missed in 2008—to reset America’s relations with the Muslim world. A foreign policy platform to match their domestic ambitions would explain that our endless, borderless war on terror has an opportunity cost: money and talent drained on a failed attempt to manage remote populations from the sky. The siren call of low-risk counter-terrorism has in fact fueled violent sentiment, and radicalized communities against American interests.

Democrats bequeathed us the drone wars. It would be only fitting for Democrats to stop them.