The connection is not at all obvious between Jimmy Carter’s presidency and the investigation of the 2016 election that was sharply critical of the FBI’s role in it and how it may have wrongly harmed Donald Trump.

The official Department of Justice report that concluded that “that senior FBI employees would be willing to take official action to impact a presidential candidate’s electoral prospects to be deeply troubling and antithetical to the core values of the FBI and the Department of Justice.” And this report never would never have been issued, absent a Carter initiative — the Inspector General Act of 1978.

Through that law, Carter introduced a system that now includes 70 officials charged with reviewing the actions of specific agencies and issuing probing reports. There were, in other words, no inspectors general or “IGs” — including Justice Department IG Michael Horowitz — before Carter.

The idea that a department insider would be looking over the shoulders of employees and would routinely be critical should be appreciated as a deeply American innovation. One cannot imagine this happening in China, where it is certainly needed.

Yet thanks to........

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