I am one of the few people in my zip code who was not horrified by President Trump’s comments about the US Intelligence Community’s investigation of Russian activity during the 2016 presidential election.

I figure I can be horrified later if necessary.  In the meantime, what is the answer to the president’s question?  Why didn’t the FBI examine the servers that the Russians hacked back in 2016?

The answer that the Intelligence Community will offer would go something like: “/////////// information //////////.  //////// and ////////.  ////////// Security.   Next ////////.”

Unredacted, that would be: “We cannot provide that information at this time.  Sources and Methods.  National Security.  Next Question.”

The media chorus would add: “Only a pawn of the Russians would ask such a question.  Putin must have something on him.”

Granted, the President did not handle the situation artfully.  Instead of directing attention to the FBI’s curious behavior, he might have said something along one of these lines:

I can’t comment on a matter that is under investigation.

We have the finest investigative organizations in the world looking into various aspects of this matter.  Mr. Mueller and his team are still gathering evidence.  Several Congressional committees are actively looking into it.  Let’s wait until all the facts are in.

Mr. Putin and I each lead a great country.  I am not going to conduct a conversation on a matter as delicate as this in front of a gaggle of reporters.

He might have tried a little subtlety, perhaps something like this:

It’s too early to make a comment about any of this.  Look, in 2016, the FBI and the DOJ signed off on an application for a FISA warrant telling the court that Carter Page was a Russian agent.  It’s almost two years later and Mr. Page is still at liberty, uncharged with any crime.  Obviously, our justice system works at its own pace.  I don’t want to rush anything.

These were among the alternatives available to him, but the president’s rhetorical palette is dominated by bolder colors.

He could have done better.  Everyone agrees, including him. But what’s the answer to the question?  How did it happen that the Intelligence Community declined to examine the Democratic National Committee’s servers, yet concluded that Russian GRU agents (not the KGB, but Alger Hiss’s old clients in military intelligence) were in there hacking away?

If the authorities told us that the Russians burglarized an office, we would expect them to enter the building, secure the crime scene, and dust the office for fingerprints.  When it came to the servers, they didn’t do the equivalent.  Yet, anyone who questions their conclusion is accused of aiding and abetting the burglars.

This sounds like groupthink, which happens when members of an organization value their membership in the group and the survival of the group more than the group’s actual mission.  If you’re part of the group, you don’t question its assumptions.  You could be ridiculed.  You could be shunned.  There is safety inside the group.  It helps if the group tells itself that it is smarter, more knowledgeable, more attuned to the world around it than anyone outside the group.

The president bruised the delicate sensibilities of the Intelligence Community.  His critics think he should accept the work of the Community as settled.  But think of all of the Community’s blunders that resulted from groupthink.  They missed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the rise of Al Qaeda in the 1990s, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the simultaneous bombings of two US embassies in East Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000.  They continued to assume that airplane hijackers wanted hostages, so they missed the change in tactics that converted airliners into guided missiles on September 11, 2001.

The “Community” sent the U.S. Secretary of State (Colin Powell, appointed by George W. Bush) and the Director of the CIA (George Tenet, appointed by Bill Clinton) to the UN Security Council to provide ironclad evidence of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.  Those weapons could not be found by the occupation force when it arrived.  After the occupation of Iraq, the “Community” dismantled the only Iraqi organization that knew anything about governing that unhappy country and then supervised that nation’s descent into chaos.

Following those blunders, the Community rushed to the opposite extreme and announced that Iran was not attempting to develop a nuclear weapon.

Then there is Benghazi, a complete failure of intelligence.  Add the underwear bomber from Nigeria, whose own father had informed on him to the U.S. embassy in Lagos and the Boston marathon bombers, whose threat had been disclosed to U.S. authorities by – of all people – Russian intelligence.

This is not a complete list.

But the Community gets upset if anyone questions their wisdom.  They check with each other and they agree: they’re right nearly all of the time.  It’s treason to say otherwise.  John Brennan, the CIA director under President Obama, made that charge on television.

If the charge of treason seems overblown, perhaps that’s because the president’s question struck deeper than the Community’s self-regard.  Kimberley Strassel in the Wall Street Journal details the methods deployed by Mr. Brennan, among the most hysterical of the president’s critics, to tie the Trump campaign to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

In 2016, when he was Director of the CIA, Brennan knew that the FBI thought that Russia was intervening in the election, but he didn’t like their opinion that Russia wasn’t taking sides.  The FBI view at that time was that Russia just wanted to sow confusion.  That wasn’t the conclusion he wanted, yet he wasn’t able to persuade the FBI or even James Clapper (then Director of National Intelligence) that Russia’s activities were aimed at helping Trump and hurting Mrs. Clinton.  At the time, there were elements within the FBI dragging other baited lines through the water that would eventually hook George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn of the Trump campaign, but let’s put off to another day a discussion of the FBI-DOJ attempts to tie Trump to Russia.  It’s entirely possible that Mr. Brennan’s efforts were not connected to those of Deputy Director McCabe, Agent Strzok, DOJ Attorney Lisa Page, and DOJ Attorney Bruce Ohr.

According to Strassel, in late August 2016 Brennan briefed Senator Harry Reid, then the Senate Minority Leader, on Russia’s efforts to advance the Trump candidacy.  Reid got the story out to the public.  Ultimately, the narrative has become the Community’s received wisdom.  The Intelligence Community has concluded not only that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, but that they did so to aid Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.

The reaction of the establishment – including members of both major parties – to the President’s stinging accusation can be explained in part by incompetence and groupthink, each of which can usually be found pulling an oar when government goes into action.  The extra measure of hysteria we are hearing from people like Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey and others may arise less from the insult than from the implications of the president’s question.  If there is no credible answer to why the servers were off-limits, we might ask further questions about other odd activities of the Community.  These would include:  how did the infamous “Steele dossier” came into the hands of the FBI, why was it used to procure a FISA warrant, did those warrants allow investigators to listen inside a political campaign, and why is it that after some two years all we have are indictments against U.S. citizens for meaningless process crimes (failure to register as a foreign agent, misstatements to investigators about when certain meetings took place, and the like) and against Russian nationals who aren’t going to appear in a US court (and when one of them did, the Mueller team refused to proceed).

The president’s question about the DNC servers pulls on the curtain and may start to reveal the wizard behind it.  If a robber cracks a safe, you examine it.  If someone is shot, you collect and examine the bullet.  If a check is forged, you examine the handwriting.  If a server is hacked, why would you leave it alone?  It’s only one small thread in a much more complex fabric.  Pull it and who knows what may be revealed?

A person more careful with his words than Mr. Trump might have been able to make the point that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election doesn’t imply that they favored one candidate or the other.  It means that they wanted to sow confusion, something they have accomplished.  The problem for him is that If he agrees openly that they meddled but fails to persuade that they were non-partisan, he opens the door to the segment of the news media – a mere 95% of them – who will report that he now admits that he had Russian help.

Instead of trying that more difficult rhetorical gambit, he focused on the FBI’s lack of curiosity about the Democratic National Committee’s servers.  But again: what is the answer to the president’s question?  The failure to examine the hacked servers is so glaring that the default explanation — incompetence and groupthink — may not be sufficient.  And if that’s the case, the answer to the president’s question – Russians or no Russians – can lead to some damaging revelations.  The truth always comes out eventually, but it can take a long time.  I wonder how many people in Washington are thinking, “If the truth has to come out, let it be after the statute of limitations has run.”