There is “a dire threat to the rule of law in the country I love.”

He is a former federal judge, and the only person ever to have led both the FBI and CIA. He is a Republican who was first nominated to a federal government position by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri in 1960. He is 95 years old, and he is apparently appalled by what he is calling “a dire threat to the rule of law in the country I love. “

“Order protects liberty, and liberty protects order,” writes William Webster (photo, right), in a New York Times op-ed on Monday. “Today, the integrity of the institutions that protect our civil order are, tragically, under assault from too many people whose job it should be to protect them.”

Webster, who has served as Chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council since 2005, is serving up a scathing rebuke to President Donald Trump, as well as to his own friends, Attorney General Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani.

“I am deeply disturbed by the assertion of President Trump that our ‘current director’ — as he refers to the man he selected for the job of running the F.B.I. — cannot fix what the president calls a broken agency,” Webster says. He warns of Trump’s “thinly veiled suggestion that the director, Christopher Wray, like his banished predecessor, James Comey, could be on the chopping block.”

Judge Webster blasts the “aspersions cast upon” the men and women of the FBI “by the president and my longtime friend, Attorney General William P. Barr,” which he characterizes as “troubling in the extreme.”

Calling F.B.I. professionals “scum,” as the president did, is a slur against people who risk their lives to keep us safe. Mr. Barr’s charges of bias within the F.B.I., made without providing any evidence and in direct dispute of the findings of the nonpartisan inspector general, risk inflicting enduring damage on this critically important institution.

Webster also goes after Giuliani.

“I’m profoundly disappointed in another longtime, respected friend, Rudy Giuliani, who had spent his life defending our people from those who would do us harm. His activities of late concerning Ukraine have, at a minimum, failed the smell test of propriety.”

Read Webster’s entire op-ed here.

Image of William Webster and Bill Barr via Wikimedia