This says it all:
It’s right out there in the open. Trump rewarded Stone for not telling the Feds what he knows.
Of course.
"what digby sez..."
Month: July 2020
Rush Limbaugh admitted Thursday that support for Trump hinges on the perception that, as Trump said himself, he alone can fix what’s wrong with the country. Presumably, on the “it takes a crook to catch one” principle.
“How many of you Trump supporters support Trump because he is a paragon of moral virtue and financial rectitude? How many of you support Trump because he is the crème de la crème when it comes to character, decency, mor…. That’s not why Donald Trump is supported.”
Like Trump, Limbaugh thinks he’s a pretty smart guy. Yet, he portrays support for the acting president as some sort of patriotic altruism. (For which Trump’s evangelical base is willing to debase itself.) Moral virtue? Financial rectitude? Character, decency, morality?
No. It is not to save the country except for themselves. It is because they think they are losing their country and Trump is the only Republican who can save it for them, Limbaugh explained.
But it is also because Trump’s wanton bigotry, dishonesty and viciousness liberate them to wallow in their own. Like a medieval pope, he is selling a plenary indulgence. Go, and sin some more, says Trump in red letters held upside down and backwards. All it cost them is the surrender of whatever withered moral authority the movement had remaining.
Obviously, Trump as license to sin is not an original thought. The day after tweeting that in response to the Limbaugh clip, I came across this meme:
This gentleman below stepped up to perform his worst self for the camera. As you can see, he is loving it.
Reflected in the paint of Red Man’s truck door is “BLACK LIVES MATTER” written on the passenger door of the truck doing the filming. (It may have been written in more places.) Maybe it was just “BLACK LIVES MATTER” that set off Red Man. But if you look closely in the side mirror of the filming truck, there is a flag of some sort flying in the bed. So, maybe it was both. (If you can make out what the flag is, drop me a line at the address at Meet the bloggers.)
In his papal role Friday evening, Trump granted an indulgence to his buddy Roger Stone, due to spend some quality time in prison on conviction of a jury of his peers for seven felonies. Trump’s commutation of Stone’s sentence, like an indulgence, was granted for performance of some good work. In this case, for Stone not giving evidence against Trump, his benefactor.
Hallelujah.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.
Have a drink and watch some lion cubs. You deserve it:
He’s cratering:
Trump’s approval among independents lands at 26% in the survey, a sharp drop from 40% in mid-June, the last time the question was asked. Trump’s disapproval among independents has risen to 73%, up from 59% in the June poll.
Within his own party, Republicans are less inclined to back him in the newest poll, with only 78% approving of the president’s handling of the coronavirus, compared to 90% in mid-June. His disapproval of 22% in the new poll is a more than two-fold increase from last month.
In a variety of demographic groups, there are clear and consistent shifts in support away from the president.
Men (66%) and women (67%), in near equal measure, disapprove of the president’s coronavirus response, which represents a double-digit increase among men since the June poll, when 54% disapproved.
Even white Americans without a college degree, considered to be a core constituency of Trump’s base, are split in their approval of the president’s handling, with 50% disapproving and 49% approving, compared to 42% disapproving and 57% approving in that last poll.
The newest numbers come as Trump continues to downplay the threat posed by the virus, even as confirmed cases climb.
Earlier this week, Trump falsely claimed that “99 percent of [coronavirus cases] are totally harmless,” while casting the movement to remove statues of controversial figures in the country’s history as the most pressing threat to the nation.
Trump’s focus on what he called an “angry mob” looking to “tear down our statues” and “erase our history,” comes as the country continues to reel from the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, who died on Memorial Day after he was pinned down by a white Minnesota police officer, and the nationwide unrest over racial injustice that followed.
The new poll comes amid debates over renaming and removing statues that bear the names of Confederate figures, and after Mississippi lawmakers voted to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag.
Americans are more than eight times as likely to have a negative reaction to the Confederate flag than a positive one, the new poll finds, marking a shift from just five years ago.
Trump is seeing his approval broadly underwater for his handling of race relations, even across all racial groups. More than half (57%) of white Americans, and overwhelming majorities of black Americans (92%) and Hispanics (83%) disapprove of the president’s handling of this issue.
Although his approval among Republicans falls at 78% on race relations, this is far less than the strong majority of Democrats (91%) who disapprove of the president on this issue. Independents (74% disapprove) are also deeply skeptical of the president’s handling of race relations.
The faltering numbers for Trump are also accompanied by concerns over the country’s path to reopening.
A majority of Americans (59%) believe the push to reopen the economy is moving too quickly, similar to a June 26 ABC News/Ipsos poll when it was 56%.
Currently, 15% think the country is moving too slowly, and 26% think the country is moving at the right pace.
Instead of rising to the occasion and proving to the nation that he is worthy of his absurd claim to greatness, he did this:
Not that there’s anything new about that…
After threatening a shutdown for months over border wall funding and vowing last week that he would “take the mantle” of responsibility, Trump tried to shift the blame Friday, just hours before a government funding bill expired at midnight.
The devastation of 133,000 deaths and many more being seriously ill may have made this childish refusal to ever take responsibility for anything a little bit more salient. Add to that his grotesque racism and this is what he gets.
Anything less that total adulation and loyalty toward Donald Trump is evidence of it. (Well, either Deep State or pedophile ring, one or the other.)
Here’s Fox Business news anchor Lou Dobbs sounding the alarm:
Dobbs has repeatedly ranted about the Supreme Court in recent weeks. Last month the Fox host launched an attack on John Roberts, whom he claimed “has lost his mind” after the chief justice ruled against ending DACA — an Obama-era program which protects some undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children from deportation — and for safeguarding workplace protections for LGBT people.
On Thursday night, Dobbs ramped up his attack on the court — suggesting that the SCOTUS was kidding no one in its decision to allow “left-winger” District Attorney of Manhattan Cyrus Vance the room to obtain tax records, while simultaneously ruling that Congress does not have that power. In reality, the court ruled that Congress does have the authority to subpoena the financial documents, but the court kicked this specific case back to the lower courts — a decision that will prevent lawmakers from accessing those records until after the 2020 election.
Dobbs then accused the Manhattan DA of coordinating his efforts to take down the President with the “radical Dems on Capitol Hill.”
Dobbs’ aggressive defense of the President paid off. Hours later, Trump praised Dobbs in a Friday morning tweet about his upcoming book entitled, “The Trump Century.”
It’s always hard to know whether a professional Trumper is simply an opportunist on the Trump train for their own purposes or whether they really like the guy. Dobbs is obviously a true believer, full-fledged cult member. In fact, he’s completely insane.
They don’t exist. The above table and the link are to the Gallup poll. As of June 8, Trump won approval from 91% of all Republicans. I don’t think any other national Republican enjoys anything close to this level of support.
The takeaway? Republicans are impervious to even the most basic forms of rational discerning. They can’t be argued with, but any political party that clueless can be defeated.
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Greg Sargent has a terrific column today about Trump greatest fear: small crowds.
Two new reports — one from NBC News, and one from the Associated Press — shed light on an internal debate now underway among Trump advisers about how to manage both this new reality and Trump’s own emotional struggle with it.
The picture that emerges is one in which they are working to balance Trump’s insatiable need to feed off adoring crowds against the reality that people might be disinclined to brave the plague conditions that he did so much to unleash on the country. The imperatives of satiating Trump’s megalomania are bumping up against the consequences of his depravity and incompetence.
Trump is set to hold a rally in New Hampshire — originally scheduled for this weekend, it has now been postponed — and as NBC reports, his advisers are desperate to avoid a repeat of the lackluster turnout at his Oklahoma gathering. As one puts it: “We can’t have a repeat of Tulsa.”
What’s changed is that Trump now realizes why the Tulsa fiasco happened: A White House official tells NBC that Trump “sees now” that supporters may not turn out at rallies due to coronavirus fears.
It’s galling that Trump only sees this now, since experts loudly warned against rallies, and one of his paramount goals was to create the illusion of normalcy, so everyone would get back to work and the economy would roar back to greatness on Trump’s reelection schedule.
So the New Hampshire rally will be held outdoors, and masks will be strongly encouraged, though not mandated. Meanwhile, Trump continues urging a recklessly rapid reopening while refusing to set a mask-wearing example himself.
Yet Trump’s advisers also know that future rallies create the risk of more lackluster appearances. But they’re going to brave that risk, and the Associated Press reports on why: Despite the risks, the Trump campaign believes it needs to return to the road, both to animate the president, who draws energy from his crowds, and to inject life into a campaign that is facing a strong challenge from Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
The problem is that at a time when coronavirus cases are spiking to record levels in many states and nationally, Trump nonetheless wants and needs big crowds.
Trump himself unwittingly laid bare the dynamic in an interview with Sean Hannity on Thursday night.
“We’re doing very well in the polls,” Trump declared, when in fact his approval numbers are 15 points underwater and he’s trailing Biden nationally by 10 points. Both metrics have gotten worse over the last few weeks, but Trump insisted: “We’re rapidly rising.”
“There’s great spirit,” Trump continued. “Spirit like nobody’s ever seen before, actually. And there’s no spirit for Joe.”
As the constant lying about polls demonstrates, for Trump the impression that he’s losing — that his energy and candidacy are flagging, that the crowds aren’t showing up — is itself deadly. What must be relentlessly manufactured is the illusion that he remains enormously popular and that Trump’s America is energized and primed and ready to win again.
Greg has hit on something very important. Trump’s psyche will fracture if he can no longer manufacture the illusion of popularity., particularly at a time when the polls are showing him cratering. It’s everything to him:
Trump has obsessed over his crowd sizes throughout his presidency. Indeed, the ability to create imagery like this is why he held rallies in off-years like 2019 in the first place:
This obsession goes back many years. In his biography of Trump, journalist Timothy O’Brien recounts an exchange between Trump and producer Lorne Michaels, in which Trump acknowledges his NBC project might not attract a big audience forever:
“You know, Lorne, it won’t always be this way,” Donald mused. “Someday NBC will call me and say, ‘Donald, the ratings are no good and we are going to have to cancel.’”“No, Donald, there is only one difference,” Michaels replied. “They won’t even call.”
That exchange remained with Trump for years, O’Brien reports.
“Trump’s biggest existential fear is that the spotlight will be turned off, the seats will be empty, and his phone will stop ringing,” O’Brien told me. “If the ratings drop, he drops.”
“There isn’t any part of his life that hasn’t been touched by this,” O’Brien continued. “His obsession with newspaper and TV coverage in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s; how many people show up at his rallies; how he’s performing in the polls. It’s always there.”
The idea that they canceled the rally tomorrow because it might rain in the middle of July because is absurd. Trump has held dozens of rallies in which his ecstatic cult waited in extreme inclement weather to see him. I think they’ve had a tepid response and they don’t want to chance another Tulsa. Trump’s fragile emotional state just can’t handle it.
from the Washington Post on that subject. The whiny little man-baby is even starting to get on his loyal henchmen’s nerves:
Trump often launches into a monologue placing himself at the center of the nation’s turmoil. The president has cast himself in the starring role of the blameless victim — of a deadly pandemic, of a stalled economy, of deep-seated racial unrest, all of which happened to him rather than the country.
Trump has always exhibited a healthy ego and his self-victimization tendencies are not a new phenomenon, according to those who have known him over the years. But those characteristics have been especially pronounced this summer, revealing themselves almost daily in everything from private conversations to public tweets as the pandemic continues to upend daily life across America and threaten the president’s political fortunes.
Barbara Res, a former executive at the Trump Organization, said that when she worked for Trump, he interpreted nearly everything in deeply personal terms. “Whatever bad happened, no matter what it was, it was always against him, always directed at him,” Res said. “He would say, ‘Why does everything always happen to me?’ ” She added: “It was as if the world revolved around him. Everything that happened had an effect on him, good or bad.”
Now, however, Trump’s sense of victimhood strikes even some allies as particularly incongruous considering the devastation wrought by the pandemic and the pain and anguish apparent in Black Lives Matter protests.
[…]
They even brought the toddler some big trucks!
Other top White House advisers — including Hope Hicks and Dan Scavino — have also sought to buttress Trump’s mood with events they thought he would enjoy, such as celebrating truckers by bringing 18-wheelers onto the White House South Lawn in mid-April or creating social media videos that feature throngs of his adoring fans, according to aides.
They should just give him a bottle and put him to bed. The article reports on numerous outside advisers and confidantes saying that he never stops whining about his plight and he seems low energy and depressed.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University and author of the forthcoming book, “Strongmen,” a history of authoritarian leaders, said Trump’s victimization complex fits a pattern of authoritarian leaders past and present.
“They have no empathy, and they only see the world through how things affect them personally,” Ben-Ghiat said. “They’re not there to govern. They’re there to enrich themselves, they’re there to plunder the nation, and they’re there to be world historical.”
Sounds like Trumpie. But never let it be said that he’s mired in depression. There’s always his magical thinking to bail him out:
The president’s mood had also improved as he focused on the fight over whether to rename or tear down statues named after Confederate generals and other controversial historical figures. Aides say he believes a battle over such symbols will help him politically.
Despite his bouts of moroseness, Trump can also exhibit optimism not entirely grounded in reality. He has continued to tell advisers, for instance, that he is certain the virus will go away by October and that there will be a “cure” by then — a word he favors over “vaccine.”
Then, he adds in these tellings, the economy will rebound overnight and he will win a second term.
Like all toddlers, he loves fairy tales.
One of the most enduring Trump-era internet memes is “I hope you find someone who looks at you the way Mike Pence looks at Donald Trump.” Trevor Noah’s “Daily Show” has had a lot of fun with it:
And it’s not just the adoring gaze. When Pence speaks, it is invariably in the most servile tones, always suggesting that he has never had a thought in his head that “this president” didn’t “direct” him to have. He is the most loyal of all the Trump loyalists, a man who was saved from an ignominious failure as Indiana governor in 2016 and turned into the president’s personal political manservant.
Up until this year, Pence had managed to be nothing more than a cipher in the Trump administration, performing the patented furrowed-brow, look-of-love act at public appearances and not much else. The speculation was that his empty-suit role may have saved him. By doing nothing except standing next to Trump and smiling benevolently, he might be a rare survivor of the Trump White House and might still have a political career after it’s over.
I never thought that was possible. Pence’s close association with Trump has destroyed him, and if he runs for president he will be the Trump administration’s sin-eater. The base will have to make someone suffer for Trump’s failure, and Pence was always top of the list. Unfortunately for him, his role as the “pandemic czar” has probably sealed that fate.
Had Pence been left to his regular houseboy routine he might have slipped into obscurity if Trump loses the election in November. But because he was assigned the thankless role of supposedly heading the coronavirus task force he’s now the face of the administration’s failure, right alongside the man he stares at so dreamily.
Setting aside Pence’s lugubrious delivery and the apparent necessity to flatter the president in reverent tones, he started off doing a fairly decent job with the task force His daily briefings, in the beginning, were hobbled by Trump’s often incoherent ramblings, which had to be explained away, but Pence at least allowed the experts to speak and take questions.
Under his early leadership the task force came up with guidelines called “30 Days to Slow the Spread,” which Pence discussed at every appearance. Thirty days was always inadequate, but at least that conveyed a sense of urgency and was an attempt to get the whole country on the same page. But as soon as Trump saw that people were paying attention to the briefings he horned in on the action and we know how that went. The bizarre daily spectacle of the president blabbering on about hydroxychloroquine and injecting disinfectant signaled that any serious attempt at a national response was over.
From that moment on, Pence has worked overtime to lose whatever small amount of credibility he was able to cultivate in those early days. The slide into Trumpian happy talk was demonstrated by Pence’s defiant refusal to wear a mask while palling around with Trump acolytes like Florida Gov Ron DeSantis as they declared “Mission Accomplished,” just a bit prematurely. Then Pence came out as a full-fledged propagandist with a big op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on June 16, in which he threw down a straw man and lit it on fire:
In recent days, the media has taken to sounding the alarm bells over a “second wave” of coronavirus infections. Such panic is overblown. Thanks to the leadership of President Trump and the courage and compassion of the American people, our public health system is far stronger than it was four months ago, and we are winning the fight against the invisible enemy.
He was addressing the spike in coronavirus cases that has now led to a gigantic surge all over the country except the Northeast. Nobody was talking about a “second wave.” Everyone knows we are still in the first one. And despite his claims that his “whole-of-America approach has been a success,” Pence’s plans to “slow the spread” did not come close to working. The virus is out of control.
But the New York Times reported that in a phone call with governors around that same time, Pence encouraged them to lie, saying, “I would just encourage you all, as we talk about these things, to make sure and continue to explain to your citizens the magnitude of increase in testing and that in most of the cases where we are seeing some marginal rise in number, that’s more a result of the extraordinary work you’re doing.”
In other words, he was telling them to parrot the president’s fatuous insistence that if we didn’t have all this testing we wouldn’t have all these cases. He was not even trying to be an honest broker.
Since then, Pence has held a couple of task force briefings for the first time in months. They might as well have involved Trump himself standing up there talking about miracle cures and claiming that the virus is going to disappear on its own. This week Pence appeared with some of the favored public health experts and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to share the administration’s directive that all schools must be open for in-person learning five days a week this fall or else.
They had planned to discuss the CDC guidelines for school reopening, but as usual Trump stepped all over it by disagreeing with them publicly:
He also threatened to withhold federal funding for any school that didn’t do as he ordered. Naturally, Pence eagerly backed up the boss:
“The president said today we just don’t want the guidance to be too tough,” Pence told reporters. “And that’s the reason next week the CDC is going to be issuing a new set of tools.”
CDC director Robert Redfield added, bizarrely, that they didn’t want schools to use the guidelines as an excuse not to open, raising the question of why in the world the agency would even bother to issue them in the first place.
This is exactly what happened in the spring when the CDC issued guidelines for reopening the economy and the White House withheld them for weeks so Trump could pressure states to withdraw their mitigation strategies and get the economy going in time for his re-election.
Well, the data is in. According to a Thursday report in the New York Times, the current surge was driven largely by states that were among the first to ease virus restrictions. Imagine that. Surely this latest push to reopen schools without the proper safeguards in place won’t have the same results,.
Mike Pence is now fully engaged in saving Trump, not saving American lives. He has big ambitions of his own and plans to run for president. But he’d better hope Trump wins in November, because if he thinks he can run in four years if they lose this time, he needs to think again.
There’s a reason Trump put him in charge of the worst crisis of his presidency. It’s Pence’s pandemic now. And you can bet that Donald Trump will be the first one to hang it around his neck with one of his extra-long red ties. After all, if Trump loses this fall, there’s every reason to think he’ll be running against Pence in 2024.
Jack Goldsmith and Daniel Sobel have taken to time to look into what we know about the Durham “investigation of the investigation” at the moment. It appears that for all of Barr’s hand-wringing about political interference in presidential campaigns he may be preparing to throw this hot potato into the mix just before the election in the fall. So much for his great concern about the DOJ being a partisan tool:
In May 2019, Attorney General William Barr tapped Connecticut’s U.S. Attorney John Durham to look into issues related to the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. Durham is a longtime federal prosecutor in Connecticut known for leading organized crime and public corruption cases. In 2008, Attorney General Michael Mukaseytasked Durham with investigating the CIA’s destruction of interrogation videotapes. A year later, Attorney General Eric Holder expanded Durham’s mandate to examine CIA torture allegations.
Now, Durham is conducting a comprehensive global probe of the U.S. government’s investigation of the Trump Campaign’s connections with Russia. The investigation covers pre- and post-election matters, and reportedly has come to include the unmasking of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and the basis for the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia tried to help Donald Trump win the election in 2016. These are all matters on which President Trump has publicly commented. Before and after Durham began his investigation, Trump has often claimed, in fiery rhetoric, that the Trump campaign investigation, and the unmasking of Flynn, and the intelligence community’s assessment, were illegitimate. He has also charged that some of the people apparently under investigation by Durham engaged in misconduct on matters under investigation. Attorney General Barr has also publicly commented that some of the people under investigation engaged in serious wrongdoing.
The fruits of the Durham investigation will reportedly be disclosed later this summer, or in the fall. This post does a deep dive into what has been publicly reported about the Durham investigation, and then offers analysis. We include Barr’s commentary on the investigation, but not the president’s. The bottom line is that (1) the probe as it developed is not one that should have been conducted by a federal prosecutor conducting a criminal investigation, and (2) Barr’s tendentious running commentary on the investigation violates Justice Department rules, politicized the investigation and damaged the credibility of whatever Durham uncovers. (The post is long. If you want to skip the lengthy factual recitation and jump to the analysis, click here.)
[…]
There were good reasons for a comprehensive inquiry into the criminal and counterintelligence investigations of the Trump campaign and the president himself. The investigation was unprecedented and controversial, even if justified. We know from Horowitz’s review that the investigators made many mistakes and that the standing Justice Department guidance on such matters was (according to Horowitz) imprecise, underdeveloped and procedurally inadequate. A comprehensive review was warranted not only for the American public to know what happened, but also as a basis for intelligent reform of FBI and DOJ investigative processes going forward.
To say that a comprehensive investigation was warranted is not to say that the Barr/Durham investigation, as it has developed, was the right one, or has been conducted well. (Goldsmith early on took a hopeful view of the investigation that, for reasons explained below, has not been borne out by events.) Two large problems stand out from the lengthy recitation of reported facts recounted above.
1. Durham’s Competence
Durham is a seasoned and undoubtedly competent federal prosecutor who entered this investigation with bipartisan credibility. He has an unusually rich understanding of the intelligence community from his days investigating the CIA tapes destruction and elements of the CIA black site and interrogation program. And there are precedents for reviews of the type Durham initially undertook—for example, federal prosecutor Randy Bellows’ review of the mishandling of the Wen Ho Lee case. But fifteen months after Durham was appointed, it has become clear that he was not the right man for the investigation that developed.
Durham’s review began as an effort to understand what happened in the genesis and conduct of the Trump campaign investigation. There was no inkling at the outset that crimes had been committed; Durham’s initial probe was a “review” to gather and assess facts. This function could and perhaps should have been done by a congressional committee. In April 2020, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a bipartisan report that found that the intelligence community’s assessment of “unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election” was “coherent and well-constructed” and that “the Committee heard consistently that analysts were under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.” This approach to the broader questions related to the Russia campaign investigation would have yielded more credible conclusions than Durham possibly could.
A more comprehensive investigation also would have been an appropriate task—at the core of their expertise and competence—for inspectors general. Inspectors general across the government could have reviewed and assessed Crossfire Hurricane, as Horowitz did for a slice of it. There is a precedent for this. Six inspectors general worked together to produce a government-wide assessment of the Bush administration’s Stellar Wind collection program. If the input of foreign governments became necessary, as Durham and Barr believed it did, that could have been arranged by the State Department or by the agency whose liaison agency’s information is sought (for example, by the director of national intelligence if information from foreign intelligence services is needed). And if evidence of crimes arose in such an investigation, it could have been referred to a prosecutor—again, as happened with Horowitz’s investigation.
An investigation by a prosecutor is especially inappropriate for what appears to be one large focus of Durham’s investigation: the nature and validity of the intelligence assessment that the Russian intervention in the 2016 election sought to aid Trump rather than merely sow confusion. Durham has experience examining the intelligence community. But he is neither personally nor institutionally expert in intelligence assessments or the intelligence assessment process, and a prosecutorial focus is not the right one to understand or second-guess the basis for the assessment. As former intelligence officials Robert Litt and John McLaughlin wrote in the Washington Post, “[i]f analysts fear they may come under criminal investigation for judgments the president does not like, our nation will be less safe.”
One weakness with the inspector general approach is that former employees can cooperate voluntarily but cannot typically be coerced through legal process into cooperation. This is one reason a congressional process would have been better in theory to develop a “what happened” narrative and a list of “lessons learned.” But while this is a limitation in the inspector general approach, it does not justify a criminal prosecutor, in what is now a criminal investigation, poring over every decision, document, communication and the like that had any relationship to the Trump campaign investigation, the intelligence community’s assessment of Russian motives and the controversies related to the presidential transition.
To be sure, we do not know the scope of Durham’s criminal investigation or whether and how he is using coercive prosecutorial tools. The reporting suggests that the criminal side of the probe has been quiet. It remains unclear whether a grand jury has been convened or, if so, how it has been used. But as recently as May, Barr spoke about the department’s “concern over criminality” in connection with matters that Durham was investigating. Having a prosecutor under the rubric of a criminal investigation diving so deeply into these events for an ex post assessment is a menacing and invariably distorting approach.
It is also an approach that is not designed to produce legitimate outcomes. There are obvious dangers in one administration using the prosecutorial process to examine a counterintelligence and related investigation conducted by a prior administration. Those dangers were exacerbated enormously by the fact that the investigation from the outset focused on individuals and processes that the president had virulently and repeatedly criticized and insisted had engaged in criminal behavior. Durham began this process as a credible figure, even if one not fully qualified for the task as it developed. But his investigation was burdened at the outset with the appearance of using law enforcement tools to carry the president’s water and harass his enemies. And it grew much more heavily politicized due to the actions of the attorney general.
2. Barr’s Role
No contemporary attorney general has, like Barr in the Durham investigation, offered such extended, opinionated, factually unsupported and damning public commentary, naming names and drawing conclusions, about an ongoing investigation that is at least in part a criminal investigation.
Barr’s commentary on the Durham investigation violates several Justice Department rules and norms. The department’s media contactspolicy, which applies to “all DOJ personnel,” prohibits “respon[ses] to questions about the existence of an ongoing investigation or comment[s] on its nature or progress before charges are publicly filed.” None of the exceptions, such as for public safety, apply to the Durham investigation. Departmentregulations also prohibit information disclosure “relating to the circumstances of an … investigation [that] would be highly prejudicial or where the release thereof would serve no law enforcement function, such information should not be made public.” It is hard to see the law enforcement function of Barr’s public commentary.
Barr knows all this. He knows what he is doing is contrary to the rules and traditions of the Justice Department. He knows he is doing reputational harm to people nominally under investigation. He must know that the way he is comporting himself does damage to the department and will make whatever Durham finds more contestable than it otherwise would have been. In short, Barr has acted in ways that foreseeably politicize and damage the investigation that he initiated and has devoted so much time to. The question is: Why?
One possibility is that the evidence Durham has uncovered is objectively so damning that Barr’s commentary cannot delegitimize it. Perhaps, but we doubt it. No matter what problems Durham finds, assuming he finds some, they will be tainted due to the combined behavior of the president (who might not know better and who cannot control himself) and the attorney general (who does know better and can control himself but has chosen not to). If Barr and Durham have an October (or earlier) surprise, Barr’s actions now are diminishing its impact.
Another possibility is that Barr’s judgment is distorted by zeal. He has made clear that he thinks the people who investigated the Trump campaign and transition team were engaged in illegitimate efforts to reverse the outcome of the election. Perhaps he thinks that what happened was so bad, and that the department’s rules and processes were so abused, that he is justified in publicly damning and injuring the participants no matter what. Two wrongs make a right, perhaps, or the ends justify the means. Again, this logic makes little sense, for Barr is only hurting the case he is trying to build. And, if Trump loses in November, Barr is acting in ways that will invite an investigation of the Barr/Durham investigation of the Trump campaign investigation.
A third possibility is that Barr is an out and out partisan hack—a Sean Hannity equivalent operating from the Fifth Floor of the Justice Department to try to fire up the president’s base or give the president other short-term political advantages. This widely held view is difficult to square with Barr’s reputation for probity and establishment credentials, and with his recent description of the prosecution of Trump friend Roger Stone as “righteous,” but it is consistent with other aspects of his behavior and the Department’s (for example, the announcement of the Bash probe of the Flynn unmasking on the Hannity show).
When Durham announces the results of his investigation we will surely have a better sense about which (or which combination) of these three possibilities, or another one, is correct.
I’m pretty sure it’s a combination of Fox News brainrot, unitary executive zeal and partisan hackishness, mostly the latter. He is the most openly political AG in history and that’s saying something. (John Mitchell actually went to jail for this kind of thing but we lived in a different world then.)
The background detail at the link is fascinating if you are interested in going into the weeds on this issue. It’s stunning to think that they actually decided to open a criminal investigation. But of course, that’s what Trump wanted and Barr was clearly eager to deliver it for him.
If you want to see how Trump’s rhetoric has tracked the trajectory of the pandemic, this tells the tale
That says it all.