TPM’s David Kurtz has some bracing thoughts about the now thoroughly corrupted DOJ. I felt it fully yesterday when I watched the press conferences about the Dallas shooter and realized that I simply had no faith in what the FBI and DOJ was saying about it. That’s frightening because while it’s always good to maintain skepticism about law enforcement I don’t think I’ve ever just assumed they were operating out of purely partisan motives before. I do now and for very good reason.
Anyway, Kurtz makes an important observation about all this:
The traditional journalistic practices for covering criminal investigations and prosecutions are not up to the task of dealing squarely with a president hijacking the Justice Department and using it to, variously, punish his political foes, reward his allies, and cover up his own corruption and that of those around him…
The key thing to remember is that we’re already well beyond the event horizon in the corruption of the Justice Department. If federal judges, having dispensed with the presumption of regularity in the functioning of the government, no longer give the Justice Department the benefit of the doubt in court, then we shouldn’t either.
The implications of that shift are enormous, but too many editors and producers are not fully grappling with them yet.
I think we all know why, starting with the clown show that is the FBI director. And the news media is inadvertently helping them:
The incremental drip-by-drip news coverage of criminal cases, especially in public corruption cases — a highly competitive news environment that rewards the best access and quickest trigger fingers — now does a public disservice. Continuing to cover bogus prosecutions in the traditional ways gives a veneer of legitimacy to what should be framed instead as illegitimate retribution, abuse of power, and public corruption in its own right.
If for days, weeks, and months in advance of charges being brought, news outlets allow themselves to be used to parcel out each investigative development and procedural step in a politicized prosecution, then they’re letting themselves be co-opted by the bad faith actors in service of smearing the putative target. If the average news consumer is seeing the same old headlines they’ve always seen in the run-up to an indictment, how are they to process it as anything other than a normal prosecution?
When prosecutions are driven by naked political considerations, as they are in the Trump DOJ, then every morsel of information is at risk of being part of the underlying propaganda effort to frame the target as a villain, to tar them as criminal, and to exact maximum extra-judicial punishment in the court of public opinion. Editors and producers had a chance to learn these lessons from, among other examples, the Trump I prosecutions of Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko, who were ultimately acquitted, and the corrupt pardons of those legitimately convicted in the Russia investigation. Distressingly, the lessons didn’t stick.
Kurtz uses the example of John Bolton pointing out that we’ve known he was a Trump target for retribution for a very long time. Kurtz wonders how this case should be covered if it’s determined that Bolton did have some classified documents even in light of the fact that we know he was fingered for being a Trump critic.
The answer can’t be to ignore court proceedings entirely. Those proceedings, more than anything else, may reveal the corrupt nature of the prosecution. And yet, the advantage (as it always has) still runs toward the government in these scenarios. Court filings unsealed this week showed the inventory of things that the FBI recovered from Bolton’s home and office. Among them, allegedly, were documents with classification markings.
You can cover the Bolton case like you might have the Sandy Berger case, another national security adviser involved in unauthorized retention of national security documents. But you would, of course, be mostly missing the point. Or you could cover the Bolton prosecution as corrupt, as it certainly is. Or you could attempt to cover it as both, not an easy choice given the inherent tensions in the framing, the confusion it could create in readers, and the fact that actual wrongdoing by the target doesn’t justify a corrupt predicate to the investigation.
(Bolton’s lawyer said that these documents were very old and had been declassified long ago, by the way.)
He doesn’t have any answers and God knows that I don’t. I think this is the best we can do for the moment but we’d better figure it out:
I hate to urge something as anodyne as greater awareness of the inadequacies of the old way of covering criminal cases, but for now it’s a start. And perhaps it’s less about amorphous awareness and more about basic humility. We’re up against a terrifyingly corrupt president abetted by a deeply compromised Supreme Court. It’s going to take new tools and different applications of the old tools to confront the threat we face. No shame in that.
Not only is there no shame — there is tremendous honor in trying to tell the truth about what’s going on and putting it in context for the American people. I thought that’s what journalism was supposed to be.