88 search results for "smoke there's fire"

I have been writing this for so long now that I’m worn out from it. The Republican game has been the same for a very long time now: gin up phony scandals, throw it all at the wall until people think there must be a fire because they’re choking on all the smoke. The confusion, chaos and resultant exhaustion are the point.

But it’s good to see people who are important saying the same thing. If people don’t recognize what they’re up against, it will never change.

This piece by Ann Applebaum in The Atlantic is getting a lot of response. She debunks one particular byzantine scandal being churned up in the right wing mediverse at the moment about which she has some personal knowledge. And offers this analysis:

… In releasing the 26,000 emails, Tyrmand and his collaborator, the Breitbart News contributor Peter Schweizer, are not bringing forth any evidence of actual lawbreaking, or an actual security threat, by either Hunter or Joe Biden. They are instead creating a miasma, an atmosphere, a foggy world in which misdeeds might have taken place, and in which corruption might have happened. They are also providing the raw material from which more elaborate stories can be constructed. The otherwise incomprehensible reference in last night’s debate to “the mayor of Moscow’s wife,” from whom Joe Biden somehow got rich, was an excellent example of how this works. A name surfaces in a large collection of data; it is detached from its context; it is then used to make an insinuation or accusation that cannot be proved; it is then forgotten, unless it gains some traction, in which case it is repeated again.

As Americans learned during the 2016 presidential campaign, an email dump is an ideal source for this kind of raw material, not least because email communications are so often informal. When people speak or write to one another privately, they make jokes, they test out ideas, they use language they would not use in public. This does not necessarily make them duplicitous: All of us speak differently depending on whether we are talking to our friends, our families, or a large auditorium filled with strangers. In many languages, these different kinds of conversations require distinct forms of grammar.

But just as the misuse of grammar can make someone sound illiterate, a note meant for one person’s eyes can look jarringly out of place when it appears in, say, a newspaper. The change of context alters not just the weight of what was written, but the meaning. This is what happened in 2016 to the emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee by Russian intelligence and released by WikiLeaks. Those messages contained no actual scandals either—only the miasma of scandal. And that was all that mattered. But her emails was an effective phrase precisely because it was so amorphous. It was an allusion to a whole world of unnamed, unknown, and, as it turned out, fictional horrors.

Time and experience have taught many who work in the media to understand all of this better. In 2016, American journalists weren’t yet attuned to the many ways in which masses of irrelevant, hacked material could be used to waste their time. Now they are. That’s why relatively few people, other than Tyrmand (who must have a lot of time on his hands, considering how much of it he has wasted on me), have devoted much effort to the study of Bevan Cooney’s Gmail account or the material supposedly found on the waterlogged laptop. Yet these stories, which have miraculously appeared within a few days of each other, nevertheless have a purpose.

To begin with, these revelations are clearly timed to give the president something to talk about, other than the coronavirus, over the last two weeks of an ugly election campaign. By making wild references to the characters who have emerged in emails and texts, Trump hopes to undermine Joe Biden’s most important electoral asset: the impression, shared by even those who don’t like the former vice president, that he is a fundamentally decent person.

They will continue to serve a function after the election as well. If Biden wins, Foxworld will need some way to keep its audience focused on something other than the Cabinet he appoints, the new legislation he passes, and all the other events, decisions, and changes that used to constitute “news.” Instead of all that real-life stuff—laws and regulations, statistics and investigations, debates about the economy and health care—the leading figures of the right-wing conspiracy bubble will, over the next months and years, dip into the email caches to keep their followers focused on an alternate reality in which Joe Biden is a secret oligarch, his son is an important figure in the Chinese mafia, and LOL nothing matters. Just as you need to know the backstories of the stars in the DC Comics universe in order to understand the nuances of a Batman movie, six months from now you might also need to know all about Cooney and Archer and the wife of the mayor of Moscow if you want to understand Ingraham’s monologues. The extraordinary and completely unsupported insinuation, made by Wisconsin’s Republican senator, Ron Johnson, that child pornography was found on Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop also looks like an unsubtle attempt to persuade the followers of the QAnon cult to fold this story into their dreamworld as well.

As my colleague Franklin Foer has written, the email drops may also be a kind of psy-op, a cruel provocation designed to bully Joe Biden by hitting him in his weakest spot. Having lost a young daughter to a car accident and an adult son, Beau, to brain cancer, the senior Biden is known to be particularly sensitive about Hunter, his only living son. Voters got a glimpse of the pain he feels during the first debate, when Biden responded to Trump’s false declaration that Hunter had been dishonorably discharged from the military: “My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem,” he said. “He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son.”

In that instance, Biden recovered. Next time, he might not. By bringing up Hunter’s name over and over again, the Trump campaign may hope to make Biden emotional, or make him stumble, just as it hopes to provoke his stutter, or at least a gaffe.

By talking about Hunter Biden, the Trump family, especially the Trump children, also hopes to deflect attention from their own greatest weakness, namely the amoral, kleptocratic nepotism that they embody like no family ever before in American history. Their use of this tactic is not remotely subtle. Last summer, Donald Trump Jr. was in Indonesia to promote two Trump-branded properties; Eric Trump has traveled to Uruguay; Donald Trump himself has stayed at his own properties more than 500 times as president, using his presence as a form of advertising. And yet, days after authorities approved plans for a new Trump golf course in Scotland, Eric Trump took to Twitter to declare that “when my father became president we stepped out of all international business.” Only in the fantastical world of Fox can anyone hear that statement and not laugh out loud.

Last but not least, this kind of story also serves to provide employment, or at least activity, for rudderless, aimless, angry people such as Tyrmand. […]

This trajectory is not unusual. Laura Ingraham herself has followed the well-trod path by which acolytes of Reaganism become accessories to ratfucking. So has Tyrmand’s colleague Schweizer. He co-edited a book, published in 1988, called Grinning With the Gipper: The Wit, Wisdom, and Wisecracks of Ronald Reagan; later, he wrote a book with former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. Now he is focused on Cooney, Archer, and the other characters in the Foxworld universe.

None of them can win using ideas anymore, because they don’t have any. All they can do is seek attention: gesticulate, wave their arms in the air, shout at the crowd, invent things, and try to attract the fame and attention they feel they deserve, even though they can no longer explain why they deserve it. As the gap widens further between the reality lived by most of the public and the “reality” presented by people such as Ingraham and Tyrmand on Fox News, they will need to generate even more noise and even more activity if they are to keep their audience’s attention. This fantasyland is now the business model of Fox and Breitbart, and it will be with us for a long time, whatever happens on November 3.

Yes, this is true and it’s been true for avery long time. If I may just share a little bit of something I wrote back in 2007, taking the mainstream media to taks for its complicity. It’s just one of many on the same theme I’ve been flogging for the last two decades. This. Is. Not. New:

These are patented Whitewater-style “smell test” stories. They are based on complicated details that make the casual reader’s eyes glaze over and about which the subject has to issue long confusing explanations in return. They feature colorful and unsavory political characters in some way. They often happened in the past and they tend to be written in such a way as to say that even if they aren’t illegal they “look bad.” The underlying theme is hypocrisy because the subjects are portrayed as making a dishonest buck while pretending to represent the average working man. Oh, and they always feature a Democrat. Republicans are not subject to such scrutiny because a craven, opportunistic Republican isn’t “news.” (Neat trick huh?)

No single story will bring down a candidate because they have no substance to them. It’s the combined effect they are looking for to build a sense overall sleaziness. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” right?

Will things change this time? Finally?

Hope springs eternal …

The “where there’s smoke there’s fire” gambit

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

When President Trump’s new attorney general, William Barr, announced at his first congressional hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he believed “spying” on Trump’s 2016 campaign “had occurred,” Democrats on the committee and many in the press seemed to be shocked. In fact, Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, asked Barr if he’d like to use another word, suggesting that the use of such an explosive term would “cause everyone in the cable news ecosystem to freak out.” Barr declined and declared that he would be taking a look at the genesis of the investigation, saying, “I just want to satisfy myself that there were no abuse of law enforcement or intelligence powers.”

Since Trump’s incessant whining and complaining about the investigation is so common that people no longer take it very seriously, and only the most diehard right-wingers watch Fox News, a lot of people were taken aback by Barr’s use of the word “spying.” I don’t think they realized what this strategy of “investigating the investigators” really amounts to. Neither did they fully recognize that Barr was not acting in good faith but rather as a hardcore right-wing partisan.

In retrospect, that should have been obvious from the beginning, and not just because Barr sent a memo to the White House (long before he was officially being considered as attorney general) explaining that the president cannot be subject to obstruction of justice laws. I’m referring to the fact that in Barr’s previous tenure as attorney general, under George H.W. Bush, he tasked the U.S. attorney in Arkansas with digging up Whitewater dirt on then-candidate Bill Clinton during the 1992 presidential campaign.

As the legendary Gene Lyons noted in the Arkansas Times back in 2016, that U.S. attorney knew that the story was bunk as well as inappropriate and refused to proceed, telling Barr he would not be a party to such an overtly political act, and pointing out that “even media questions about such an investigation … all too often publicly purport to legitimize what can’t be proven.“ Indeed they do.

That investigation didn’t proceed under Barr, but he’d set the wheels in motion for a series of pseudo-investigations that continued through all eight years of the Clinton administration. And what that U.S. attorney said was actually the point of the whole exercise. Republicans knew it didn’t matter if the investigations of the president were based upon serious suspicion of illegal activity. It was the narrative that mattered. They didn’t need to have a serious scandal like Watergate or Iran-Contra. They could the same model to leverage and pump up trivial or mundane events into major stories.

There were endless congressional hearings by the Republican majority in both houses of Congress and multiple independent counsels, all creating hysterical headlines which finally culminated in the Lewinsky affair and Clinton’s impeachment. It was a right-wing production all the way. And it was highly effective. Clinton survived but the Republicans learned this was a useful way to keep their base engaged, particularly when the driver of right-wing politics during the 1990s, talk radio, was joined by the new powerhouse, Fox News.

Barack Obama was a harder nut to crack, but Republicans did their best. When the GOP took over the Congress in 2010 it immediately trumped up the so-called IRS scandal, alleging that the agency was targeting Tea Party groups for tax audits. There was also “Fast and Furious” about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms losing track of some guns, one of which ended up killing a federal officer. (The Second Amendment absolutists who refuse even to allow the government to track the guns of suspected terrorists never saw the irony in their hysteria about these particular guns falling into the wrong hands.)

And then there was Benghazi. That event, although tragic, was barely a blip in the history of U.S. foreign policy mishaps. But it spawned 10 investigations, six of those by Republican-controlled House committees and the others by the FBI, the State Department Inspector General and the Senate Intelligence Committee. In one of the most revealing comments ever made by a Republican official, then-House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., actually admitted that the reason they did it was purely political.

Benghazi didn’t really hurt Hillary Clinton but it pointed the way toward the notorious “email scandal” that dominated the campaign — largely due to the media’s longstanding obsession with Clinton scandals going all the way back to those heady days of Whitewater. We all know the result of that.

When Donald Trump started his term facing the most serious presidential scandal in history, however, Republicans had a problem. It was the FBI, the most revered police agency in the country, that had uncovered it, which made their usual character assassination a little bit risky. As we discovered, that didn’t stop them. They went after the FBI as if the whole bureau was full of Clintons, not sparing even a thought for what conservatives had always held out as a sacred institution. For two years the president, his Fox News supporters and Republican allies in Congress built the “deep state” conspiracy theory of the Russia investigation, which holds that the FBI was out to get Donald Trump during the campaign, and when he heroically succeeded despite it all, they set out to overthrow him in an illegal coup. (One has to wonder why, if that was so, the conspirators didn’t make sure their Russia evidence got out during the campaign. Republicans don’t seem to see that big hole in their story.)

Now that Republicans have a congenial attorney general, they are using the power of the Department of Justice against itself. In addition to the two ongoing probes into the origins of the Russia case — along with the Mueller report, which goes into these questions in great depth — Barr has announced yet another “investigation into the investigation,” as well as some kind of cross-agency inquiry with the CIA and the director of national intelligence. It’s a wonder the Department of Justice will have time to do anything else.

The effect of this isn’t necessarily to put FBI officials in jail, although that’s not out of the question. The point is to mainstream the counter-narrative. Here’s a good example of how that works:

GOP/FedSoc ex prosecutor tells MSNBC there’s a “lot of smoke” about potential misconduct in the Russia probe, fails to say multiple investigations that have already taken place. pic.twitter.com/yqklIKpdJy

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) May 14, 2019

Beyond the public relations there are serious issues at stake with all this, as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte points out in this analysis of Barr’s latest moves. And there can be no doubt about the chilling effect these investigations will have on FBI and intelligence officials throughout the government. They will think hard before they take another close look at Donald Trump’s crimes going forward.

On a political level, Republicans are running a familiar game which nobody should toss off as mere partisan warfare. It’s a crucial aspect of Trump’s re-election strategy. If they can engage the mainstream media and throw everything they have at it, they may succeed at confusing the public and convincing them that all this smoke they’re blowing means there must be a fire.

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More smoke grenades

It’s time to revisit some old posts about a tactic used by the right now being deployed against the supposed “Biden crime family.” It is a variety of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks (All the president’s lawyers; 9/7/22):

It is a time-tested tactic on the right. Practiced and perfected. Gin up fake controversy over anything and everything. From tan suits to sloppy salutes. From Benghazi to emails. Pimp it like hell until the press can’t stop itself from reporting the controversy. Rush Limbaugh built a career on serving up a daily dose of outrage to his listeners until they would go into withdrawal if it stopped. I’ve described the decades-long, Republican phony effort to convince the public there is massive voter fraud as them lobbing smoke bombs into newsrooms. By the time the smoke clears and we discover, yet again, there was never a fire, all the public remembers is they saw smoke and heard someone yelling, “Fire!” Lather, rinse, repeat.

Digby calls it the “where there’s smoke there’s fire” gambit.

From Media Matters last week:

Fox News host Sean Hannity got a less-than-emphatic answer when he flat-out asked House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer if he will be able to prove allegations that President Joe Biden is guilty of participating in a bribery scheme.

Former Hunter Biden business partner Devon Archer testified for Congress behind closed doors Monday, and Democratic New York Congressman and House Oversight Committee member Rep. Dan Goldman has been outspoken in making the case that the testimony backs up the president, as has the Biden White House.

Here’s that exchange (highlighted):

SEAN HANNITY: I tell you, and this is why the Republicans have one half of one house. The government, one branch of government is so critical because these investors would all get covered up. And both of you put your neck on the line to get to the truth. And we went a long way today. And this. Will you both a, answer yes or no? Do you believe that this is now officially the Joe Biden bribery allegation? And do you believe that you will be able to prove that? Jim Comer.

REP. COMER: I sure hope so. And I do believe that there’s a lot of smoke. And where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Except, of course, when it’s the GOP just lobbing smoke bombs into newsrooms to create that impression (Smoke bombers; 5/16/21):

With all that smoke, casual viewers conclude there must be a fire. And for smoke bombers, the truth is beside the point. The allegations land on Page 1 and on the news at six. Investigation findings showing no fraud occured wind up on page six.

Regarding the truth being beside the point, Laura Ingraham told viewers just that last week while tossing out more unsupported innuendo.

Where readers are most familiar with the “where there’s smoke there’s fire” gambit is regarding rumors of widespread “voter fraud” (Scrutiny Hooligans; GOP Fraud Hunt: A Lack of Electoral Confidence; 4/7/14):

Gaming election results through precision gerrymandering and repressive voting laws aimed at the poor and minorities is political Viagra® for the flagging demographic potency of the Republican base. Voter data matching exercises are not meant to uncover crimes, punish criminals, or even amass credible evidence. They are the pretext for a party suffering a lack of electoral confidence to throw smoke bombs into newsrooms and yell, “Voter fraud!” By the time the smoke clears and no evidence is found — again — of a “massive” problem, all viewers remember is that they saw smoke and heard cries of fraud. And where there’s smoke there must be a fire, right?

Thus spreads unsubstantiated rumors that undermine voter confidence in elections and build public support for tighter controls on voting that serve only to make it harder, you know, for those people to vote.

Smell the scandal. Smells like smoke!

by digby

Brian Beutler points out one of the defining characteristics of a bullshit right wing scandal:

No less a figure than John Boehner (who’s not a scientist) says the IRS’ version of events—that the emails were lost in a hard-drive crash and the backups wiped off the servers after six months, per the agency’s old protocol—”doesn’t pass the straight-face test.”

But here’s the thing nobody covering the latest incarnation of the IRS feeding frenzy can bring themselves to say clearly: It is unconnected to the “scandal” that gave rise to the feeding frenzy in the first place. And that reflects the basic illogic underlying the right’s embrace scandal politics. Republicans are no longer investigating allegations. They’re assuming the conclusion that a scandal is afoot, and working backwards to prove it.

Actually, this is a standard “smell test” scandal (also known as “where there’s smoke there’s fire”) wherein a coincidence or innocent explanation is used as proof that something nefarious must have happened because it’s “too good to be true.” Logic, facts, even simple chronology are rarely relevant. The hysteria takes over and it all becomes a vague melange of suspicion and innuendo until most people just assume something must have happened or so many people wouldn’t be talking about it.

And the press often eagerly plays along because it’s just so juicy.

Here’s my favorite explanation of how this works in the press from New York Times in 1994 called “Is the Press Being Too Hard On the Clintons — or on Itself?”

On balance, Whitewater looks like the garden-variety political scandal that no President since Roosevelt has escaped during his tenure, save John F. Kennedy, who died in office, and Gerald Ford, who served but a year. The primary issues dogging Mr. Clinton — the hints of political graft, sexual misbehavior, coverup — meet any modern journalist’s smell test. The admonitions that they are old news suggests, improbably, that Robert A. Caro’s juicy revelations about Lyndon Johnson’s rise to power would not be news were Mr. Johnson President today. They would make front-page headlines. L.B.J.’s era, like Harding’s, is an age of innocence passed.

If Whitewater coverage seems excessive it is because the scandal is unfolding in what has become a journalistic hall of mirrors. The explosion of news outlets — from the shrill “Hard Copy” to the ubiquitous CNN — has created a hunger for news, any news, to fill the electronic maw. Stories that are unfit for the breakfast-table press, especially about Mr. Clinton’s private life, now surface in the National Enquirer and its brethren and become the subject of soul-searching analysis by serious journalists. Stories the mainstream press stamp as serious — Mrs. Clinton’s stunning success in cattle futures, for example — become such ready fodder for Leno and Letterman and McLaughlin and Limbaugh that they soon become larger, and more irritating, than life.

“We’re like a too-powerful amplifier, running through old speakers,” said Tom Rosenstiel, the media writer for The Los Angeles Times. “Anything that runs through it comes back with feedback and distortion. There are just too many of us blaring too loud.”

And, there is another plausible explanation for Whitewater’s grate on some ears: Perhaps some columnists support Mr. Clinton’s policies and are offended by the ceaseless accusations. This new crop of analysts is a different breed of journalist, highly valued not for daily reporting but for the ability to express thoughtful opinions in attention-grabbing ways.

Mr. Clinton is not being pilloried with falsehoods. Putting aside White House fury over Newsweek’s report that Mrs. Clinton risked nothing in her $100,000 cattle-trading venture (she risked $1,000), investigative reports on the Clintons by mainstream journalists have by and large been accurate. Most backtracking has come from the White House.

One could argue, of course, that this is just egg beater journalism — froth whipped up by prize-hungry sensationalists. After all, who cares if Mrs. Clinton made a killing in high-risk commodities futures?

But as Mr. Nixon once said about hush money, that would be wrong. “It’s a great story, in part because of the incongruity of Ms. Politics-of-Meaning playing the commodities market, and in part because of the real suspicion that there’s more to it,” said Michael Kinsley, the omnipresent broadcast and print analyst who also calls himself a Clinton sympathizer. “If Barbara Bush had made $100,000 on the commodities market, do you think anyone would argue that it isn’t news?”

You just have to laugh at the sheer volume of self-serving rationalizations in that piece. Has anything changed much since then? Not really. It’s bifurcated into a more partisan press, but truly it’s only a matter of time before one of their “smell test” scandals grabs the attention of ambitious mainstream journalists. (I’m going to guess it’s when Hillary Clinton really takes center stage…)

The good news is that Michael Kinsley is still in there, all these years later, illuminating the bankrupt ethos that drives much of modern establishment journalism. It’s nice to see that some traditions never die.

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Benghazi smoke


by digby

James Warren offered up some good perspective on “Benghazi!” yesterday.  He concluded with this:

Though Stevens was an admired former Lugar staffer, Lugar has neither condoned nor condemned U.S. actions in response to the Benghazi attack. And a former Republican staffer on that committee underscored his own bottom line: “This is not Iran-Contra,” he said, alluding to the bonafide Reagan era scandal in which secret arms sales to Iran were used to fund anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua.

“These were people here in a dangerous position trying to do the best they could,” said the former staffer. “There were probably real communications issues. Rice knew when going on air this all didn’t add up. In retrospect she should have simply said, ‘It simply wasn’t clear what was happening.’ That would have taken care of it.”

Team Obama fumbled. And Republicans saw an opportunity to diminish Obama and Clinton. It was a twofer, with Benghazi serving as a potential real-time version of the nastily effective “Swift Boat” attacks on Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004.

But it’s not having that same impact, and thus it’s folly to think this hurts Clinton’s chances if she chooses to run. Tom Bowen, a shrewd Democratic consultant in Chicago, says, “The idea that one of the most popular secretaries of state to serve this country will be damaged by revisions of ‘talking points’ is foolhardy.”

Yes, four Americans killed in a terrorist attack is nothing to be flip about. But voters by and large understand that the world is a dangerous place — and there are plenty of narratives that fall far short of being deemed Nixonian.

Here’s the thing, though. The right sees these contretemps as vehicles for creating an atmosphere of scandal. And the press, caught up in the daily churn of information, fails to see the forest for the trees every time.  As I’ve mentioned before:

These are patented “smell test” stories. They are based on complicated details that make the casual reader’s eyes glaze over and about which the subject has to issue long confusing explanations in return…  No single story will bring down a candidate because they have no substance to them. It’s the combined effect they are looking for to build a sense overall sleaziness. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire”, right? 

The major media has never copped to their role in the tabloid sideshow that politics in the 90’s became. They have never copped to their part in elevating Bush to the status of demigod and running beside him like a bunch of eunuchs waving palm fronds during the lead-up to the war. Even today we see them pooh-poohing the significance of a federal trial that exposes them for whores to Republican power. 

But it happened and it will happen again. They have learned nothing and feel they have nothing to answer for. Clinton’s spokesman is right when he says “I think that history demonstrates that whoever the nominee is is going to engender opposition from the right, and we will certainly be prepared” but it is only part of the story. All Democrats will also engender reporting from a press corps that persists in seeing politics through the lens of the rightwing narrative that was set forth by Scaife and his various hitmen back in the 1990’s.

It’s reflexive at this point.  They don’t even know they’re doing it.

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Philip Bump did a necessary deep-dive into James Comer’s mendacity about those transcripts. It’s truly astonishing that they are able to get away with this:

One of the arguments offered by attorneys for President Biden’s son Hunter when responding to a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee for a closed-door deposition was that the committee had shown a pattern of cherry-picking what would be presented to the public.

This is unquestionably true. Over and over and over and over and over, committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has made debunked and unsubstantiated public statements that cast the president and/or his son as dishonest or has rushed to release unsubstantiated claims or information that similarly collapse under scrutiny. The first year of his investigation into the Bidens made extremely little progress as a result — except where it matters, in the right-wing media universe.

Clearly, though, this has not gone unnoticed by those enmeshed in Comer’s sprawling investigation. There was that letter from Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell in November. And then, this week, a letter from an attorney for Kevin Morris, a wealthy friend of Hunter Biden who helped pay off the president’s son’s tax liability.

Morris appeared for a closed-door deposition on Thursday. His attorney, Bryan Sullivan, claims in the letter that he asked at the outset that his client’s testimony not be cherry-picked or misrepresented. Instead, he said, he received only a promise that Morris would “be treated fairly.”

“You did not treat Mr. Morris fairly and engaged in your standard practice of partially and inaccurately leaking a witness’s statements,” Morris writes in the letter obtained by The Washington Post. “Not two hours after we left Mr. Morris’ transcribed interview, you issued a press statement with cherry‐picked, out of context and totally misleading descriptions of what Mr. Morris said.”

It is very important to point out that this may simply be Sullivan’s effort to frame the moment as positively as possible for his client. We should not assume that the examples in his letter — which we’ll consider in a moment — are themselves necessarily accurate.

To his point, though, this could be ameliorated by the House Oversight panel releasing a transcript of the testimony. This is not an instantaneous process, certainly; it took three days for the testimony of Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer to be released last year. But there’s also no rush to try to frame Morris’s testimony, no demand to make public what he said. Well, there is one source of demand: the right’s appetite for any morsel of information that seems to implicate the president or his son in wrongdoing. That’s a demand for which Comer offers an endless supply.

There’s something else to consider about Sullivan’s response. Even if it is an attempt to cast his client in a more favorable light by pointing to Comer’s track record of cherry-picking, it reinforces that this cherry-picking is a liability for Comer. That he has this track record of trying to construct as damning a case as possible instead of trying to fairly represent witness testimony as broadly informative about the investigation itself.

Sullivan alleged multiple misrepresentations — again, the transcript can help tell us who is more accurately describing what occurred. Comer’s press release:

-inaccurately described why Morris made the loan to Hunter Biden,

-used scare-quotes around “loan” to suggest that the payment (vetted by attorneys, Sullivan argued) was not a loan at all,

-overstated Morris’s past support for Democratic candidates, andsuggested that this money had somehow provided Morris access to the president.

“Mr. Morris testified that he has only had cursory communications with President Biden at public events like Mr. Biden’s daughter’s wedding,” Sullivan wrote, “and said basic courtesy things as ‘hello’ and ‘how are you’ and President Biden making comments about Mr. Morris’ unkempt hair style that lasted a few minutes.”

The scare-quotes around “loan,” we should note, are probably meant to suggest that Morris didn’t expect to be repaid (though, per Sullivan, Morris testified under oath that he did). It’s also a word that has gained new importance for Comer in the past few months.

[…]

We may perhaps see if this is another example of Comer cherry-picking or framing claims that help his case or if, instead, it’s an example of how his doing so frequently in the past allows critics to disparage how he’s conducting the probe.

Neither is what one might seek in an objective investigator.

You can read the whole thing at the gift link above. It’s important to understand what they are doing but most of the media doesn’t bother to spell it out. It all becomes “where there’s smoke there’s fire” to many in the public. It destroys people and it needs to be batted back when we get the opportunity.

It’s a mess and it’s getting messier

It appears that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s honeymoon is coming to an early conclusion. The Freedom Caucus is hopping mad that he allowed the Defense Authorization Bill to pass with Democratic votes, a big no-no signifying that the bill was obviously much too good. According to Puck’s Tara Palmieri, they accused Johnson of going behind their backs and using a “page ripped from the Boehner playbook” referring to the former speaker who, like Kevin McCarthy, was also chased out of the job for passing bills with Democrats.

Palmieri reports that a senior GOP aide told her that “people are turning on Mike fast; he won’t make a decision” because he wouldn’t choose between two competing bills. And apparently it has finally occurred to them that his lack of experience and expertise might be a problem, quoting the same aide saying, “his operation is minor league compared to Kevin’s team. At least they knew what they were doing and how the place ran. Mike’s team has no idea what they’re doing, and it’s pissing people off. We used to be able to get answers from people.” Who could have seen that coming?

It’s clear from his record that Johnson would love nothing more than to stand by their side and throw tantrums but his job as Speaker is coming into conflict with his ideology as a MAGA warrior and it’s probably not going to end well for him.

He has certainly gone out of his way to show the hardliners that he’s one of them. He immediately made the required pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and then enthusiastically delivered his endorsement making it clear that he is still MAGA all the way. And despite just a few weeks ago suggesting that impeachment was no longer necessary since President Biden’s polls numbers are weak (therefore admitting that the whole thing is a partisan sham) he delivered for Trump and the MAGA faithful on their biggest priority this week. He brought the vote to formalize the inquiry to the floor and persuaded the so-called moderates in the party to go along. You’d think that would have appeased the Freedom caucus but let that be a lesson to him: that is simply not possible.

All the usual suspects have been making the rounds since the vote suggesting that the party line vote (which Johnson once insisted could destroy the Republic) shows that they have the goods. But once again, they are lying. They have still produced not one sliver of evidence that Joe Biden did any of the things they are implying he did with their histrionic innuendo about “the Biden Crime Family.”

Interestingly, there is one member of the House who may have actually done the things he’s accusing Biden of doing. A few weeks ago Roger Sollenberger of the Daily Beast broke a story about some shady dealings by House Oversight Chair James Comer that resembles some of the crimes he’s accusing Biden of committing. In a new report the AP unearthed new details and now it’s now pretty clear that his crusade is a clear example of projection.

Comer has been yammering about “the Biden family” shell companies, which Joe Biden had nothing to do with and were actually completely legitimate companies with real purposes, for months. He even once told Fox Business, “nobody creates shell companies.”

Actually, some people do. In fact, Comer himself has a shell company which grew from $50,000 and $100,000 at the time of purchase to between $500,001 and $1 million today. Evidently, he’s conveniently forgotten to report the assets within it which goes against House rules which require members to disclose assets held by companies worth more than $1,000. Oh, and this shell company was formed from a transfer of a piece of land co-owned with one of his major campaign donors and nobody can figure out what the purpose of it was or why he has gone to such lengths to obscure it.

When asked about this, he keeps saying that the questioner is “financially illiterate” which is hilarious considering the total illiteracy of his charges against Joe Biden. If you don’t believe that, I highly recommend this thorough fact check by the Washington Post’s Philip Bump or this one by Factcheck.org. It would be sad if it wasn’t so outrageous.

But the point of all this is to dirty up Joe Biden as corrupt to give some red meat to the Trump followers and make the rest of the country assume “where there’s smoke there’s fire” which is something they’ve been successful at doing against their enemies for decades. I’m sure I don’t have to remind people about Whitewater which bears some similarities with this current bogus scandal in both its lack of evidence or its relevance to the current presidency. The memory of Benghazi and “But Her Emails” against Hillary Clinton are still fresh. The Birther scandal enraptured the right wingers throughout the Obama presidency and launched Donald Trump’s political career.

This is what they do. And more often than not, when you examine these scandals closely you’ll find that it’s the Republicans doing the accusing who are actually guilty of the crimes. James Comer’s flagrant hypocrisy is just par for the course.

Donald Trump wants revenge for his two impeachments and if there was time he would demand that they impeach Biden three times just so he’d have one more than him on his record. And because they’ve pounded this story on right wing media for years now, the MAGA base is slavering over the prospect of taking down the president. It has nothing to do with any real crimes or evidence or anything else that would justify an impeachment.

Those Representatives from swing districts who voted to open the inquiry this week may believe this was essentially a free vote and hope that they won’t be asked to vote for an actual impeachment but I think they are deluding themselves. The constitutional standard for impeachment is “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” but in practice, as the late president Gerald Ford put it, “an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

At this moment in history, Donald Trump, James Comer and Jim Jordan will be deciding what it is and it’s clear that their standard is literally nothing. They’ll do it because they can. That’s the only reason they need.

If you’d like to support Hullabaloo for another year, you can do so below or use the snail mail address on the left. Happy Hollandaise, everyone!

They just can’t help themselves

It’s clear that the Republicans need to lose some more elections before they sober up:

The Republican majority in the House is planning to launch full-throated investigations into Hunter Biden and other political bugbears when the new Congress convenes in January, prompting Democrats on the other side of the Capitol to respond with the powers of their Senate majority.

[…]

Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine told The Bulwark Senate Democrats could pick up the slack where these investigations have fallen off in the House. Whether they will need to do so depends on which route Republicans take over the next two years—a serious one, or a frivolous detour.

“We may do some of our own work here to tell a more accurate story—that would depend on what the investigation is,” he said. “But if the House wants to go from a legislative body into a body that’s just trying to get headlines on weird investigations, they may feel like at the end of the day they can pat themselves on the back because they got on a cable news TV show. But I don’t think they’re going to be impressing their voters.”

Kaine added that the Democrats’ best course of action will be to ignore hyper-political investigations that come out of the House committees.

“I think if we do the work of a legislative body and produce some results, good confirmations, continue to produce bipartisan bills as we have, and the House is known for wacky investigations that aren’t really top of mind to anybody but an extreme view, that will show a real contrast between who the two parties are in ways that will not necessarily be harmful to us,” he said.

“I think if they spend the next year talking about Hunter Biden instead of health care, housing, and gun violence, we won’t have to do much,” Murphy said. “They may dig their own grave.”

“It’s a little hard in a 50-50 Senate” to increase the chamber’s oversight, Murphy said. “But we’ll do oversight when it’s policy related, but we’re not going to engage in witch hunts.”

However, Republicans appear to be all in on making the House agenda about Hunter Biden, examining whether arrested January 6th rioters have been treated unfairly by the Justice Department, and more.

“Protecting the president’s son who has committed crimes with Americans’ tax dollars is waste,” said the next House oversight committee chair, James Comer, in the Republicans’ first press conference after securing the House majority.

“Rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse will be the primary goal of a Republican House Oversight Committee,” Comer added. “As such, this investigation is a top priority.”

Even Rep. Dan Newhouse, one of just two Republicans in the House to survive his primary and win re-election after voting to impeach Donald Trump, told The Bulwark investigations into Hunter Biden are warranted in the new Congress.

“I think if the whole Biden family issue has some connection to the president, there may be a thread there that should be followed,” he said. “Some things I’ve heard and read appear that that may be the case. It makes sense I guess.”

Regarding the alleged Justice Department mistreatment of January 6th protesters, Newhouse added the issue should be examined for transparency’s sake but conceded he is unsure there is any “evidence of some wrongdoing.”

Let’s make sure we don’t get too comfortable with that Tim…

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy echoed Kaine, telling The Bulwark spending too much legislative time on red meat for the party base will ultimately doom Republicans at the ballot box.

“I think if they spend the next year talking about Hunter Biden instead of health care, housing, and gun violence, we won’t have to do much,” Murphy said. “They may dig their own grave.”

“It’s a little hard in a 50-50 Senate” to increase the chamber’s oversight, Murphy said. “But we’ll do oversight when it’s policy related, but we’re not going to engage in witch hunts.”

However, Republicans appear to be all in on making the House agenda about Hunter Biden, examining whether arrested January 6th rioters have been treated unfairly by the Justice Department, and more.

“Protecting the president’s son who has committed crimes with Americans’ tax dollars is waste,” said the next House oversight committee chair, James Comer, in the Republicans’ first press conference after securing the House majority.

“Rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse will be the primary goal of a Republican House Oversight Committee,” Comer added. “As such, this investigation is a top priority.”

Even Rep. Dan Newhouse, one of just two Republicans in the House to survive his primary and win re-election after voting to impeach Donald Trump, told The Bulwark investigations into Hunter Biden are warranted in the new Congress.

“I think if the whole Biden family issue has some connection to the president, there may be a thread there that should be followed,” he said. “Some things I’ve heard and read appear that that may be the case. It makes sense I guess.”

Regarding the alleged Justice Department mistreatment of January 6th protesters, Newhouse added the issue should be examined for transparency’s sake but conceded he is unsure there is any “evidence of some wrongdoing.”

The Democrats have 51-49 in the Senate now and they should be prepared to use their power to offer the truth if these Republicans go as insane as it appears they are about to do. I think it’s a mistake to just assume the House members will make such fools of themselves that nobody will believe them.

The media is likely to be disseminating all their garbage to a wide audience and there must be an official response from the other body. Otherwise the right will get away (again) with the “where there’s smoke there’s fire” tactics. When people hear it in the NY Times and it’s only refuted by some anonymous Democratic Senator, even some non-QAnon types will start to think there’s something to it. They must fight this disinformation with truth or we’re going to have a problem.

Well, ok then….

Former President Trump on Thursday said he “can’t imagine being indicted” over his handling of classified documents or a scheme to put forward alternate electors after the 2020 election, but that if he were, it would not deter him from a possible White House run in 2024.

“I can’t imagine being indicted. I’ve done nothing wrong,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.

“I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it,” Trump added. “And as you know, if a thing like that happened, I would have no prohibition against running. You know that.”

Trump in the interview claimed he had no involvement in a plot to put forward alternate electors in Georgia that would have tipped the state for him despite President Biden winning by thousands of votes, though he insisted the concept was “very common.”

Georgia prosecutors have been investigating the scheme and interviewing Trump associates like Rudy Giuliani in the matter.

The former president also repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in his handling of classified documents after the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago estate last month. The agency conducted the search months after it found dozens of classified documents at the residence and unsuccessfully tried to get the materials back from Trump.

Trump reasserted his claim that he had declassified all of the documents he kept at his home more than a year after leaving the White House, though experts have disputed he could do so without going through a more formal process and Trump’s legal team has not argued in court that he declassified the materials.

The former president repeatedly said he does not believe the American public will accept him being indicted, warning there would be “problems” if he were.

Hewitt, noting some would interpret his comments as inciting violence, asked what kind of problems he was referring to, though Trump did not specify.

“That’s not inciting, I’m just saying what my opinion is,” Trump said. “I don’t think the people of this country would stand for it.”

I wonder if the right’s patented “where there’s smoke there’s fire” strategy will ever blow back on them when it comes to Trump? I know they believe they are the most persecuted people on earth and Trump is their Jesus, but at some point don’t they have to ask,”why is this guy always saying ‘I did nothing wrong'”? “Why is there always something with him?”

Yes, I know that most of these people are brainwashed. But surely a few have to hear this whining about how unfairly he’s being treated and wonder, right? No?

Yeah, you’re right….

Every time Trump gets away with it, his people love him more

When the FBI’s search warrant was served on Donald Trump’s beach club in early August, I don’t think anyone could have guessed that there would be such a mountain of classified material among the boxes of government documents he stole from the government when he flounced out of town, pouting like a 4-year-old, on Inauguration Day 2021. But the hair on the back of the neck stood up when we later learned that they were looking for nuclear intelligence documents.

Trump pooh-poohed the report, of course, posting on his social media site, “nuclear weapons issue is a Hoax, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was a Hoax, two Impeachments were a Hoax, the Mueller investigation was a Hoax, and much more. Same sleazy people involved.” Of course, this was hardly reassuring since none of those were hoaxes. But not much more was said about the issue — until Tuesday night when the Washington Post reported that the FBI had, in fact, found “a document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities.” This would be one of the nation’s most tightly kept secrets.

As of this writing, Trump has not responded to that story. Instead, he’s posted yet another rant about the stolen election and a former FBI agent he blames for failing to indict Hunter Biden. He signed off with “they spy on my campaign, Rigged & Stole the Election, and go after me for doing nothing wrong. Only in America!!!”

As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte wrote here, the case has become extremely complicated with Trump’s hand-picked judge, Aileen Cannon, creating a legal mess that will likely take some time to sort out. One of Cannon’s rationale for appointing a Special Master to look through all the documents to make sure Trump’s “privileges” were preserved (some of which he is not entitled to) was to allegedly insure the appearance of impartiality, even going so far as to say that Trump’s position is so special that it’s even more important that he not be tainted by the unseemly existence of an investigation. (I’m sure there are tens of thousands of Americans who would love to have that privilege.) But it is nothing more than a political tactic and it’s one the right is well-practiced at deploying. I have always called it the “where there’s smoke there’s fire” gambit. (It is often a corollary to the patented “hissy fit.”) The right spreads a conspiracy theory, either defensively or offensively, which has only the slimmest relationship to reality. But their non-stop shrieking about it inevitably leads some people to believe that there must be something to it. The media can’t resist this so they then pump the “controversy” which gives right-wing authorities the excuse they need to let a Republican off the hook.

You see, there’s just so much (fake) controversy circling in the ether that these authorities, whether law enforcement or the courts, have no choice but to bend over backward to ensure there is no “perception of unfairness” when, in fact, the whole manufactured dispute is blatantly biased. This can also work in reverse as well. The controversy can also lead authorities to go harder on Democrats so as not to appear biased in the face of the right’s accusations. It’s a win-win for the GOP.

Judge Cannon was particularly crude in her invocation of this ploy and it will be remembered as one of the most brazenly partisan acts ever handed down from the federal bench. Caring not at all about maintaining even a shred of judicial objectivity, she went the extra mile to ensure that Trump will at least have the delay he desperately needs to worm his way out of this one. Considering what we already know about the stolen documents, and the actual simplicity of the elements of the crimes he’s clearly committed, however, that’s going to be more difficult than most of Trump’s corrupt conduct. So, he is working overtime to make sure his MAGA supporters see this as the ultimate act of persecution.

As you can see from the post quoted below, Trump has a string of persecutions that he relentlessly recounts for his fervent followers. This is one from just hours ago:

The Fake News Mainstream Media, Democrats, and RINOs are obsessed with pushing the latest Witch Hunt against me. All American Patriots know that I always do everything “by the book” and that this Hoax will fail miserably just like the Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, Impeachment Hoax # 1, Impeachment Hoax #2, and all other attempts, perpetrated by the same people, to weaponize Law Enforcement against the 45th President, me. We have to rescue our great Country.

His followers no doubt relate to all of this. They too are angry at all the unfairness they believe is being meted out by people who are out to get them. He speaks to their grievance like no one else and in their view he is being mistreated for doing so.

It’s tempting to think that Trump makes a mistake in relating the full litany of alleged “hoaxes.” After all, you’d think that at some point, some of his followers would start to wonder about any person who gets into so many messes. After all, “where there’s smoke there’s fire,” right? But Trump’s survival instinct is well-honed and he knows his people. They don'[t see it that way at all.

The saying, “if you come at the king, you’d best not miss” is usually interpreted to mean that he will seek revenge against you and you will pay. Certainly, in Trump’s case, that’s true. He lives for vengeance and all you have to do is look at the way he’s targeted anyone who crossed him to know how he’ll respond. But Trump understands something else about that and I think it comes from his knowledge of mob bosses and how they work. The fact that he constantly eludes accountability even as the government throws everything at him, from the DOJ to Congress to state courts and local law enforcement, has led to the belief among his followers that he is invulnerable.

What we see as whining they see as strength and when he says “this will fail miserably, like all the rest” they believe him — he’s a superhero. It’s rather important that the government gets the job done this time. If he gets away with stealing top secret nuclear documents, relying on the laughably absurd rationales he and his hand-picked judge have been throwing out, they will believe he is nothing short of a god. 

Salon