I’m giving up trying to finish a post this week on Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai, which I took 117 screen caps from the Criterion Blu-ray edition. As a fill-in I might as well comment on the latest news involving former Trump chief-of-staff Mark Meadows. It reminds me of another Kurosawa film, The Bad Sleep Well, which predated the paranoid political thrillers of the Seventies. The vice president of a company that distributes public funds to construction contractors is suspected of being involved in massive corruption from bribes and kickbacks. In order to conceal these crimes, he has been “taking care of business” by destroying evidence and staging “suicides” and “accidents” to silence witnesses and those trying to expose the crimes (including his own son-in-law).
After spending all day and night without sleep tending to this “business,” the vice president receives a phone call from an anonymous, unseen “Mr. Big,” who is assured that everything has been “taken care of.” Thus the real bad guys behind it all are allowed to “sleep well.”
We can see today that all the former Trump administration officials are also working very hard to insure that the real “bad guy”—Donald Trump—is also allowed to “sleep well.” Numerous Trump administration officials have been subpoenaed to supply documents and provide testimony before the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, but the ones most guilty have refused to comply, either claiming “executive privilege” out of fear of Trump, fear of the truth, or simply out of contempt for the process.
Meadows is a former member of the House’s far-right “Freedom Caucus,” which simply meant the “freedom” to obstruct or destruct. Perhaps knowing that his failure to comply with the committee’s lawful demands sets up him and every Republican in Congress as lawless hypocrites that Democrats can use against them as “precedent,” Meadows—before incurring Trump’s wrath after his book’s disclosure about Trump’s true COVID status—had thus tried to skirt around the issue by offering cherry-picked documents, many of them from his personal texts which brings up that word “illegal.” Government correspondence is supposed to be kept on government servers and handed over to the National Archives; of course the “precedent” for not doing this was done courtesy of Hillary Clinton, who is on the same level ethically (if not morally) as Trump.
While two of Trump’s henchmen have been held in contempt (and Steve Bannon in criminal contempt), Meadows’ efforts to “fake it” have not fooled the committee, and a criminal contempt proceeding is in the offing after he announced he would also refuse to appear for questioning. But like his fellow far-right colleagues, Meadows thinks he is above the law hiding behind the sham of “executive privilege,” and he is now suing Nancy Pelosi and the January 6 committee in civil court for what he calls a “lack of good faith” in subpoenaing his personal phone records; Verizon has stated that it would comply with the subpoena by December 15, unless a court order prevents it.
Meadows (like the rest who have been subpoenaed but have chosen to ignore it) is behaving as if he is scared shiftless at this prospect; further, his claims that he has acted in “good faith” is a lie, and the fact that he is refusing to testify or hand over relevant documents does not make him a “witness” who deserves protections from the laws he and other Trump officials evidently have broken.
Meadows was of course only one of many who helped Trump orchestrate his false stolen election claims and pressured election officials to change the results. Meadows was also among many who drummed-up support for these false claims and deliberately sought to excite crazed Trump supporters to “act” in way that could possible force a change in the results, which they knew was not only unlawful but a danger to democracy.
Yet who have been the only people to have been brought to account for this? The 200+ plus people who have been charged with believing that the President of the United States had given them “authorization” to march on the Capitol building and invade it to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes. We know that Trump sat before a TV screen mesmerized at the evidence of his “power”; he had to be “persuaded” to issue a tepid response in which he praised the “patriotism” of the insurrectionists.
While initial sentences of insurrectionists were relatively mild, those who are being tried on more serious crimes—such as assaulting police or destruction of property—have been sentenced to somewhat stiffer jail terms. This includes the so-called QAnon “shaman” Jacob Chansley and mixed martial “artist” Scott Fairlamb, both sentenced to prison terms of 41 months in November.
What we see here is that Trump and his henchmen (and henchwomen) acted in a way that they expected would incite some mob action in a crazed scheme to somehow overturn his 7 million vote defeat, and yet they expect some kind of special “immunity” simply because they hadn’t “anticipated” how far their deliberately intended lies and fabrications (which they continue to make) would drive the mob they deliberately incited. While some of those who were incited by these lies are now sleeping on prison cots, Trump expects to “sleep well” while those like Meadows and Bannon wait for the courts to decide if they can “sleep well” too.
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