Sunday, July 19, 2020

Former Freedom Caucus anarchist Mark Meadows wants us to believe that Durham's mole hill can hide a mountain



Current White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is boasting that “indictments” are coming in the John Durham “investigation” by the end of the summer. This claim shouldn’t be too surprising coming from a founding member of the extreme-right Freedom Caucus, which in a 2017 Vanity Fair piece former Speaker of the House John Boehner described as a group that “can’t tell you what they’re for. They can tell you everything they’re against. They’re anarchists. They want total chaos. Tear it all down and start over. That’s where their mindset is.” In reference to caucus member Jim Jordan—who seems intent on exposing himself in the most public manner as a conspiratorial nutcase—he is “a terrorist as a legislator going back to his days in the Ohio House and Senate … A terrorist. A legislative terrorist.”  

Is it any wonder that Donald Trump would have an extreme-partisan fanatic like Meadows controlling the “message,” even at the cost of alienating independent voters away from Trump? To “solidify” the Republican “base,” which represents less than 29 percent of the electorate?  People like American Conservative Executive Director Johnny Burtka claim that the Trump campaign should return to a white nationalist and “populist” message (hasn't he noticed that he has?), but that was back when many voters didn’t realize what exactly that meant, and were simply voting against Hillary Clinton and not necessarily for Trump. Now that they know, that “message” doesn’t “resonate” quite as well as it did before.

But back to the Durham investigation.  This is clearly a politically-motivated hack-job to change the narrative of wrong-doing by the Trump administration. Take the case of Mike Flynn, who allegedly tried to illegally negotiate with the Russian ambassador, proposing some kind of “deal” in order to lessen sanctions without addressing the Ukraine, the Crimea or Russian interference in the election.  But the fact was that Flynn was already on the outs with Trump; according to John Bolton in his new book:

Then, less than a month into the Administration, Mike Flynn self-destructed. It started with Flynn facing criticism for alleged remarks to Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak…The criticism intensified dramatically when Flynn seemingly lied to Pence and others about the Kislyak conversation. Why Flynn would lie about an “”innocent” conversation, I never understood.  What senior Administration aides, and indeed Trump himself,  told me a few days later made more sense, namely, that they had already lost confidence in Flynn for his inadequate performance, and the Russia issue” was simply a politically convenient cover story.

Nor is it isn’t like the Republicans are “innocent” of trying to drum-up politically-inspired “charges” of “criminal” malfeasance; the Benghazi investigation, for example, was a clear attempt by Republicans to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid (it ended-up being a non-issue in the 2016 campaign). Of course the difference was that Trump associates were convicted and sentenced to prison time of criminal acts. But William Barr and Durham are trying to claim that these crimes should never have been prosecuted in the first place, because the “process” was flawed, and it certainly was to a point; the question is if it is a prosecutable “crime.” Many crimes in this country would never have been solved if investigators simply ignored the tiniest bit of evidence or mere “hunches,” and the Robert Mueller investigation uncovered crimes that would never have been prosecuted if investigation relied solely on the “maybe not” possibility—when the “maybe so” possibility turned out to be the correct “hunch.” 

On the other hand, this country has seen many, many cases in which people have been wrongly convicted and sentences to years, even decades in prison because of prosecutorial misconduct, deliberate fudging of the “evidence,”  forced “confessions,” or wrongful witness  testimony (particularly of black defendants who all look “the same” to white eyewitnesses). The Central Park Five case even saw one Donald J. Trump put out a full-page ad calling for the death penalty for them. Nobody involved in the investigation and prosecution of that case was ever charged with a crime, and the same can be said of thousands of cases in this country’s history where the mere “assumption” of guilt “justified” falsified evidence and testimony to convict the innocent.

But is that what the Durham investigation is about? No, it isn’t. The Trump administration created its own problem by obstructing congressional investigations into its conduct, with administration officials closest to the Trump circle either refusing to testify under oath or deliberating lying or equivocating. Barr and Durham are careful not to claim that those convicted by the Mueller investigation did not commit crimes; what they are doing is making the outrageously partisan political “charge” that there may have been some semantic “fudging” in the FISA filings against a few of the lower-level functionaries. In regard to Flynn, did some investigators wonder if there was something “prosecutable” in his case? Yes, but that doesn’t mean it was a “crime” for other investigators to believe that there was something “there.” And there was.

We should just see the Barr/Durham investigation for what it is: a political hack-job to somehow inflate a mole hill to “hide” the mountain behind it. Thinking people should not be fooled.

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