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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