Blog No. 179. Donald Trump and Baloneygate

Donald Trump has repeatedly asserted that the FBI placed a “spy” in his campaign, and last week he went further, exclaiming in a tweet that “SPYGATE could be one of the biggest political scandals in history!” This claim, like so many of Trump’s assertions, is pure baloney, a product of a fevered imagination that routinely creates a parallel universe for our president. The true political scandal is that a president of the United States is able to engage in serial confabulations without suffering political consequences. In the tradition of attaching “gate” as a suffix to describe scandals in Washington, this unfortunate and dangerous circumstance can aptly be termed “Baloneygate.”

For reasons that are not easy to fathom, Trump’s supporters and enablers remain unmoved by their leader’s alienation from factual reality. Some apparently believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that there is some truth to Trumpian fabrications, while others excuse them as “just Trump being Trump.” The father of Trump’s fantasies, and the very foundation of his political career was the long-held canard that Barrack Obama is not a citizen of the United States, a claim that Trump finally abandoned reluctantly and without apology. That was followed by hundreds of other falsehoods including such classics as Trump’s supposed recollection of thousands of Muslims cheering after 9/11, his inflation of the size of the crowd at his inauguration and his claim that Hillary Clinton benefited from millions of illegally cast votes.

In the case of Spygate, there is no evidence that any spy or informant was ever placed within the Trump campaign. The only connection with reality lies in the fact that, after the FBI became aware of questionable Russian contacts by two members of the Trump campaign, George Papadopolous and Carter Page, the FBI asked a confidential informant, Stefan Halpers (an American academic at Cambridge University who had served in Republican administrations and had done a significant amount of consulting work for the Defense Department) to speak with the two men to try to determine what the Russians were up to. (Halpers also spoke with a third member of the campaign, Sam Clovis, but it is not clear if he did so at the behest of the FBI.)

The misdescription of the FBI informant as a spy within the Trump campaign apparently began with a comment by a National Review columnist, Andrew McCarthy, on Fox and Friends, the cable news show that serves as one of Trump’s primary sources of information on current events. Nevertheless, as Lindsey Graham, a sometime Trump supporter, pointed out, “a confidential informant is not a spy.” Indeed, the use of confidential informants is a routine procedure in counterintelligence. So why all the talk about a “spy”? According to the Associated Press, “Trump told one ally this week that he wanted ‘to brand’ the informant a ‘spy,’ believing the more nefarious term would resonate more in the media and with the public.” That cynical approach is entirely consistent with Trump’s previous explanation to journalist Lesley Stahl about why he continually attacks the media: “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”

In accordance with long-established practice, the Department of Justice and the FBI resisted demands from Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, to identify the confidential informant and to provide classified documents concerning his work. But the Committee’s Chair Devin Nunes, Trump’s personal apparatchik, persisted and a briefing was scheduled for him and Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy on Thursday. The partisan structure of the scheduled briefing spurred strong Congressional protests that produced a last-minute revision: Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff was included in the briefing with Nunes and Gowdy and a second briefing was given on the same day for the “Gang of Eight,” consisting of Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate and of the Intelligence Committees of both chambers.

The unexplained peculiarity of having two briefings was compounded by the cameo appearances at each briefing of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Trump’s White House Counsel for the Russia investigation, Emmet Flood. The participation of Kelly and Flood drew immediate criticism from Democrats, but apparently they each made introductory remarks and left before the substantive part of the meeting. As it happened, the briefings turned out to be largely a non-event. Afterward, Nunes was uncharacteristically silent and Democrats issued a brief statement that no Republican challenged or attempted to rebut:

Nothing we heard today has changed our view that there is no evidence to support any allegation that the FBI or any intelligence agency placed a ‘spy’ in the Trump Campaign, or otherwise failed to follow appropriate procedures and protocols.

Nevertheless, Trump’s TV lawyer, the irrepressible Rudy Giuliani, did what he could to try to keep the issue alive. On Friday, Giuliani proclaimed that the Trump legal team would seek its own briefing on the classified information:

If the spying was inappropriate, that means we may have an entirely illegitimate investigation. Coupled with Comey’s illegally leaked memos, this means the whole thing was a mistake and should never have happened. We’d urge the Justice Department to re-evaluate, to acknowledge they made a mistake. It’s a waste of $20 million of the taxpayers’ money. The whole thing is already a waste of money.

Giuliani’s statement is preposterous on its face. Even the briefings given to lawmakers represented a rare and unfortunate intrusion into the investigative process. It is far worse to suggest that confidential information be shared with lawyers for a subject of the investigation. It is doubtful that Giuliani and Trump believe that the Department of Justice and the FBI would accede to such an outrageous proposal. It is more likely that it was simply another attempt to distract or, more seriously, to lay a pretextual foundation for Trump to refuse an interview by Mueller or to fire Deputy Attorney Rod Rosenstein.

Giuliani is also off base in his assertions that a) if the use of a confidential informant was somehow improper—which it was not—that would invalidate the entire investigation, and b) the investigation has been a waste of money. The Mueller investigation will be judged not on how it began but on how it ended and what it accomplished. And the results to date show that it has hardly been a waste of money: the probe has thus far resulted in five guilty pleas and 17 indictments, many involving senior members of the Trump campaign.

No one knows where events will take us and there are many obvious questions to be resolved. For example: whether Trump will agree to be interviewed by Mueller and, if so, what the interview will yield; whether, if Trump refuses to be interviewed, he will be subpoenaed by Mueller, if so, will the subpoena be enforced by the courts; whether Trump will fire or force the resignations of Rosenstein and Mueller, and if so, how Congress will react; whether Mueller will adhere to the Justice Department’s position that a sitting president cannot be indicted and, if so, whether Mueller will prepare a report setting out grounds for impeachment and, if so, whether Rosenstein will permit its delivery to Congress; whether Democrats will take control of the House in the November elections to make a vote of impeachment feasible and, if so, whether there is sufficiently compelling evidence of misconduct to make conviction by the Senate feasible. Those and related questions will be explored in future blogs. For the moment, it is sufficient to note and lament the damage that Trump has done to respect for the truth and to our democratic institutions.

In January, Senator Jeff Flake made a speech from the Senate floor that addressed Trump’s relentless assaults on the truth and on a free press. The speech bears reading in its entirety but the following excerpts are central to the theme:

2017 was a year which saw the truth – objective, empirical, evidence-based truth – more battered and abused than any other in the history of our country, at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government. It was a year which saw the White House enshrine “alternative facts” into the American lexicon, as justification for what used to be known simply as good old-fashioned falsehoods. It was the year in which an unrelenting daily assault on the constitutionally-protected free press was launched by that same White House, an assault that is as unprecedented as it is unwarranted. “The enemy of the people,” was what the president of the United States called the free press in 2017.

Mr. President, it is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies. It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase “enemy of the people,” that even Nikita Khrushchev forbade its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of “annihilating such individuals” who disagreed with the supreme leader.

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Mr. President, the question of why the truth is now under such assault may well be for historians to determine. But for those who cherish American constitutional democracy, what matters is the effect on America and her people and her standing in an increasingly unstable world — made all the more unstable by these very fabrications. What matters is the daily disassembling of our democratic institutions.

We are a mature democracy – it is well past time that we stop excusing or ignoring – or worse, endorsing — these attacks on the truth. For if we compromise the truth for the sake of our politics, we are lost.

Sadly, matters have not improved since January but have, if anything, deteriorated further. Those of us who are Republicans in Exile can only plead with Republicans on Capitol Hill to echo and support Senator Flake’s impassioned cri de coeur. It will be observed by some that Flake was free to speak as he did because he had decided not to run for reelection. It is a fair point, but surely some who are remaining in office can find the courage to speak up and defend the truth. The future of our republic may depend on it.

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Before leaving on our recent vacation, I invited readers who have a more positive view of President Trump than RINOcracy.com to write down their reasons and send them to this site during my absence. Only one reader, my friend John Hook, took up the offer:

I welcome the invitation to say positive things about The Donald, a nickname to soften the vitriolic reaction to the word “Trump.” Now the “Impeach him” and “Russian collusion” have run out of steam, and the President has successes to report to the public, we can discuss the issues that really matter in a civilized manner without CNN spewing out a negative, debasing slant on every day events. I bet they would choke on their microphones if The Donald could end the Korean War and denucularize [sic] the Korean Peninsula.

John, however, did not identify the “successes to report” that he had in mind or give examples of the unfairness that he perceives in CNN’s coverage. I have decided to extend indefinitely my invitation for readers to submit comments explaining their grounds for supporting Trump and, if any accept, I would urge them to be as specific as possible.