AStroll Through Memory Lane: The Clinton Campaign and the Press

My previous post pointing out how hostile relations were between the Clinton Campaign and the FBI in 2016 is mostly warmup to allegations that the Clinton Campaign and the mainstream media worked hand-in-glove in 2016 to link Trump to Russia. This posting is largely inspired by an article in the Columbia Journalism Review about how unfairly the press hounded Donald Trump about Russia and how his belief that the entire system was hopelessly rigged against him was, if not justified, at least understandable. And I will concede, the press was all too credulous about Trump-Russia conspiracy theories after he was elected But this was at least partly an attempt to correct their general disregard of the issue before he was elected.

The word cloud to the left is revealing. If you look closely enough "Russian" and "Russia are in there, but it takes some looking to find them. The dominant words are "speech," "immigration," "president," "make," "convention," and "Mexico."

Nonetheless Jeff Gerth, the author of the article, finds some articles linking Trump to Russia during the 2016 election, and some attempts by the Clinton Campaign to cultivate Trump/Russia stories that failed. So I suppose that if you focus single mindedly on the two small mentions of "Russia" and "Russian" in the word cloud, you can create the impression of an all consuming obsession by the press with Trump and Russia in 2016 -- but only if you airbrush out everything else.

In 2015, Gerth says, presumably approvingly, the press was far more concerned about Hillary Clinton's ties to Russia. These included a paid speech by Bill Clinton in Moscow, Russian donations to the Clinton Foundation, and Hillary's attempts at improving relations with Russia while serving as Secretary of State. Gerth sees the entire attempt by the Clinton campaign to tie Trump to Russia as an unfair smear to deflect attention from her own Russia ties, and her hiring of Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele in those terms. It was only after the disclosure in June, 2016, that Russia had hacked the DNC (which Gerth seems to call into question) that the Washington Post ran its first article on Trump's suspicious financial ties to Russia. Gerth found some evidence that the reporter had communicated with Fusion GPS in writing the story, and that Fusion GPS contributed. To Gerth, this appears to wholly discredit the article.

Can we take a step back here. Trump was running for President on a pro-Russia platform. In my opinion, it was not crazy in 2016 to seek an alliance with Russia to defeat Islamic terrorism, and that, in itself, was not sinister. What was concerning was the Trump seemed contemptuous of the whole idea of international cooperation or of having any allies at all. He showed no interest in friendly relations with any country whatever -- except Russia. It was not unreasonable to find that problematic, and perhaps in need of further investigation. And the article's reports on Trump's business ties to Russia were accurate, even understated.* Also accurate were reports that two of Trump's advisors had lived in Russia and worked for Russian companies; that his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was an advisor to a pro-Russia Ukrainian president; and that Michael Flynn, considered as a possible vice president had attended a Russia Today banquet and was seated near Putin. Perhaps one can dismiss reporting of the lower-level advisors as mere bigotry or McCarthyism. But if a campaign manager or possible vice presidential candidate have unusual Russia ties, that really is newsworthy and deserves reporting. Even if one of the sources is an opposition researcher for the opposing candidate.

The next article Gerth cites is a Washington Post editorial made on July 18, 2016 during the Republican convention. The article blamed Trump for removing a portion of the Republican platform calling for lethal aid to Ukraine. This later proved to be false and quite innocent. And, given that the US was not supplying lethal aid to Ukraine at the time, it would not have been all that important even if true. So yes, this is an unfair smear based on speculation. It was followed by two opinion columns using that erroneous speculation and Trump's general hostility to NATO as evidence that he would promote Putin's interests at the expense of the US. Gerth treats dissent from this view as an extraordinary outlier, but in fact concerns about Trump and Russia were far from center stage at this time.

The Democratic Convention began on July 26, and Wikileaks significantly disrupted the convention by releasing hacked DNC e-mails showing that the party leaders clearly favored Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the primaries. This badly split the Democrats at a time they needed to come together. Gerth concedes that this was "not helpful" to Clinton but adds that it "energized the promotion of the Russia narrative to the media by her aides and Fusion investigators." Well, yes, up until then everyone had just assumed that the Russian hack of the DNC server was just intelligence gathering. To have the e-mails turn up with Wikileaks, which released them in a manner calculated to cause maximum harm to the Clinton campaign does legitimately give rise to questions about whether Russia was trying to get Trump elected. The concerns are legitimate, even when matched with false accusations that Trump was behind the change in the Republican platform. 

The purportedly innocent Trump then blundered into the trap by saying, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing.”  Was he serious or joking?  Gerth accepts that it was an innocent joke.  In fact, there are two strong pieces of evidence to the contrary.  One was, as the Mueller report revealed, the Russians took the comment very seriously and significantly escalated their attempts to hack into Clinton's e-mails directly.  They were not successful. But Trump cannot be held responsible for how the Russians take his comments.  Far more significantly, Trump really did task Michael Flynn to cruise the dark web, looking for Hillary's e-mails, unconcerned with whether the e-mails might come from a hostile intelligence service.  But even if Trump was joking, it was a legitimately scandalous joke. The proper response for a patriotic candidate to a hostile intelligence service targeting his opponent is to make clear that such targeting is utterly unacceptable, and that, whatever our internal differences, Americans stand together in rejecting foreign meddling.

In August, Gerth sees three sinister events.  One was attempts by the Clinton campaign to interest the press in stories about an alleged link between Trump Tower and Russia's Alfa Bank. The press did not bite. The second was a story in the New York Times about reported payments from Ukraine's pro-Russia party to Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort.  The third was Harry Reid, Democratic leader in the Senate, dropping dark hints about Trump-Russia collision. As for the first, Gerth presents the goods to show that the Clinton campaign really was trying to plant stories in the press.  Does he truly think this is something unprecedented or even unusual?  Candidates seek to plant stories in the press all the time.  In any event, the press did not bite.  Second, the story about payoffs to Manafort got him fired as campaign manager, and rightly so. Manafort would ultimately acknowledge that the amounts were right but deny that the payments were in cash, rather than wire transfers. In any event, he was prosecuted for the payoffs.  Not known at the time, and certainly not mentioned by Gerth -- Manafort was secretly providing campaign polling data to a Russian spy.  As with the report on Trump's business ties with Russia, the public report was actually less bad than the reality.  And finally, Harry Reid's hints were based on the Steele Dossier and were false. Reid had a longstanding history of fighting dirty.

In fact, at about this time the Steele Dossier was beginning to circulate among some of the leading journalists. All but one declined to publish, finding the work somewhere between too unsubstantiated to outright "bullshit." The one exception was a September 23 article in Yahoo News by veteran national security reporter Michael Isikoff reported that Trump advisor Carter Page was under investigation by US intelligence agencies for his activities during a July trip to Moscow.  The article speculated that Page might have attempted to bypass US policy by setting up an informal channel of communications about lifting sanction and might have met with (named) sanctioned individuals.  The trip to Moscow was real and Page used the opportunity to criticize US promotion of democracy and human rights as self-serving hypocrisy.  However, the meetings with sanctioned individuals were more unsubstantiated rumors from the Steele Dossier.  (The article omits some even more sensational allegations).

So, from June to September, 2016, the press's purported obsession with Trump/Russian and sinister collaboration with Hillary Clinton consisted of:

• An accurate article about Trump's business ties to Russia
• A sincere but wrong opinion piece, based on speculation, attributing to Trump the change in the Republican platform to leave out calls for lethal weapons to Ukraine
• Two somewhat overwrought opinion pieces expressing alarm over Trump's proposed anti-NATO, pro-Russia outlook that proposed to reverse consensus US foreign policy since WWII
• Hillary Clinton seeking to convince the press that Russian intelligence agencies hacking DNC e-mails and releasing them to Wikileaks to publish in the manner calculated to cause her maximum damage was an attempt to get Trump elected
• A broadly accurate story about payments by pro-Russia politicians to Trump's campaign manager
• Sinister insinuations by the Senate Democratic leader based on false stories in the Steele Dossier
• An inaccurate Yahoo News story based on the Steele Dossier
• The Clinton campaign seeking to interest the press in a dubious story about Trump server ties to a Russian bank, and the press refusing to publish.

Dare I say that some of this seems accurate, fair, and well within reasonable bounds. Some are unfair and hyperbolic opinion pieces, but election campaigns are rife with unfair and hyperbolic opinion pieces.  Some are attempts by the campaign to manipulate the press, which as absolutely standard behavior for politicians, with entirely appropriate resistance by the press.  And two stories -- the insinuations by Harry Reid and Yahoo were based on the Steele Dossier and clearly turned out out to be false. Both Reid and Isikoff can both be fairly rebuked and told they should have known better.  

But this hardly looks like a media obsession with Trump-Russia, or a hand-in-glove cooperation with the Clinton campaign.

It is also a case of acute tunnel vision, focusing exclusively on what the press said about Trump and Russia and completely ignoring, not only what it was saying about Trump on other subjects, but what it was saying about Hillary.  The word cloud on the right makes clear just how contentious Hillary's relationship with the press actually was during the 2016 campaign.  

Unlike Trump, a single overreaching theme dominated for Clinton -- emails.  And the other major words are also revealing, "lie," "health," "scandal," "speech," "people," "president," "foundation," "campaign."  Some of these words admittedly are neutral, but even "health" refers to exaggerated rumors of illness and "foundation" refers to a series of ginned up scandals.  The media was, I agree, generally hostile to Trump during the 2016 election.  But they were considerably more hostile to Hillary, as the word cloud makes clear.

I quote Gallup:

The top substantive words Americans use when reporting on Trump include "speech," "president," "immigration," "Mexico," "convention," "campaign" and "Obama." Though Clinton has attacked Trump on several issues related to his character, no specific words representing negative traits have "stuck" to Trump the way the word "email" has to Clinton. Instead, Americans' recollection of information about Trump shifts in response to his campaign schedule, speeches, comments and the resulting controversies that sometimes arise from those comments.

The same article even included a table of the top stories about each candidate, week by week from mid-July to mid-September:

The table shows the leading stories about the two candidates over ten weeks.  Hillary Clinton's e-mails were her lead story in eight of the ten weeks.  On the week of the convention, the e-mails were merely the second story, the convention, with the damaging materials released by Wikileaks, was first.  The one week in which e-mails were not a leading story was when Hillary collapsed at the 9-11 commemoration, and stories about her health predominated.  Lie, foundation, scandal, FBI, and release are also major stories, all reinforcing the impression that Hillary was suspect.

On the weeks of the Democratic convention, Russia was the top story about Trump, presumably because of his "Russia, if you're listening" remark.  It was not among the top stories any other week, with the possible exception of the Week of September 12-18, in which the third word is "bear."  (I don't know what that is about). Admittedly, some were unfavorable for other reasons.  For instance, August 1-7 appears to focus on his comments insulting a Muslim family whose son was killed in Iraq.  The focus of Mexico and immigration is no doubt a YMMV matter, as is normal with any policy focus.

But this summary should make clear that the idea that the media was in the tank with Hillary and obsessing over Trump's Russia ties during the election is clearly false.**

Of course, this account only goes up to mid-September and omits all of October.  But even Gerth admits that Trump-Russia did not dominate October press coverage.  The intelligence community did put out a brief statement that they believed Russia was behind the hacks, but this was "overshadowed" by the Access Hollywood tape and Wikileaks publication of John Podesta (Hillary's campaign manager) e-mails.  Several things here are notable.  One is the the Access Hollywood tape was the only scandal that really stuck to Trump during the campaign and consumed a significant time with negative stories.  Presumably if Gallup's word cloud and lead stories had extended into October, they would have looked different.  Second, the Podesta e-mails were also part of the Russian hacks.  Gerth acknowledges the allegation, but seems to see it as unsubstantiated.  Finally, as a major social media promoter of the Podesta e-mails admitted, there was nothing "particularly weird or strange" about the Podesta e-mails, but they somehow nonetheless became a scandal.

Gerth does reveal some interesting things that were happening behind the scenes.  Members of the Clinton campaign took a strange pattern of communications between Russia's Alfa Bank and Trump tower and tried to convince the New York Times to publish. Eric Lichtblau, the Times reporter, found the story intriguing, but the FBI persuaded him to hold off until it investigated.  The FBI investigated, found nothing there, and persuaded the Times not to publish.   In mid-October, Times reports also learned that Trump was under counterintelligence investigation by the FBI.  The FBI convinced them to keep the story under wraps.

Naturally, Gerth does not mention the FBI's October 28 bombshell that it was reopening the e-mails investigation, which may very well have sunk the Clinton campaign.  He does mention October 31 stories by Slate, reporting the Alfa Bank server and by Mother Jones, revealing the existence of the Steele Dossier.  Both stories were in outlets that did not truly qualify as mainstream media -- liberal advocacy publications with relatively small readership. And neither one gained any real traction. Both seemed too much like desperate flailing by a campaign that knew it was in serious trouble.  Lichtblau of the New York Times actually followed p with a story saying that the FBI has investigated the server and found nothing to it.  And, as we all know, Trump ended up winning the election, probably largely as a result of the FBI's last minute revelations.

So what is the scandal here that Gerth is pointing to?  If he is trying to argue that the Clinton campaign, the FBI, and the media were working closely together to hurt Trump, he comes much closer to making the exact opposite case.  At most, he shows the Clinton campaign trying to interest reporters in various stories and generally failing.  This is completely normal behavior.  I suppose one could say the scandal was that the Times was being too deferential to the FBI and should have gone ahead and published stories that he agreed to keep under wraps.  Certainly the current lesson from Republicans about Twitter heading FBI warnings and blocking links to the Hunter Biden laptop story seems to be that the government has not business telling media what stories to publish. But somehow I don't think that is what Gerth has in mind.

Nonetheless, as Gerth admits, it was the lesson that the Times took away from the election.  Coming down hard on Clinton because they assumed she would win, the FBI and the media paved the way for a Trump victory.

None of this is to deny that the news media overcompensated in the opposite direction by being all too credulous about the Steele Dossier and all too eager to believe the worst about Trump and Russia.  But any attempt to suggest that this began during the 2016 campaign is flatly false.

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*The article mentions prior negotiations about a Trump Tower in Moscow but says that the plan had long since been abandoned.  In fact, such negotiations were underway in the early stages of the campaign and ended only when news of the Russian hacks came out.

**My own stroll down memory lane from December 8, 2016 is revealing.  I looked at the Gallup article and lamented that there were so many Trump scandals that none ever seemed to stick, and speculated on what might have happened if there had been just one.  My candidates for the one scandal were the Access Hollywood tape, the Trump University lawsuit, or general financial shadiness.  Trump-Russia did not even occur to me.  My sole mention of Russia was to say that the Clinton e-mail revelations were carefully timed by "Republicans in the House Oversight Committee, the FBI, the Russians, and Wikileaks" to do maximum damage, with the clear disclaimer that the only coordination was between Russia and Wikileaks.

A Stroll Through Memory Lane: The FBI and the Clinton Campaign

 And the point of all this is to circle back to the whole matter of Trump-Russia.  Conventional wisdom in the "Russia hoax" narrative now posits and iron triangle of the Hillary Clinton campaign, the FBI, and the mainstream media all joining forces to thwart a Trump candidacy and smear Trump with the fake Steele Dossier.

All of this seriously muddles the timeline and calls for a considerable degree of revisionist history and an impressive forgetting of what actually happened in the 2016 campaign.  But narrative has a way of overtaking facts, so in order to refute stories of the Clinton/FBI/MSM alliance, let us take a tour down memory lane about what actually happened.

The Clinton Campaign and the FBI

First consider Clinton and the FBI. It is true, of course, that FBI began investigating the Trump campaign in July, 2016.  However, this fact did not become public until after the election and therefore did nothing to harm the Trump campaign.

Clinton, by contrast, was under open and public FBI investigation for a year before the Trump investigation began, a fact that almost certainly did harm at least some voters' view of Clinton.  The FBI publicly declined to prosecute Clinton several weeks before it opened its investigation into Trump, but a year of FBI scrutiny made Hillary highly suspicious and distrustful of the organization, contrary to allegations that they were working hand-in-glove.

These strained relations proved costly for the Clinton Campaign.  The FBI began warning the Democratic National Campaign (DNC) as early as September, 2015 of Russian hacking attempts. These warnings went unanswered until the DNC became aware that it had been hacked in May, 2016.  The delay proved costly to the the Democrats, and perhaps to Trump as well.  While in September, 2015, the DNC had been hacked by Russia's civilian intelligence agency, a/k/a the SVR, a/ka "Cozy Bear," Cozy Bear limited itself to intelligence gathering and never publicly disclosed DNC materials.  Perhaps a timely response would have prevented hack by Russia's military intelligence, a/k/a the GRU, a/k/a Fancy Bear, which did not hack in until April, 2016, and which did start revealing the materials it found in within a fairly short time.  And, after all, if there had been no successful Russian hack-and-leak, there would have been no question of whether Trump was complicit in it and no Trump/Russia investigation.

It is true that the Clinton Campaign (indirectly) commissioned the Steele Dossier, and that Steele turned over his findings to the FBI, which investigated them. But the Clinton campaign did not know about the FBI's investigation of Trump, which was a closely guarded secret.  And neither the Clinton Campaign nor the FBI ever revealed the existence of the Steele Dossier to the public.  It is true, of course, that both knew about the allegations, and that this knowledge presumably influenced their actions.  But it seems decidedly strange that they would conspire together to frame Trump with a fake dossier and then never release it to the public until after he won the election.

Another point often made by Trump defenders is that the FBI investigators looking into his possible Russia ties were hopelessly biased against him, as shown by the strongly anti-Trump texts exchanged between the lovers, Peter Strozk and Lisa Page.  The accusation is true, but incomplete. The New York field office, which investigated Hillary, was strongly biased against her and greatly resented the decision not to prosecute. Many people on our side of the aisle wonder what an inspector general investigation of the New York field office and their internal texts might reveal.  In defense of members of both investigations, it seems most likely that both succumbed to the all-to-human failings of tunnel vision and confirmation bias.  Focusing so hard on a particular target, both investigations developed a deep-seated hostility to their target and a conviction that there must be something much worse just below the surface if only they could find it. This is a very understandable tendency in human nature, but it must be combatted when people's liberties are at stake.

But what should be the final nail in the coffin of the theory that the FBI improperly colluded with the Clinton campaign was its October 28 announcement, less than two weeks before the election, that it was reopening the Clinton e-mail investigation.  This was in clear violation of FBI policy not to take action in high-profile politically charged investigations so soon before an election. The last-minute investigation proved to be utterly trivial, but it may very well have thrown the election to Trump.  Hardly the actions of an agency secretly in league with Clinton!

In Defense of Whataboutism

 

I do see an obvious criticism of my last post.  Certainly one could dismiss it as an exercise in whataboutism. Do I seek to justify the failures of scientists, mainstream media and the like by pointing to the failures of the right wing?  

In answer, I would say that the reason whataboutism has significant intuitive appeal is that it is often fully justified.  To consider when "whataboutism" is an is not justified, it is best to think about context.  Because there are at least three cases in which the accusation is made.  Not all three are the same.

Whataboutism when used to justify one's own misconduct.  (First party criticism).

The criticism of "whataboutism" is quite correct when the speaker seeks to justify the speaker's (or the speaker's "team's") misconduct by pointing out someone else's. Worse still is the implication that somebody else's misconduct not only justifies one's one misconduct, but that so long as other people do bad things, one's own side is in some way morally obligated to do similar bad things, and that to improve one's own conduct if other people do not improve theirs is somehow hypocritical.   This is what my sister called the "Darth Vader kills people so why shouldn't I" argument.  

Example:  An employee is embezzling from his/her employer and refuses to stop because the employer is cheating on his/her/its taxes. The employer's misconduct in no way excuses, much less mandates, the employee's.

This argument was much used during the War on Terror to justify killing civilians, indefinite detention, torture, and other types of abuse. Any criticism of our own behavior was met with quite accurate accounts of the worst things terrorist did and a strong implication that it was immoral to refrain from such things so long as our enemies did them.

For much the same reason, I do not agree with people who say Elon Musk is a hypocrite for denouncing Twitter's coordination with our government while complying with censorship by the governments of China, India, etc.  It is perfectly reasonable to say that it is not Twitter's job to change government policies in countries like India or China, and that it is asking too much to expect Twitter to defy the law of the host country.  It is also reasonable at the same time to say that we expect our government to refrain from meddling in social media, except as part of a criminal investigation.*

Or consider the classic expression of hypocrisy from Matthew 7:3-5:

3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? 4Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? 5Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

The Gospel does not say what you should do if the mote is in your own eye and the beam is in your brother's.  But presumably you are not under any obligation to leave it there, much less to measure and insist that it would by hypocritical to remove your own mote so long as your brother's beam is larger.

Whataboutism when used to refute an implied claim of moral superiority.  (Second party criticism).

This is what is known as the tu toque fallacy, not a refusal to engage in self-criticism, but an attempt to deflect another person's criticism by pointing out the other person's flaws.  The point of the tu toque fallacy is that just because the other person has the same moral flaws, it does not follow that your own misconduct is morally right.  That is true, of course, but it is not the whole story.  When the other person calls out your moral failings, he or she is almost always making an implied claim to moral superiority.  It is not unreasonable under these circumstances to point that out.

Example:  An employer cheating on his/her/its taxes calls out an employee for embezzling.  The employee points out the hypocrisy.  If the mote is in your eye and the beam in your brother's, you are in no way required to leave the mote there -- but perhaps you are justified in calling our your brother for criticizing it.

Another classic example was the Soviet Union under Communism retorting to criticism of its human rights records by raising the question of lynching in the United States.  But can we point out the obvious. Implicit here is the assumption that US lynching was worse than anything happening under Communism.  And what, after all, would be most Americans' response to Communist criticism of our record on race?  Presumably, to point out the Communists' own failings.

So, too, any time the right wing media points out the real failings and errors of the mainstream media, the clear implication is that the rightwing media is more reliable.  It is entirely reasonable to point out that this is not so.  Or if Elon Musk points to the alleged censoriousness of Twitter before he bought it out, it is fair to shoot down any implication that he is not censorious.

But even hypocritical criticism has its value.  US Presidents in the Cold War threw their support behind the Civil Rights movement in large part to maintain the moral high ground against the Soviet Union.  And if right wing criticism leads the mainstream media to strive to be more accurate, that is all to the good.

Whataboutism when used to choose between imperfect options in an imperfect world.  (Or, third party criticism).

But the time that whataboutism makes most sense, is when addressed to a third party other than the accuser who has to make choices between imperfect options in an imperfect world.  In that case, it makes perfect sense to weigh the relative degree of everyone's faults and misdeeds before making a choice.  This would be, say, a triage facility deciding what item to remove from somebody's eye first.  Presumably it would be the great beam.**

Suppose the white collar crimes division is investigating and embezzler and the embezzler points out that his/her employer is engaged in tax evasion.  The white collar crimes division will presumably take note.  And it will probably weigh the relative severity of the two offenses in deciding which party to offer a plea in order to testify against the other.

Much the same principle should apply to viewers deciding whether to follow the mainstream media or the right wing media.  Neither is perfect; the only question is which is more reliable (or less unreliable). 

Political candidate are an obvious example of this principle at work. Donald Trump is actually quite spectacular in this regard, because no matter what Republicans say is the Democratic candidate's worst quality that make them unacceptable, Trump invariably manages to exceed them.***

Are you running against Bill Clinton and want to argue that character is what is most important?  Well, on any character test, Trump will run dead last.  Do you oppose Bill Clinton because the one thing you can't stand is sexual impropriety?  Well then, you must hate the man who says, "Grab 'em by the pussy."

But her emails (Mar-a-Lago raid)

Do you oppose Hillary Clinton because she was careless in her handling of classified documents?  Then you must hate the man who took hundreds of them home.  Is the real issue that Hillary evaded record keeping laws and deleted e-mails?  Trump routinely tore up every paper that crossed his desk in clear violation of the Presidential Records Act and even flushed some down the toilet. Are you worried that the Clinton Foundation creates possible conflicts of interest?  Then it makes no sense at all to vote for a candidate with a far-flung international business empire. Are you concerned about personal profiteering in the Clinton Foundation?  Meet the Trump Foundation.

Similarly, if your biggest issue in candidates is sons who who trade on their family name to profit, or whose international business ties create potential conflicts of interest, Donald Trump is probably not a good choice.  And a lot of people wonder about drug addicted sons as well.

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*And to note, while I think this is a reasonable position, I am not necessarily saying that I agree with it.  My mind is not made up on the subject.  What is clear is that it did not take Musk long to learn what other right wing social media operators learned -- that it is simply not realistic to have no terms of service or content moderation, and that any attempt to do so quickly degenerates into a complete sewer.

**Don't think too hard about how a great beam would fit.

***Of course, if what you really find unacceptable about Democrats is their policies, then doubtless Trump will seem the better choice.  But, given how closely divided the electorate is, candidates invariably have to reach out beyond the party faithful to explain to undecided voters why the other candidate is unacceptable for reasons other than policy.

Fallibility versus Bad Faith

To state the obvious, our institutions are not infallible.  They are made up of human beings, and they make mistakes, especially when acting on incomplete information.

COVID is an obvious case. There can be no doubt that our scientists made many mistakes.  They were uncertain how it spread and encouraged hand washing and surface cleaning, which turned out not to be a major form of spread.  They discouraged congregating in outdoors events, which later proved to be safe.  And they did not immediately recognize the importance of masks. They may have focused too much on halting the spread, resorting to lockdowns, and ignored the lasting social damage such actions could cause. They may have taken too much of a one size fits all approach, not recognizing that so densely populated a city as New York may have different needs from a more sparsely populated area.  And when the vaccine came out, they seriously overestimated its efficacy, believing it was 90% effective in preventing infection, which soon proved to be false.

Our right wing media and leaders point to each and every one of these mistakes and use them to claim that they were right and scientists and mainstream media were wrong all up and down the line.  But guess what. COVID was a completely new virus that never existed before.  Expecting our scientists to know everything about it from day one is completely unrealistic.  And yes, I get that it is frustrating to receive a torrent of ever changing advice, focusing on hand washing for a time and denigrating masks, and then later focusing on masks and denigrating hand washing.  But such is the nature of learning on the fly. As for vaccines, the usual practice is to test a new vaccine for five years before approving its use. Certainly if that had been done in the case of COVID, all its limitations would have been learned and matched with appropriate instructions by the time it came out.  Which would still be at least a year from now.

And while right wingers crow over every mistake that scientists and mainstream media made and take it as vindication, somehow they never mention their own mistakes along the way.  Like that COVID did not exist at all.  Or that it was a Chinese bioweapon.  Or that it was no worse than seasonal flu. Or that it would all disappear in April. Not to mention any number of completely nutty claims about vaccines and possible cures.  But somehow all of this either gets dropped down memory hole or is still claimed today.*

Much the same applies to denunciations of the FBI investigation of Trump for possible Russia ties. The FBI knew that Russia was hacking the DNC server and releasing the results through Wikileaks in a manner calculated to cause maximum harm to the Clinton campaign. They learned that a low-level Trump campaign staffer might have gotten advance notice. So the FBI suspected that there might be a channel of communication between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence and began to investigate that possibility.  Ultimately, the investigation determined that no such channel existed, although it did uncover quite a bit of scandalous behavior by the Trump campaign with respect to Russia.  The conclusion by the right wing was that  no such investigation should ever have been launched. In other words, counter intelligence investigations should not be launched unless the investigators know in advance that the investigation will be successful. That's not how investigations work.  

By point of comparison, Congressional committees endlessly investigated Hillary Clinton's role in the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi in hopes of finding some misconduct that would sink her election chances.  No such misconduct was found, although it did turn out that Hillary sent State Department e-mails on a private server. How many Republicans would apply the same conclusion there -- that the committees should never have launched their investigations unless they knew in advance what they would find?

Much the same applies to right wing criticism of the Trump/Russia scandal. I will concede Republicans some points in advance.  The Steele Dossier ultimately turned out to be worthless.  Once it was published, a whole lot of Trump critics (myself included) were all too credulous that there was a well-developed conspiracy. There can be no doubt that media coverage went fairly far down the rabbit hole, speculating about what sinister things lay beneath the surface. It also over-interpreted some things that were visible on the surface. It turned out that there were no sinister Russian machinations behind the change in the Republican platform to remove a call for sending lethal weapons to Ukraine.  Jeff Sessions meetings with certain Russian diplomats were wholly innocent.  And so forth.  Right wingers tout all these things in order to demonstrate that the whole thing was a hoax and the mainstream media went off the deep end.

They prefer to ignore some of the genuinely scandalous things that the mainstream media managed to uncover.  Like that Trump's son and son-in-law met with Russian operatives offering "dirt" on Hillary.  Or that Trump had operatives trawling the dark web looking for Hillary's missing e-mails, unconcerned that they might be dealing with hostile spies.  And so forth.  

Still, right wingers do have a point when they complain that from the Trump election until the Mueller Report, the mainstream media went down the rabbit hole and spent way too much time pursuing conspiracy theories. How dare the MSM trespass on the right wing media's territory!

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*Not excusable are some of the things that scientists said on genuinely political grounds, such as discouraging masks as ineffective in order to save them for healthcare workers, or encouraging Black Lives Matter protests after denouncing anti-lockdown protests. These things deserve to be criticized as political and unscientific.  I just question some of the critics' standing to complain about anything being politicized.

Message Discipline and Message Indiscipline

 

One last follow up from my last post.  I want to address the subject of whether Democrats can ever learn to be competitive in rural areas.  Indivisible Rural Caucus found that the most successful candidate in rural areas were ones who were well-known in the community, had strong ties to the community, were able to build local organizations and address local issues.  I said that if this meant that Democrats can set aside demands for ideological purity* and (re)learn to do retail politics I thought it would be a very healthy development.

To some extent, it comes down to a question of whether you can beat message discipline with message indiscipline. 

And the question of whether you can beat message discipline with message indiscipline itself leads to the larger issue and central paradox of the asymmetries in today's politics -- the paradox of centralization.

Liberals for all too long have placed too many eggs in the presidential basket and assumed that once we elect a Democrat as president he (or she) will have a free hand to make policy.  This, in turn, see politics and policy in top-down terms.  The President makes policy and dictates it to the country and the country falls in line.  Conservatives complain, with some justification, that this top-down dictation of policy is authoritarian.

What has actually happened every time a Democrat is elected President is that Republicans put up massive resistance from all levels.  From votes in Congress to Senate filibusters to debt ceiling crises to defiant state governments to "constitutional" county sheriffs, resistance has been extremely broad-based, and therefore extremely hard to overcome in our system of highly decentralized political power.

But while Republicans have shown great ability to mobilize grassroots politics at all levels, they are extremely centralized in a different way -- their message.  This, in turn, comes from the right-wing media, which has great message discipline.  I am not going to hunt for the link, but I was most impressed by someone who watched and compared Fox and MSNBC.  The difference was not merely one of ideology, nor did he see all that great a difference in quality.  The real difference was that Fox commentators all conveyed the same message in different ways, while MSNBC commentators were all conveying separate and unrelated messages.  

And it is not just Fox.  In general, when the right wing decides on a party line, before long the entire right wing media are all saying the same thing.  Soon right wing politicians -- at all levels -- all join in.  The same message hits over an over.  Certainly it is repeated by the party faithful. But it leaks out of the right wing echo chamber into Sunday talk shows and other mainstream outlets, all on the same note. Soon everyone who follows the right wing news has the story and everyone else hears it at least as one side. On one side -- a unified phalanx.  On the other -- confusion.

So what do we do about this?  I have heard two main proposals.  One is to start adopting our own message discipline.  Have all MSNBC commentators start singing on the same note and Democratic politicians repeat the same message on Sunday talk shows and continue to echo through liberal think tanks and other outlets. That will doubtless be effective in rallying the party faithful, but it will not reach people in the Fox News ghetto.

Another alternative is to deliberately cultivate message indiscipline.  Approach each election as separate and individual and learn to hit on the issues that lie outside Fox News' purview.  Fox News can convince local voters of the importance of school boards banning critical race theory from the local schools and sheriffs refusing to enforce national gun laws.  But if the biggest local issue is actually how to rebuild after a forest fire, neither critical race theory nor guns are much use.  Show that you are really good at rebuilding after the forest fire, and maybe voters can tolerate some heterodoxy on other issues.

Can this be made to work?  I think the jury is still out on that.  It appears to have been effective in the 2018 midterms.  Instead of all singing on the same note, Democratic candidates all crafted their messages to appropriate local concerns. The right wing noise machine was frustrated, unable to counter so many disparate messages at the same time.  Of course, that also makes it extremely difficult for national organizations to manage, while local organizations lack resources.  So maybe this is wishful thinking on my part.

At the same time, after making a poor showing in the 2022 midterms, some Republicans started to wonder whether "be as crazy as possible" is as effective a message as they thought.  Some of them started to think maybe it was best to tailor their message to the needs of their local constituency.  In other words, some Republicans started to consider the merits of message indiscipline.

And allow me to say that if Republicans, too, can be persuaded to adopt message indiscipline, if local elections can stop being nationalized, and, in short, if ideology starts to fragment to match our highly fragmented power structure, maybe at last we can move past the rigid polarization that is destroying our country.

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*I am not altogether confident with the Indivisible Rural Caucus. Leaders insist on giving their pronouns.  In giving advice how to argue for abortion in rural area, they offer messaging strategies like encouraging members not to be afraid to say abortion instead of taking refuge in euphemisms like "choice," "reproductive health," and the like, and to be sure we talk about pregnant "people" or "folks" instead of women.  This sounds a lot more like an attempt at woke message discipline than a serious attempt to appeal to people in rural communities.

The Dog that Didn't Bark

It may seem a bit late to post on last year's elections.  I had planned to do so much earlier but was overtaken by events.  But now that the Democrat has won for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, it seems like a good time to finally get to it.  

Last year's mid term elections were good news at (almost) all levels.  Consider.

Democrats vastly outperformed either the polls or the usual midterm results.

Democrats actually expanded their US Senate seats by one, and held their losses in the House to a manageable level. What does this mean?  Well, there will be a legislative check on the Republican House to prevent it from doing anything too crazy.  Also, the Senate can continue to confirm and there will be no excuse for large executive or judicial backlogs.  And it can counter any investigations the House comes up with by holding investigations of its own.

Secretary of State results

Democrats finally realized the error of putting all their eggs in the federal basket and started seriously competing at the state level.*  And not just state governors, either.  Democrats are also recognizing that success at the national level depends on success at all levels in the states.  Democrats managed to flip four state legislatures in key midwestern swing states, greatly reducing the risk of state legislatures selecting their own slates of electors next time around.  They also held onto the Secretary of State position in all key swing states except for Georgia, where the Republican incumbent had proven himself willing to respect election outcomes.**

Furthermore, maximum crazy turned out not to be a winning strategy for Republicans.  While plenty of crazies won, many crazies won the primary and went on to lose in the general. Sane Republicans did fairly well.  Some have even talked about flexing their muscle in Congress, though they show no signs of actually acting on this promise. 

While running on a democracy is in danger platform proved to abstract to be effective for Democrats on a national basis, in the key swing states where the Republican assault on democracy is strongest, warning of this local threat did turn out to be successful. Particularly at the level of Secretary of State, the official in charge of certifying elections, running on a promise to respect election results regardless of who wins proved to be a better message than running on a program of throwing out results one does not like.

Of course, not everything was good news.  Republicans won the House of Representatives and are in the process of competing to see who can be craziest.  And given the strong rural/urban divide in this country, with counties being geographic rather than demographic units, it seems likely that it will be a long time before Democrats can compete at the county level.  Given the importance of counties in counting votes, as well as "constitutional sheriffs," this is a serious concern.  I attended an Indivisible Rural Caucus Zoom meeting to discuss the aftermath in which they discussed the most successful strategies in rural areas.  The most successful candidates were well-known in their local communities, had strong community ties, addressed local issues, and built local organizations. All of this should be completely unsurprising and unremarkable, but if it convinces rural Democratic activists to focus on this sort of retail politics instead of policing ideological purity, it is all to the good.

But best of all is the dog that didn't bark -- the way this election proceeded as a completely normal election in contrast to 2020.  No militias turned out to intimidate Democratic voters. Michigan election watchers did not engage in the disruptions they had discussed.  Defeated candidates conceded.  Certifying bodies followed their usual duties.  There was significant doubt as to whether this would happen.  But even in real areas of concern, all went smoothly -- completely normally.

Heavily Republican Navajo and Mohave Counties in Arizona certified the results.  Cochise County, Arizona delayed, but ultimately yielded to a judge's order and certified, allowing the Secretary of State to make a timely certification.

Other states proceeded more smoothly.

Nye County, Nevada insisted on a hand count, only to learn the hard way the value of counting machines. There were similar calls in Torrance County, New Mexico and other rural New Mexico counties, but in the end all New Mexico counties, even Otero County, which had refused to certify the primary, made timely certifications of the election results.  In Michigan, all elections must be certified by a board consisting of two members of each party. Although Republicans had ousted board members certifying Biden as the winner, certification of Democratic wins in 2022 went off without a hitch. In Pennsylvania three counties refused to count mail-in ballots in the primary until ordered by a court.  In the general election, however, only Luzerne County dragged its feet in certifying the outcome, and only because the election ran out of ballots before it was finished.

There were a few exceptions to the general rule that defeated Republicans graciously conceded.  Kari Lake, notoriously, refused to concede defeat in Arizona, denounced the outcome as fraudulent and sued to overturn the outcome. All of this deserves to be condemned but still looks more like performance art than a serious attempt to overturn the outcome.  Far more serious, but very much an outlier, was the case of Solomon Pena, a Republican who ran for a safe Democratic seat in the New Mexico legislature.  Pena attributed his loss to fraud, made complaints of fraud to two Democratic county commissioners and two Democratic legislators.  When they refused to take the complaints serious, Pena has some of his friends shoot at their houses!  Fortunately, no one was killed or injured.  Pena had a criminal record and appears to have gotten the nomination mostly because no other Republican wanted to run for such and obviously safe Democratic seat.  This suggests a need for better quality control, even for hopeless candidates, but it seems unlikely to be duplicated.

In light of all these encouraging results, I can see several possible conclusions:

1. The Republican threat to democracy was overblown.  Our side was panicking for nothing.
2. Republicans can handle losing down ballot elections, so long as they keep the presidency.
3. Trump is the problem. So long as Trump is not on the ballot, elections can proceed more or less normally.
4. The January 6 prosecutions have scared some sense into people who might otherwise challenge elections.

I guess we will learn the answer next year.

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*Actually, in fairness to the Democrats, they actually seem to have figured that out and sought to compete in state-level elections, especially for state legislature, in 2020.  They just weren't very successful.  
**In Pennsylvania the chief elections officer is appointed by the governor, rather than elected.  But Pennsylvania elected a Democrat as governor.

One More Thought

 

Something occurred to me in going over the litany of Republican allegations of crimes by Democratic Presidents and candidates.

Consider.

There was the years-long investigation of Bill Clinton's role in Whitewater investments, his impeachment for attempts to conceal an affair with the White House intern, and the last-minute deal with the Special Counsel to avoid indictment for perjury.  Though never reaching the stage of criminal investigation, there were allegations swirling about accusing Clinton of everything from running drugs in Arkansas to killing Vince Foster to the Clinton body count.

Hillary Clinton got off easy, really, being accused of nothing worse than sending State Department e-mails on a private server.  But this was nonetheless portrayed as a heinous crime, and the FBI's decision not to prosecute as a major miscarriage of justice. Trump led crowds chanting, "Lock her up" and vowed to prosecute if elected.  

And now Joe Biden's son Hunter's sleazy but legal (or legal but sleazy) career in international business is being portrayed as anything from vast ring of financial fraud to an outright Chinese spy.

Do you notice someone missing there?

Barrack Obama.

Many people were convinced that it was seeing a Black President that caused the Republican Party to lose its mind.  I never believed that.  I was old enough to remember just how much the Republican Party lost its mind when Bill Clinton was President and concluded that any Democrat in the White House is enough to push Republicans over the edge.

During his time as candidate and President, Obama was accused of being a secret Muslim, being ineligible because he was born in Kenya, being a Communist, fascist, Muslim, atheist, terrorist supporter and generally hating America.  But no one ever made any serious allegation of criminality.

Looking back, the omission is striking.

The One Thing That Might Give Me Pause

 

I must admit that there is one thing that might convince me that the Manhattan prosecution of Trump is not wholly illegitimate.  That is District Attorney Alvin Bragg's comment that falsifying business records is the bread and butter of prosecution for white collar crime.

And just to be clear, I do believe that white collar crime is real crime, and that, although white collar crime poses no immediate threat to our physical safety, consistently letting it go unpunished will undermine society's morals.

On the other hand, white collar crime poses no immediate threat to our physical safety, so police departments and district attorneys generally ignore it to focus on street crime.  When most district attorneys prosecute white collar crime, it is very simple, low level white collar crime, like writing bad checks.  More complex cases are usually left to state attorney generals or federal prosecutors.  And even they tend to take only the highest-level, most egregious cases.  Intermediate cases are usually treated as civil or administrative matters.

Clearly any records falsification Trump may have done is not the sort of street-level white collar crime like writing bad checks that causes serious headaches to local merchants and draws the attention of local prosecutors. Nor is it the sort of really egregious case that draws the attention of federal and state prosecutors.  If intermediate white collar crime has an actual victim, the offender usually has enough resources that the victim can sue.  But there was no victim in this case. So if any enforcement actions were taken, I would expect them to be civil penalties by some administrative agency.

But Manhattan may be an exception. As one of the world's greatest financial centers, it is presumably also one of the great centers of white collar crime.  So it may be that the local district attorney in Manhattan really does spend a great deal of time prosecuting white collar crime.  Maybe he even prosecutes fairly low-level, victimless cases.  Maybe a thorough perusal of the Manhattan white collar prosecution could convince me that there was nothing unusual here.  But I doubt it.

What Does It Mean to Prosecute Al Capone for Tax Evasion?

It should be clear by now that many Trump critics are nonetheless uneasy about prosecuting him for the Stormy Daniels payoffs. And others have suggested that the charges may be flimsy, but this is sort of a case of prosecuting Al Capone for tax evasion.

I disagree.  And in trying to analyze why I disagree, I came up with a series of criteria for what makes prosecution of a serious criminal for trivial matters the proverbial case of prosecuting Al Capone for tax evasion and why it just doesn't apply here..

I would say that for a case to be justified under the prosecuting Al Capone for tax evasion standard, it must meet the following three criteria:

1. There has to be a serious underlying crime.  Al Capone was not just a murderer, his entire fortune was the product of criminality.  The Stormy Daniels payoffs, by contrast, do not involve any underlying crime, just a distasteful affair.  A case of hush money that legitimately resembles prosecuting Al Capone for tax evasion is the case of former Republican Speaker Denny Hastert, who sexually abused underage boys while serving as a teacher and coach and was prosecuted for concealing hush money payments.  I would also throw in the case of Alger Hiss -- almost certainly a Soviet spy, he was tried for perjury in lying about it.
2. The real crime must for some reason evade prosecution.  Al Capone intimidated witnesses and covered his tracks well.  Denny Hastert and Alger Hiss were safe from prosecution on the underlying crime because the statute of limitations had run.  Another classic case might be someone of the underlying crime who is later determined to have concealed evidence or intimidated a witness.  Double jeopardy prevents a second prosecution for the underlying crime, but witness intimidation and tampering with the evidence are separate crimes. Or there may be a heinous act that no one ever thought to outlaw.  All irrelevant in the case of the Stormy Daniels payment, since there was no underlying crime.
3. The lesser crime must be clear-cut.  It may involve stretching the law beyond its original purpose, but there can be little doubt that the accused committed the lesser crime. It was beyond dispute that Al Capone had somehow accumulated a vast fortune, or that he never paid taxes on it.  A simple bank audit made clear that Denny Hastert has engaged in structuring (breaking a large payment into smaller payments to conceal its nature).  And Alger Hiss actually admitted to perjury.  I will admit to not knowing anything about New York's financial records law.  There may very well be a clear-cut misdemeanor case there.  But deceptive financial records are only a felony under New York law if done to conceal another crime.  Any by all accounts, that latter is dubious at best.

Of course, none of this is to admit that Trump has committed serious crimes. They just are not related to the New York prosecution. And that case that may genuinely be comparable to prosecuting Al Capone for tax evasion is the pending Georgia indictment for attempting to overturn the election there.

Consider how the criteria apply:

1. A serious underlying crime.  The attempt to pressure the Georgia Secretary of State into changing the election result was one sub-part of a vast, multi-state scheme to overturn the election and perpetuate the loser in power, subverting our entire system of elective government.  In effect, an attempted autogolpe.  A very serious crime indeed!
2. That cannot be prosecuted.  I don't know if that one applies. But it is possible that Trump's acts were so unthinkable that nobody thought to outlaw them.  No one ever thought to forbid fake electors from certifying themselves in violation of state election outcomes.  There may or may not be federal laws that can be stretched to apply.  Any Trump may or may not have had a provable role. There is ample evidence that Trump wanted to use the machinery of the federal government to overturn the election outcome, which is clearly a crime. But, to state the obvious, Trump was not successful in using the federal government to overturn the election because the federal government at all levels fiercely resisted, hence complaints about the "deep state."*  For anyone else, such an attempt, even if unsuccessful, would probably be prosecutable as criminal solicitation or conspiracy.  But it is not so clear for a President.  After all, Presidents need wide leeway to consider a broad range of options, including some options that are ultimately rejected on legal grounds.  At what point does loose talk about an illegal proposal cross the line into criminal solicitation or conspiracy?  I don't know.  But it is certainly possible that Trump stayed on the right side of the line.  Likewise, standards for criminal incitement are extremely high, and Trump's speech to the angry crowd probably did not meet the standards. 
3. An easily proven lesser crime.  Calling up the Georgia Secretary of State and asking him to change the result is about as clear-cut as you can get.

Finally, even if some part of the federal attempt to overturn the election does turn out to be indictable, it will almost certainly be for a less serious crime than insurrection or sedition.  So any prosecution related to the attempt to overturn the election will be an Al Capone for tax evasion prosecution.

Let's not prosecute on extraneous matters.

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*

 

Trump's Supporters Really Concern Me

 

Whatever one thinks of the New York indictment against Donald Trump, the reaction by his supporters has been truly alarming.  It would be one thing if they focused on the flimsiness of the charges, the degree to which the law had to be strained to bring them, the lack of an underlying crime, maybe a reference or two to the precedents of Monica Lewinsky or John Edwards (supported at the time by Democrats), that technical crimes undertaken to conceal a sexual impropriety are simply not a public concern, and the obvious conclusion from all this that the prosecution must be politically motivated. All of this is, in my opinion, a good point.

There are clear advantages to taking this approach.  It appeals to a broad cross-section of the public, including many Trump critics, and would therefore give Trump defenders the moral high ground of claiming to speak for (most of) the people. It would divide Trump opponents between critics of the indictment and defenders of the indictment.  It casts Democratic defenders of the indictment as hypocrites, since they presumably took a different view when it was Bill Clinton or John Edwards in the hot seat.  And really, there would be no need to say anything further, at least for now.

But, of course, there is one problem with this approach.

It admits the hypothetical possibility that an indictment could be legitimate if the crimes were more serious.  And we all know that possibility is considerably more than hypothetical.  So Republicans are now in the ridiculous position of arguing that ex-Presidents should be exempt from all prosecution.  (What if they shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue?).  Or else that the act of running for President should exempt the candidate from prosecution. And this on behalf of a man who led chants of "Lock her up!"