Inspector General: Russia Investigation Wasn’t an FBI Witch Hunt

Like Hitler and the Nazi regime, Donald Trump works to use two propaganda efforts to subvert the truth and to play to his knuckle dragging base.  One is to attack the independent media. that endeavors to report the truth regardless of whether or not it is popular with Trump and what Hillary Clinton aptly referred to as the "deplorables" in his base.  As a recent piece in the New York Times noted: Hitler and the Nazis had found the simple slogan they repeated again and again to discredit reporters: “Lügenpresse.” . . . .  which in English is “fake news.”  The other method is to promote conspiracy theories and outright lies.  One of the latter is Trump's refrain that the entire Russiagate investigation was a "witch hunt" and therefore should not be believed by his cult- like true believers. With the release of the Inspector General report, the Trump "witch hunt" mantra against the FBI suffered a major blow - much to the chagrin of Attorney General William Barr, perhaps, in my opinion, one of the most corrupt individuals to ever serve as Attorney General. A piece in New York Magazine looks at the inspector general report. Here are article excerpts:

Throughout both the Mueller and the subsequent House Intelligence Committee investigations of Trump campaign and administration dealings with foreign governments, [Trump's] the president’s allies have relentlessly promoted a counter-narrative full of lurid conspiracy theories. They all date back to an alleged “deep state” plot in 2016 to keep Trump from becoming president by using allegations allegedly planted by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to accuse his campaign of colluding with Russia.

A long-awaited Department of Justice report in response to these claims from Inspector General Michael Horowitz has largely exonerated the FBI of charges of political bias, while criticizing the reliance on the so-called Steele Dossier in the agency’s application for a wiretap on one key Trump operative, foreign-policy adviser Carter Page. Horowitz’s boss Attorney General William Barr is not happy about it, according to the Washington Examiner . . . . Barr made clear his displeasure with Monday’s report almost as soon as it came out.

While Horowitz suggested that the wiretap on Page was not properly secured, he views that sideshow as irrelevant to the bigger investigation and does not think it represents some sort of coordinated effort to invent a scandal designed to damage Trump’s campaign, as Politico explains in its takeaways from the IG report: . . . Horowitz found that the Crossfire Hurricane team — the codename agents gave to the Russia inquiry — did not receive Steele’s election reporting materials until after the investigation had already been opened using information about Papadopoulos the team received from a foreign ally.

Horowitz also found that the decision to pursue an investigation was above the pay grades of the “FBI Lovebirds” Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the key figures in the right-wing counter-narrative whose emails to each other displayed hostility to Trump.

Horowitz will appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee later this week to discuss his findings, and you can be sure Republicans will make every effort to link his criticisms of the pre-Trump Justice Department and FBI to the “witch hunt” they are alleging during impeachment proceedings currently in the hands of the House Judiciary Committee. But it looks like slim pickings for those claiming that candidate or President Trump is an innocent victim of partisan shenanigans.

Trump, the "Lying Press" and the Nazis

As noted many times on this blog, history has many lessons it can teach us.  Most importantly, it can warn us of dangerous trends and individuals, provided we are willing to listen and not blinded by our own closed mindedness, prejudices, and often intellectual laziness.  A professor of modern German history and European History at the University of Louisiana has a piece in Salon that focuses on Donald Trump's endless lies and, more frighteningly, his attacks of the press as he pushes an authoritarian agenda, seeks to diminish American institutions and marginalize and demonize anyone who opposes him or simply reports the truth.  The parallels with Hitler's Nazi Germany are disturbing although one historian friend views Trump more as a Mussolini as opposed to a Hitler.  Let's hope that view proves correct.  Meanwhile, emboldened by Trump's rhetoric and lies, The Independent reports:

In Detroit, an armed white supremacist group called the National Socialist Movement (NSM) descended on the annual Motor City Pride Festival, where they held placards, gave Nazi salutes and displayed armbands with swastikas.

The caption of this post comes from the Salon piece which is a must read.  Here are article highlights:  

At an election rally in Cleveland in October 2016, two supporters of Donald Trump were captured on video shouting, “Lügenpresse!” What was going on? Why would people who are looking to Trump to “Make America Great Again,” be shouting a German word at one of his events? And what did it mean? The “lying press” — an idea at the heart not only of Trump’s campaign and presidency, but of his entire worldview.

The news media, Trump complains, treats him unfairly. It does not report all the positive news about his campaign and then his presidency. Instead, he insists, it lies to the public, publishing what he calls “fake news.”

Within the confines of Trump’s community of supporters, stories critical of Trump are seen as lies, as phony left-wing propaganda. They’re not to be believed. As it turns out, the use of the term Lügenpresse happens to be quite illuminating. It sheds light on a connection between Trump’s political approach and that of Hitler in the 1930s, when one also heard that word used quite often.

The term Lügenpresse has its origins in Germany during the First World War. Initially intended to counter allied propaganda campaigns (a good deal of which we now know to have actually been accurate) the Nazis used it to attack hostile media.

As with so much of Nazi propaganda, the description of an opposition press based on lies was a classic case of projection. Hitler based his whole approach to politics on lies—something he made no secret of, having described his strategy of the “Big Lie” in his memoir, "Mein Kampf." Hitler lied to officials about his party’s use of violence, he lied about his own past, he lied to foreign leaders about his intentions, and, of course, his whole understanding of the world was based on the lie of a global Jewish conspiracy. Truth would never get in the way of Hitler’s goals.

Trump is also a man who has never let the truth get in the way of what he wants to say and who projects his own dishonest nature onto others. And like Hitler, he’s made no secret of the fact that he lies — bragging to a group of Republican donors that he simply made up numbers to argue about trade policy with the Canadian prime minister.

Trump launched his political career, in fact, on a lie: the story that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and was also possibly a Muslim. And since assuming the presidency his dishonesty has reached breathtaking proportions. In his first 828 days in office, Trump has delivered 10,111 false or misleading claims according to the fact-checkers at the Washington Post. He needed 601 days to reach 5,000, but only 226 to make it to 10,000 — a feat that required an eye-popping average of 23 lies per day. And the topics about which he lies span the spectrum.

And regardless of how often and how definitively they’ve been revealed as lies, he continues to repeat them, over and over.

Once in power, Hitler continued his campaign against the Lùgenpresse. On the one hand, he had the newspapers of his main political opposition — the Communists and Socialists — forcibly shut down. In doing so, the police arrested many of the editors and sent them to concentration camps. . . .  the Nazis often took over the facilities and equipment in order to publish their own papers, and with them, their own version of reality.

Early on this involved an effort to counter foreign papers that reported on the violence and persecution already taking place under the new Hitler government. The regime offered instead its own alternative reality, calling such criticisms and stories “atrocity propaganda.”

Though he has not taken such extreme steps yet, Trump has made clear his desire to restrict and ultimately silence critical media sources. One of the more common themes of his Twitter activity involve attacks on various news outlets as “fake.” He repeatedly calls out and attacks journalists for critical reports or for not complimenting him. He’s belittled and denigrated reporters such as Katy Tur, Megyn Kelly and Mika Brzezinski, referred to Don Lemon as “the dumbest man on television,” called CNN a network of liars, and actually ordered one CNN correspondent out of the White House for asking a question he didn’t like.

[T]he Justice Department told Time Warner in November 2017 that it would not receive approval for its planned merger with AT&T unless it sold off CNN, a network that’s been a frequent target of Trump’s ire. The message is clear. If a media company wants fair treatment when it comes to regulations or approval of prospective business deals, it ought to think twice before airing anything critical of [Trump] the President. And this is not the only danger of a government that rejects the truth and peddles in lies.

When a regime camouflages its true actions and intentions in lies and euphemisms, it can provide cover for the most horrifying measures. The Holocaust is a perfect example. Instead of deportations to death camps in German-occupied Poland, the Nazi government spoke of "relocations" and "work camps" in the east. . . . For those who did not want to know the truth of what was really happening to their former neighbors and fellow citizens, they could choose to believe the rhetoric. How many people would want to believe that their own government was systematically murdering millions of unarmed men, women and children in their name? It was much easier on their conscience to choose a more palatable reality and therefore that much easier to justify doing nothing to stop it.

At its heart, the use of "fake news" by the Trump Administration is illiberal, anti-democratic, and in fact, authoritarian. Dismissal of critical news as “fake” implies that criticism of the president is illegitimate, inappropriate and even unpatriotic. It serves to confuse. . . . . Trump’s attempts to obliterate reasonable understanding of truth give rise to such confusion and hesitation. And hesitation allows him time to consolidate his power.

Assaults on the truth also serve to divide. On one side they pit those who choose to believe the president and therefore do not accept the reality of any news outlets critical of him. On the other side are those who understand the role of journalism in a democracy and can discern true stories from false. Those within the boundaries of the Trump media world see those fake news" purveyors — and their consumers — as hindering the president and actively working against him. They are, as Donald Trump himself so shockingly asserted in February of 2017, “the enemy of the American people.” Should anyone be surprised then when a man calls into CNN to deliver racist diatribes and threatens to “gun you all down?” Or that someone would actually deliver on such threats? Should anyone have been surprised when a gunman opened fire in the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, in June 2018?

The point at which politics shifts from truth to lies, from opponents to enemies, is the point at which democracy dies.

America Is Hurtling Toward the Breaking Point

A piece in U.S. News & World Reports from a couple of months ago laid out a frightening reminder of how democracies die and draws parallels between Adolph Hitler and Donald Trump's attacks on the free press and independent media.  In both cases, claiming the press is lying and attacking news outlets is a key mechanism in duping an intellectually lazy and/or bigoted populace into giving up their civil rights.  Here are article highlights:

[Trump] and his advisers fomented Lugenpresse – the concept of "lying press" made famous by the Nazi party in Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power -- to undermine journalists covering his presidential campaign at every stop. Voters shrugged. Now, nearly a year into his administration, those efforts are bearing fruit. Nearly half the country believes the media lies and makes things up about him, calling into question their reliability on everything else as well. . . . . The process was accelerated by Facebook and Google, two companies that control information access for millions of people and allowed fake news to be presented, unfiltered, to voters around the country.

Social scientists long ago established an unfortunate truth about history: We are condemned to forget its most important lessons - and it can happen in just one generation. We are now witnessing this forgetfulness again in nation after nation. White privilege, anti-immigration fear and economic and national insecurity are upending political systems around the world with no end (yet) in sight.

We are now more than a generation away from Nazi Germany and the roots of the conflict that precipitated World War II. New generations have forgotten how and why the Nazi party rose to absolute authority in Germany. When we forget, what worked then will work again.

Today, in the U.S., we are just one nuclear confrontation away from becoming a nation where martial law and a military-controlled mass surveillance state will be viewed as a relief by many citizens. Destroying the media's credibility plays an important part in making that scenario a reality.

To put it very simply, there were five basic, highly effective moves that allowed Hitler's rise:

First, the Nazi party allowed a coarse, uneducated leader to rise to prominence on a white privilege, nationalist wave. Second, the conservative establishment party foolishly thought it could appease him by sharing power. Third, that same Nazi party destroyed media credibility to silence critics. Fourth, the Nazis literally burned the establishment congress to the ground. Fifth, it seized authoritarian power by using unchallenged propaganda to precipitate an existential threat allegedly emanating from those outside the white Aryan race and outside the nation's borders.

It is the third stage – destroying the credibility of the mainstream media -- – that's happening right now, and the Politico/Morning Consult poll shows it's working. Whether it continues to work in the next one, two or three years is still very much an open question . . . But if this third stage works, and if GOP leaders allow it to stand, then the fourth and fifth stages we saw in Nazi Germany aren't all that far behind. 

The second half of successful propaganda – the "national education" of the people by the government, as Goebbels so accurately portrayed it - relies on a confluence and collaboration between the state and mass media that voters consume. When mass surveillance of the people successfully manages to deliver lies as truth directly to those willing to consume and believe such lies, then the circle is complete.

It is in the context of this disturbing phenomenon that a column in the Washington Post makes clear that America is hurtling towards the precipice and that a significant portion of the population is either oblivious to the danger - think soccer moms and those who say they ignore politics - or fueling its success by watching fake news outlets like Fox News and Breitbart.  Here are column highlights:

Can our government function normally when President Trump tweets about his “button” being bigger than that of an armed adversary? Can there be business as usual when the word “insane” is being applied with increasing frequency to his actions, and when one of his most loyal supporters has called a meeting between Russian operatives and Trump campaign officials “treasonous”?

Only a few days into the new year, there is a striking disconnect in the nation’s capital between the ordinary and the mind-boggling — between the sorts of transactions politicians routinely make to keep the country running and displays of the irrational, the abusive and the menacing emanating from the White House.

There has been an inclination over the past year in both politics and journalism to separate Trump’s tweets and other outbursts from the realities of governing. The idea is that his eruptions are either (a) largely irrelevant forms of his letting off steam or (b) signs of a brilliance beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. What looks to most of us like madness is cast as genius in setting up enemies, signaling his base or distracting us from one thing or another.

But we are past the time when we can believe any of this. Trump is, without question, doing enormous damage to the United States’ standing in the world, and his strategy for political survival is rooted in a willingness to destroy our institutions.

While the news on Wednesday understandably focused on Stephen K. Bannon’s treason comments in a new book by journalist Michael Wolff, 2018 has already produced two remarkable essays explaining the genuine threat the president poses to the nation’s foreign policy interests.

Susan Glasser, writing in Politico, offers frightening detail about how Trump’s stunning lack of knowledge and his indifference to his own obliviousness have led diplomats to label him “insane,” “catastrophic,” “terrifying,” “incompetent” and “dangerous.” Glasser concludes: “When it comes to Trump and the world, it’s not better than you think. It’s worse.”

And Evan Osnos’s carefully reported and much-discussed article in the New Yorker demonstrates how Trump’s policies — but also his pathological focus on himself, his ignorance, and his astonishing susceptibility to flattery — have profoundly weakened the United States’ position in Asia and played into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s reach for international power. . . . And its [a Chinese think tank] analysis uses a term from feudal China, “jiatianxia,” to define Trump’s approach. It means “to treat the state as your possession.”   This insight cuts to the heart of the peril the president represents to our democracy and the rule of law.

Directing the prosecution of political enemies is a habit of autocrats. As Benjamin Wittes, my Brookings Institution colleague, wrote recently, Trump is “normalizing for an entire political movement the politicization and weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence.” Is this the legacy the Republican Party wants? While we sit back and wait on special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to issue his findings, we pray that regular governance will be possible because there is no other choice.

Yet doing so means continuing to absorb Trump’s blows to our system and to our country’s influence around the globe. It also requires great faith in our capacity for restoration despite the readiness of the president’s allies to place his survival above the health of our polity.

[W]e must face the fact that Trump is accelerating us toward the breaking point. No matter how confident we are in our resilience, we should not imagine otherwise. Not even Mueller has a button on his desk he can press to get us out of this without scars.

Be very, very afraid.

The Reality Free World of Trump's Base

A piece in New York Magazine looks at the Kool-Aid drinking supporters of Donald Trump who continue to argue that any news stories - or anything else that reflects poorly on their Dear Leader  - is "fake news."  It's understandable that many find it difficult to admit that their were played for fools or allowed their baser - and racist - instincts to lead them into voting for an unfit individual who increasingly appears to have colluded with an enemy foreign power.   The levels of denial are mind boggling. Indeed, driving back from a court appearance for a client yesterday, I caught a portion  of Michael Smerconish's radio show where he was taking calls from Trump supporters.  Let's just say the abuse showered by some of the callers was shocking.  One caller even welcomed collusion with Russia and said that Putin "was our friend" and that the Russians were "Christians."  Here are highlights from the New York Magazine piece:

With the New York Times breaking the story of a June 2016 meeting involving Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort with a Russian lawyer (according to Trump Jr. himself) who claimed to have damaging information on Hillary Clinton, the excitement is again mounting among Trump critics that (as an ABC headline put it) “fire peers out from Trump-Russia smoke.” 

But, as the various stages of reporting on the meeting in June 2016 have played out, the reaction from Trumpland’s corner of the news media has not betrayed any fear that the president’s own family might have been caught colluding with an agent of a foreign power who sought to tamper with a U.S. national election. The New York Post’s Michael Walsh called the story a “big yawn” and an effort to revive a “resentful smear cooked up in the immediate aftermath of Clinton’s stunning defeat last fall.” . . . . Fox News is focused on undermining the idea that Veselnitskaya was a “Kremlin crony” at the time of the meeting. Kellyanne Conway answered a question from Chris Cuomo on CNN about the new revelations with the deeply entrenched Trump countercharge that his enemies have created the Russia story to distract attention from the administration’s brilliant successes. . . . What bothers me is, there does not seem to be any type of disclosure about Team Trump and Russia that shakes its aggressive self-confidence. And that may be because it had done such a good job of convincing its political base that all criticism is maliciously partisan. At Vox, Lindsay Maizland reports how deeply Trump’s “fake news” charge about the Russia investigation has been absorbed by his fans in precisely those heartland rural and small-town areas that did so much to lift him to the presidency: When I recently visited my hometown and one other small town in Michigan that went for Trump, I talked with residents about the investigation. Nearly every single person I spoke with said the same thing: The media just needs to leave Trump alone, and the Russia investigation is a distraction.

A message of total disdain for media reporting is certainly falling on receptive ears. As a survey from Pew Research records, among self-identified Republicans the approval/disapproval ratio for “national news media” is 10/85. . . . . This gives him, at least among “the base” and its own allied media outlets, an extra layer of heavy insulation against bad news. In Trumpland, to a considerable extent, bad news is by definition fake.

So how does one explain this embrace of ignorance and refusal to see objective reality?  In one of a series of special reports, The Economist looked at Trump supporters and found a sort of "group think" as part of the explanation  The piece is here. Another piece here found that racism had in fact player a role in the behavior of Trump supporters.  Here are highlights from the first piece:

“IT’S A WONDERFUL day under President Trump! Please leave a message,” chirps the answerphone at the Palm Beach Republican Club, which sits on a palm-tree-lined avenue with a crossroads at one end and the turquoise Atlantic at the other. If Mar-a-Lago is Versailles, then this is its local village, whose inhabitants get occasional glimpses of the royal carriages. 

Palm Beach is about as different from rural Kansas as it is possible to be, yet the way the president’s supporters talk about him in both places is much the same: he’s a businessman, he’s trying to do the right thing, Congress is getting in his way, the media are painting him as a bad man which he’s not, and anyway the country was a disaster under Obama. In the time your correspondent spent in West Virginia, Kansas, Georgia, Alabama and Florida talking to mayors of small towns, local Republican Party bosses and ordinary folk who voted for the president, nobody spontaneously raised the lingering scandal over Russian meddling in the presidential election, and hardly anybody showed buyer’s remorse.

Go back 50 years, and if you knew someone’s income, you could predict, with reasonable accuracy, how they would vote. That is no longer true (see chart). From Florida’s golf courses to rural Appalachia, from Midwestern blue-collar suburbs to California’s bougainvillea-lined driveways, where some of the most prominent pro-Trump intellectuals grew up, the tribes that make up the president’s support are bound together by something powerful that has little to do with their economic fortunes.

To be fair, not everybody in America thinks it’s a wonderful day under President Trump.  Plenty of people have . . . . concluded that this president is a threat to the republic.

This special report is not about them. Rather, it is about the roughly 40% or so of voters—some 50m Americans—who have lived through the same events and like what they see. . . . . If you understand how they think about politics and what can change their minds, you can sketch the boundaries of the president’s support or, as his detractors might put it, what he can get away with.

The first thing to note is that most voters pay little attention. Those who follow politics tend to assume that everyone else does, too, but they are mistaken. According to the American National Election Study (ANES), a large survey run by Stanford and the University of Michigan and published in March, 94% of Trump voters did not attend a single political rally, speech or meeting last year. 

So how do the vast majority of voters change their minds? Not by taking each issue, deciding what is important to them, determining which candidate is closer to their preferences and then voting accordingly. In “Democracy for Realists”, the most influential recent book on voting, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels show that the opposite often happens: people may well decide which candidate they like and then ascribe policies they approve of to him or her, often incorrectly. 

Most voters make political choices based largely on what people like them are doing, and rarely change their minds. For example, it is hard to think of two more different candidates, in temperament, style and policy, than Mitt Romney and Donald Trump, yet more than 90% of those who voted for Mr Romney in the presidential election in 2012 also voted for Mr Trump this time, according to the ANES. . . . Those who expect Republican voters to desert Mr Trump each time a scandal breaks should bear this in mind.

This kind of groupthink is so powerful that it shapes the way people see the world around them. Right after the election, and more than two months before Mr Trump took office, Republicans told pollsters that their personal finances were in much better shape than they had been the week before the ballot. Democrats said the opposite. The question had nothing to do with politics, and yet the answers given were somehow conditioned by the election.