Here We Go Again

 In 2017, when Donald Trump took office for the first time,  a story broke that some suspected the Russian government of having assisted his campaign and taken steps to help his election.  That led quickly to the appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel and a two-year media frenzy about Russiagate, which fizzled when Mueller found no evidence of active collusion between Russia and that campaign.  The Russians had apparently hacked into the Democratic National Committee email server and had made some emails public during the campaign, but evidence for anything more was lacking.  The leaders of the intelligence community in the new Trump Administration, led by Tulsi Gabard, are now gathering documents and building a case that the FBI and CIA doubted the premise from the beginning, but that the Obama White House, in its last weeks in power, pressed them to make a statement taking it more seriously.  They are even talking about legal action against former President Obama, conveniently forgetting, it seems, that the Supreme Court did Donald Trump a huge service last year when it essentially exempted presidents from criminal liability for any official act during their term of office.

Simultaneously, the Trump Administration has enraged some its most committed supporters by suddenly declaring that there was no interesting information in the files of the investigation of the late Jeffrey Epstein--months after assuring the nation that they were preparing devastating revelations.  The controversy has started a feud between Attorney General Bondi and some of the new leadership of the FBI, and the administration is now trying to regain the initiative by trying to release the files of the grand jury investigation of Epstein.  And in the last week, our two leading newspapers, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, have added fuel to the fire. The Journal described a salacious and suggestive birthday card that Trump supposedly sent Epstein in 2003, without actually reproducing the card of explaining how reporters saw it. The Times, quoting media stories from roughly the same time, makes a strong case that Trump and Epstein were partners in womanizing, backed by accounts from at least one targeted woman.  Trump has denied everything and filed a $2 billion law suit against the Journal and I will be very surprised if a suit against the Times does not follow shortly.

This blog aims at increasing understanding of current events, not at the rather fanciful goal of changing them.  In my opinion, this is one of many instances in which the Trump administration and our major media outlets are simply building upon trends that have been around for decades--in this case, since Watergate.  Having helped to expose one administration genuinely guilty of corrupting our electoral process and trying to use intelligence agencies to save itself, reporters and editors decided that this was their most important role.  They gave into, and increased, the sense among the American people that our political leadership could not be trusted about anything.  The now-repealed independent counsel statute passed after Watergate got the legal profession more deeply involved in this process and provided the media with long-running stories.  The next really big scandal--although not the next scandal--was the Iran-Contra Affair, which culminated in the use of pardons by the Bush I administration to exonerate a few convicted conspirators (such as Oliver North and Elliot Abrams)  and at least one higher-up threatened with an indictment (Caspar Weinberger.)  Earlier, Watergate had already bequeathed a most unfortunate innovation into our legal system: the general pardon that Gerald Ford gave to Richard Nixon for any offenses he might have committed as president.  That, I believe, was the first such pardon ever given to any American, but it has now been given repeatedly by presidents including Bush I, Trump, and Joe Biden.  Bill Clinton spent years dealing with Whitewater and was eventually impeached for lying about his personal life, after Ken Starr had decided to include that subject in his mandate.  George Bush II and Barack Obama escaped any similar imbroglios, but Trump struggled with scandals all through his first administration.  Since Watergate, however, every president, including Trump, has managed to avoid any truly critical consequences of any of these investigations.  That has not dulled the media's appetite for scandal.

There could be information in the FBI files bearing on Donald Trump.  He evidently hung out quite a bit with Epstein.  There is no way, however, to know.  What we do know is that no information would really add much to what we already know about Trump thanks to the testimony of a number of women and the Access Hollywood tape.  And most important of all, we also know that half the country doesn't care about the topic at all, and that no new evidence will turn any Republicans in Congress against him.  Once again, as with Russia in the first term, our leading media outlets may decide that if they talk enough about the situation, something good will happen.  I don't think that it will.   The Journal and the Times, one would think, would have considered the possibility of a lawsuit and are ready to contest it, but the new CBS/Paramount precedent, in which the network caved for financial reasons rather than invest in a lengthy defense of its 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, is worrisome.  Trump now seems determined to use any weapon at his disposal to get his way about anything that comes up, either at home or abroad.  He thinks that the presidency, his financial resources, and the nation's economic power should allow him to make any law firm, university, newspaper or foreign government bend to his will.  We need institutions to stand up to him, but picking losing battles is not the way to do it.

The column inches and evening news minutes devoted to Epstein would be better spent, in my opinion, telling the American people exactly what is happening on the immigration front, to the economy, and to various parts of the federal government.  The major media have been trying to convince the whole country that Trump doesn't deserve to be president for ten years now, and it hasn't worked.  We need the media to help us think seriously about where our economy is going and what the American people really need.  We could use more foreign coverage.  The media, I think, should focus above all on reporting what is, not what they think should or shouldn't be.  That is properly the job of our elected officials, and it has been a long time since the media tried to let them do it.