Picking up a trope conceived
months back, the melodrama of US governance is looking more and more like
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, with the FBI as the doomed ship Pequod, with
R. Mueller as Captain Ahab and D.J. Trump as the white whale. In the classic
book, of course, the wounded whale finally sends the ship to the bottom, crew
and all (but one), and swims away to the freedom of the deep blue sea.
Forgive the barrage of movie
metaphor, but there’s quite a bit of the 1944 classic Gaslight in
here too — and sure, I’m not the first to notice. In that film, the wicked
Charles Boyer manipulates his wife, played by Ingrid Bergman, into thinking
she’s lost her marbles, in order to cover up his own crimes. That’s how I feel
when I turn to The New York Times every morning — for instance,
today’s edition, with the front-page story Trump
Proxies Drop by Briefings on Use of F.B.I. Informant (which headline
was actually changed on the landing page to Trump’s Lawyer and Chief of
Staff Appear at Briefings on F.B.I.’s Russia Informant).
This mendacious exercise in
manufacturing paranoia seeks to divert the public’s attention from the actual
matter at hand, which is whether the highest higher-ups in the FBI will hand
over documents to congressional committees who demanded them, as they are
entitled to do by the constitution. Trump’s lawyers and General Kelly “dropped
by” to remind the FBI officials that the president, as chief officer of the
executive branch, has instructed the FBI mandarins to comply. In other words,
the Newspaper of Record endeavors to distort the record of events.
That’s disgraceful enough, but they are also abetting what appears more and
more to be a case of mutiny with overtones of sedition.
After many months, the
gaslight is losing its mojo and a clearer picture has emerged of just what
happened during and after the 2016 election: the FBI, CIA, and the Obama White
House colludedand meddled to tilt the outcome and, having failed
spectacularly, then labored frantically to cover up their misdeeds with further
misdeeds. The real election year crimes for which there is actual evidence
point to American officials not Russian gremlins. Having attempted to
incriminate Trump at all costs, these tragic figures now scramble to keep their
asses out of jail.
I say “tragic” because they —
McCabe, Comey, Rosenstein, Strzok, Page, Ohr, et al — probably think
they were acting heroically and patriotically to save the country from a
monster, and I predict that is exactly how they will throw themselves to the
mercy of the jury when they are called to answer for these activities in a
court of law. Of course, they have stained the institutional honor of the FBI
and its parent Department of Justice, but it is probably a healthier thing for
the US public to maintain an extremely skeptical attitude about what has
evolved into a malevolent secret police operation.
The more pressing question is
how all this huggermugger gets adjudicated in a timely manner. Congress has the
right to impeach agency executives like Rod Rosenstein and remove them from
office. That would take a lot of time and ceremony. They can also charge them
with contempt-of-congress and jail them until they comply with committee
requests for documents. Mr. Trump is entitled to fire the whole lot of the ones
who remain. But, finally, all this has to be sorted out in federal court, with
referrals made to the very Department of Justice that has been a main actor in
this tale.
The most mysterious figure in
the cast is the MIA Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, who has become the amazing
invisible man. It’s hard to see how his recusal in the Russia matter prevents
him from acting in any way whatsoever to clean the DOJ house and restore
something like operational norms — e.g. complying with congressional oversight
— especially as the Russia matter itself resolves as a completely fabricated
dodge. The story is moving very fast now. The Pequod is whirling around in the
maelstrom, awaiting the final blow from the white whale’s mighty flukes.
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