Democrats, Liberals Catch McCarthyistic Fever – Consortium News
Exclusive: Democrats and liberals are so angry about President Trump that they are turning to McCarthyistic tactics without regard to basic fairness or the need to avoid a costly and dangerous New Cold War, notes Daniel Lazare.
By Daniel Lazare
America is a strange place and the blow-up over Mike Flynns conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak is making it even stranger. Liberals are sounding like conservatives, and conservatives like liberals.
Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican who serves on the House Judiciary Committee, made perfect sense when he remarked on CNN concerning the intelligence leaks that are now turning into a flood:Weve got to have some facts to work with here.And what troubles me is that there are people within the intelligence community that disagree with President Trump [and] that dont want to see his administration succeed. General Flynn has been subject to a political assassination here regardless of what he did or didnt say to President Trump or Vice President Pence.
Quite right. Breitbart News Joel B. Pollak sounded similarly sensible in asking whether our nations intelligence services were involved in what amounts to political espionage against the newly-elected government.So did right-wing talk-show host Michael Savage in describing the demonization of Putin, Russia, and Flynn on the part of neocons, the intel community, and Democrats who want constant antagonism with Russia.
Considering the craziness we usually get from such sources, it was all disconcertingly sane.On the liberal side, however, the hysteria has been non-stop.In full prosecutorial mode, The New Yorkers Ryan Lizza demanded to know:
Did Trump instruct Flynn to discuss a potential easing of sanctions with Russia? Did Flynn update Trump on his calls with the Russian Ambassador? Did Trump know that Flynn lied to Pence about those contacts? What did the White House counsel do with the information that he received from [Acting Attorney General Sally] Yates about Flynn being vulnerable to blackmail?
At The Nation, Joan Walsh was thrilled to hear the media asking the old Watergate question about what the president knew and when.
Weve said it before and well say it again, declared Bill Moyers and Michael Winship at Alternet: there MUST be an investigation by an independent, bipartisan commission of Russias ties to Donald Trump and his associates and that nations interference in our elections.
At The Intercept, the perennially self-righteous Glenn Greenwald said intelligence agents are wholly justified in leaking inside information because [a]ny leak that results in the exposure of high-level wrongdoing as this one did should be praised, not scorned and punished.
Over the Top
Finally, there was The New York Times, which, in Thursdays lead editorial, compared the Flynn contretemps to Watergate and Iran-Contra, expressed shock and incredulity that members of Mr. Trumps campaign and inner circle were in repeated contact with Russian intelligence officials, and called for a congressional investigation into whether the White House has been taken over by Moscow:
Coming on top of credible information from Americas intelligence agencies that Russiatried to destabilize and influence the 2016 presidential campaign, these latest revelations are more than sufficient reason for Congress to investigate what Moscow has been up to and whether people at the highest levels of the United States government have aided and abetted the interests of a nation that has tried to thwart American foreign policy since the Cold War.
High-level wrongdoing!Colluding with the enemy!Shock and incredulity!Its enough to make a concerned citizen reach for the nearest bottle of 151-proof rum. But its all nonsense.Liberals are working themselves into a crisis mode on the basis of zero evidence.
Lets begin with what The Nations Joan Walsh regards as the key issue: what do we know and when did we know it?
Well, we know that on Thursday, Dec. 29, Barack Obama expelled 35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives for allegedly interfering with the presidential election and imposed sanctions on Russias two leading intelligence services.We also know that Flynn had called the Russian ambassador a day earlier to discuss sanctions in general and that although he never made explicit promises of sanctions relief, according to unnamed government officials cited by the Times, he appeared to leave the impression it would be possible.
In Times-speak, appeared to leave the impression means that the paper is unable to pin down anything that Flynn did that was specifically wrong, but still believes that the conversation was somehow unseemly.
According to The Washington Post, the key phone call came after Obamas Dec. 29 decision to expel the Russian diplomats when Kislyak reached Flynn by phone while the national security advisor-designate and his wife were vacationing at a beachside resort in the Dominican Republic. As a veteran intelligenceofficer,The Post said,Flynn must have known that a call with a Russian official in Washington would be intercepted by the U.S. government, pored over by FBI analysts and possibly even shared with the White House.
In any event, whatever he told Kislyak must have been reassuring sinceVladimir Putin announced later that day that he would not engage in a tit-for-tat retaliation by expelling U.S. diplomats.
Getting Payback
Irritated bysuch maturity, the American state security organs, as the KGB and other Soviet intelligence services were once called, pounced.Having intercepted the Russian ambassadors phone call, the FBI relayed the contents to Obamas Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, who authorized it to interrogate Flynn about the conversation. Flynn may have lied or not given a complete account or forgotten some of the details about what he and Kislyak discussed. He also may have given a similarly incomplete account to Vice President Mike Pence, which apparently upset Pence and led to Flynn beingtossed overboard.
But if Trump and his team thoughtthat would satisfythe sharks, they were wrong. The press went into a feeding frenzy.But the substance of the complaint against Flynn adds up to very little.
AsObama administration holdovers in the Justice Departmentsearched for a legaljustificationwithwhich to accuse Flynn of wrongdoing,the only thing theycouldcome up with wasthe Logan Act of 1799 forbidding private citizens from negotiating with a foreign government that is in dispute with the United States. Adopted during the presidency of John Adams, the law was prompted by Dr. George Logans unauthorized negotiations with France, contacts that were praised by the Jeffersonians but anathema to the Federalists.
But invokingthe Logan Act in anyinstance is a stretch, much less this one.It has never been used to prosecute anyone; ithas never been tested in a court of law; and its constitutionality couldnt be more questionable.Moreover,if the law is dubious when used to threaten a privatecitizenengaged in unauthorized diplomacy, then using it to go after a designated official of an incoming presidential administration that has been duly elected is many times more so.
As journalist Robert Parry pointsout, the Logan Act has mainly been exploited in a McCarthyistic fashion to bait or discredit peace advocates such as Jesse Jackson for visiting Cuba or House Speaker Jim Wright for trying to end the Contra war in Nicaragua. [See Consortiumnews.coms Trump Caves on Flynns Resignation.]
Of course, theObama holdovers at Justice also said that Flynn might be vulnerable to Russian blackmail. But ifFlynn assumedthat the U.S. intelligence was listening in, then the Russians probably did also, which means that both sides knew that there was no secret dirt to be used against him.
In other words, theres no there there. Yet anti-Trump liberals are trying toconvince the public that its allworse than Watergate.
Strangelovian Flynn
This is not to make Flynn into a martyr of some sort.To the contrary, the man is every bit as nutty as critics say. The Field of Fight: How to Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, the book he co-wrote last year with neocon intellectual Michael Ledeen, is a paranoid fantasy about Muslim extremists ganging up with North Korea, Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela to bring down the United States and Israel.
Flynns appearance at a Feb. 7 White House press briefing in which he announced that we are officially putting Iran on notice over a missile test and then stalked off without taking a single question was so bizarre as to be positively Strangelovian.
But whether Flynn is a criminal is another matter. As Ronn Blitzer observed in a smart article at Lawnewz.com: Between the details of the communications being unclear and the complete lack of historical guidance for prosecutors to work off of, chances are slim that hell face any legal repercussions.
Lying to the FBI is another matter, of course.But grilling someone about whether he violated a moldy old law that should have been repealed centuries ago is the equivalent of giving someone the third degree over whether he washed his hands after using a public restroom.It raises questions about civil liberties and prosecutorial abuse that used to concern liberals before, that is, they went bonkers over Russia.
Moreover, taking a call from the Russian ambassador is not only legal but, with the inauguration only three weeks away, precisely what one would expect a newly designated national security advisor to do.If the call indeed happened while Flynn was on vacation and hencewithout the usual staff support its not that surprising that he might not have hadtotal recall of what was discussed. For FBI agents to question him weeks later and test his memory against their transcript of the conversation seems closer to entrapment than a fair-minded inquiry.
The whole area is a gray zone regardingwhat is and isnt proper for a candidate or an incoming administration to do. Eight years earlier, Barack Obama reached out to foreign leaders to discuss policy changes before he was even elected.
In July 2008, candidate Obama visited Paris to confer with then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy about Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan and NATO.In late November after the election, that is,but before the oath of office he telephoned Afghan President Hamid Karzai to discuss how his country might achieve greater stability.
Yet as Robert Charles notes at the conservative Townhall.com website, no one thought to mention the Logan Act or accuse Obama of overstepping his bounds by engaging in private diplomacy.
As to whether it was Trump who instructed Flynn to talk to the Russian ambassador what Politico calls the key question and what Times columnist Gail Collins says would be super-illegal if true that is also standard operating procedure.
PoorDonald Trump is getting it from both sides, from those who claim that he was unprepared for his new responsibilities (which he was) and from those who claim that he was too pro-active in reaching out to key international players before taking office.
The Crime of Peace
As to Glenn Greenwalds charge that what Flynn did was not only illegal but wrong, all one can say is: what on earth is so terrible about trying to reduce U.S.-Russian tensions?Of all the things that Trump said on the campaign trail, one of the few that was not completely stupid was his call for better relations with Moscow.
After all, Obama had gotten himself into a serious pickle by the end of his administration in the intermarium between the Baltic and the Black Sea. This is whereObama found himself beholden to dangerous nationalist provocateurs from Estonia to Ukraine, where a major NATO arms build-up was making observers increasingly nervousand where serious fighting is now underway.But while one would think that liberals would approve of attempts to defuse a dangerous confrontation, Flynn is under assault for merely giving it a try.
(And what about Greenwalds usual concern about intrusive electronic surveillance? Isnt the Flynn case a classic example of law-enforcement agencies using powers to entrap an individual into a possible criminal violation by seeing if hisrecollection diverges from the officialtranscript of a wire-tapped conversation?)
Finally there is theNew York Times editorial, a farrago of half-truths and unsubstantiated assertions.For instance:
No matter how many timesthe paper of recordinsists that Russiatried to destabilize and influence the 2016 presidential campaign, it should realize that saying something doesnt make it so.In fact, the Director of National Intelligences Jan. 6 report on the alleged hacking was so skimpy that even the Times conceded that it contained no information about how the agencies had collected their data or had come to their conclusions and was therefore bound to be attacked by skeptics.
The charge of repeated contact with Russian intelligence officials is similarly evidence-free.The Times made the charge in afront-page expos on Tuesdaythatwas heavy on innuendo but short on facts.It said that Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials without saying what those contacts were or whether the individuals in question were even aware of whom they were talking to.It added, moreover, that there was no evidence of cooperation with Russian intelligence and that it was unclear whether the conversations had anything to do with Mr. Trump himself.Theres no there there as well.
As for aiding and abetting a nation that has tried to thwart American foreign policy since the Cold War, all one can say isthat theTimes is engaging in classic McCarthyism bycrying treason with zero data to back it up.
Opportunism and Confusion
So, whats going on?The simple answer is that Democrats are seizing on Russia because its an easy target in a capital city where war fever is already rising precipitously.Little thought seems to have been given to where this hysteria might lead. What if Dems get their way by forcing the administration to adopt a tougher policy on Russia? What if something horrendous occurs as a consequencesuch as a real live shooting exchange between U.S. and Russian troops?Will that make Democrats happy? Isthat reallywhat they want?
The truth is that America is in disarray not only politically but ideologically. Once Sen. Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race last summer, voters were faced with a choice between two right-of-center candidates, one (Hillary Clinton) seemingly bent on a pro-war policy regardless of the consequences and another (Donald Trump) who uttered isolationist inanities but nonetheless seemed to sense thata course change was in orderwith regard to Russia, Syria, and perhaps one or two other hot spots.
Since the election, both parties have responded by goingeven farther to the right, Trump by surrounding himself with billionaires and ultra-right fanatics and the Democrats by trying to out-hawk the GOP.
Sanity is in such short supply that the voices of reason now belong to Republicans like Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who told the Washington Post, The big problem I see here is that you have an American citizen who had his phone calls recorded, or House Speaker Paul Ryan who says that reaching out to the Russian ambassador was entirely appropriate.
Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, seems oddly rational in indicating that he will block legislation seeking to prevent Trump from rolling back anti-Russian sanctions.
All in all, its the worst Democratic performance since the Washington Post complained in 1901 that Teddy Roosevelt had fanned the flames of negro aspiration by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House.Whats the point of an opposition when its even more irresponsible than the party in power?
As Phil Ochs sangabout unprincipled liberals back in the 1960s:
Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But Ive grown older and wiser
And thats why Im turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, Im a liberal.
Daniel Lazare is the author of several books includingThe Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy(Harcourt Brace).
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Democrats, Liberals Catch McCarthyistic Fever - Consortium News