Russia Redux?
Progressives are once again hoping for the worst possible outcome to the January 6 investigation -- even when the evidence is not there.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
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Beware Clickbait Journalism
Over the past 48 hours, social media has been ablaze with the latest reporting on the January 6 insurrection. According to a blockbuster report in Rolling Stone, several Republican House members, including Rep. Paul Gosar, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rep, Andy Biggs, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, and Rep. Lauren Boebert, were allegedly involved in the planning for the rallies that took place that day in Washington, and around the country.
But there is good reason to be wary of the reporting in the piece. Take, for example, the story’s lede:
“As the House investigation into the January 6 attack heats up, some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the January 6 events that turned violent.”
There are a few problems that become more evident as you delve into the piece.
First, the sources for this piece are not only anonymous but they were both involved in organizing and planning events on January 6. So they are not exactly the most reputable of sources. Second, their claims are uncorroborated. Obviously, it’s sometimes necessary to rely on anonymous sources. Still, considering that both of these individuals have every reason to shift blame to others, it’s hard to take what they say seriously, particularly since it is unconfirmed.
Third, there’s nothing really new here. Since January, there have been allegations that Republican House members played a role in Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and helped plan the January 6 rallies.
The passage below is from a Washington Post report dies after the insurrection:
Weeks before a mob of President Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, right-wing activist Ali Alexander told his followers he was planning something big for Jan. 6
Alexander, who organized the “Stop the Steal” movement, said he hatched the plan — coinciding with Congress’s vote to certify the electoral college votes — alongside three GOP lawmakers: Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Mo Brooks (Ala.) and Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.), all hard-line Trump supporters.
“We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting,” Alexander said in a since-deleted video on Periscope highlighted by the Project on Government Oversight, an investigative nonprofit. The plan, he said, was to “change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.”
Once again, consider the source. It’s also important to note that all GOP members implicated in this reporting have consistently denied the allegations. In Rolling Stone’s defense, they highlighted Alexander’s quotes from last January — and pointed out that the involvement of Republican House members is not news.
While it was already clear members of Congress played some role in the Jan. 6 events and similar rallies that occurred in the lead-up to that day, the two sources say they can provide new details about the members’ specific roles in these efforts.
But, in reality, there isn’t much in the way of new details, other than the sources’ assertion that Rep. Paul Gosar “dangled the possibility of a ‘blanket pardon’ in an unrelated ongoing investigation to encourage them to plan the protests.”
“Our impression was that it was a done deal,” the organizer says, “that he’d spoken to the president about it in the Oval … in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support.”
It’s not clear why Gosar would need to make such a promise since organizing political protests is not illegal. But considering that no pardons were forthcoming and Rep. Gosar seems a tad prone to hyperbole, it’s hard to imagine that the White House made such an offer. At the very least, Rolling Stone was not able to independently verify these claims.
Finally, there's this from the lede:
Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent.
Notice what’s happening here? There’s an implicit suggestion that these GOP members were also responsible for the violence on that day. This charge has been circulating for a while. Back on January 30, Democratic members of Congress asked for an investigation into whether their GOP colleagues organized “reconnaissance” tours of the Capitol for the insurrectionists. Democratic partisans have latched on to these accusations and claimed that the Capitol attack was coordinated with House Republicans.
But Rolling Stone makes no such assertion. In fact, the piece doesn’t address the violence much at all. Nonetheless, the implication is unmistakable, and more than a few Democrats took that baton and ran.
I realize that I’m making what might seem like a minor criticism, but Democrats are getting way ahead of their skis here. In the nearly ten months since January 6, there’s been little evidence that the insurrection was planned, no less supported by members of Congress.
To be sure, that doesn’t obviate the responsibility of those who organized the January 6 rally in DC — and certainly doesn’t provide a get out of jail free card to the president who instigated the mob that invaded the Capitol. But that also doesn’t mean a crime was committed. Organizing the violence is different than helping organize a rally -- and Rolling Stone implicitly connects the two.
Liberals should be wary of making the accusation that organizing a rally or event (no matter how atrocious the cause), which leads to violence, implicates the organizers or planners in responsibility. Indeed, Republicans used precisely these types of arguments to attack Democrats for supporting Black Lives Matter protests that turned violent and have even passed laws to that effect (and no, I’m not making a moral equivalency between BLM and “Stop the Steal” rallies, but rather pointing out how one’s political rivals can easily turn the Democrats’ arguments back on them).
Russia Redux
At this point, you might be wondering why I’m spending so much time on this issue. It’s a fair question! The simple answer is that the conversation around January 6 is increasingly reminding me of the coverage on the Russia-Trump investigation. For years, Democratic partisans pinned their hopes on a smoking gun that would show the Trump campaign had directly colluded with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election. Well-timed leaks to prominent DC reporters further fed the speculation. So too did elaborate arguments from journalists about the potential nature of Trump’s involvement. Maybe he was a Russian agent? Maybe Moscow was blackmailing him with compromising material — a claim made in the infamous Steele Dossier? Maybe members of Trump’s staff were working directly with Vladimir Putin? Every time a member of Trump’s inner circle pled guilty, there was fevered speculation that they would turn on the president and finally tell the truth about Russia.
That never happened.
So, when the Mueller report came out, the White House claimed vindication because there was no evidence of direct collusion between the campaign and Moscow. Of course, Mueller’s investigation found that the Trump campaign was far from innocent:
Trump campaign officials “welcomed” Russia’s “systematic” efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.
The Trump campaign built a “messaging strategy” around emails stolen from John Podesta, a key aide to Hillary Clinton.
Trump publicly asked the Russian government to hack Clinton’s emails. Soon after, Russian hackers tried to do precisely that.
The campaign received, via Roger Stone, advance notice that Wikileaks would be making these emails public.
Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, provided Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence operative, with internal polling data and briefed him about the campaign’s political strategy in key battleground states.
All this sure sounds like collusion, but it didn’t approach the level of criminality, which is one of several reasons that the report’s conclusions didn’t live up to the hype.
January 6 risks following a similar pattern. Rather than focus on the deplorable fact that members of Congress tried to overturn a free and fair election, partisans are pursuing a much bigger, yet unlikelier possibility — that members of Congress helped organize the day’s violence.
Perhaps at some point, we will find out that Republican members of Congress did play a role in the insurrection. But the Rolling Stone piece doesn’t make that argument. Indeed, it doesn’t even try to. Instead, it makes that implicit argument to get clicks and attention. There’s plenty of wrongdoing to go around when it comes to January 6. Indeed, the bigger story of that day is the GOP’s continuing efforts to whitewash the violence — and present it as defensible or even patriotic. Arguably, that’s a more important story than what Gosar, Taylor-Greene et al. did to help organize and plan the January 6 rallies. Focus on those “crimes” rather than chasing a white whale they are unlikely to catch.
What’s Going On?
I have a new piece up today at MSNBC on the Republican Party’s complete absence from any of the nation’s ongoing policy debates.
While Democrats are fighting over the details of policy proposals that could create the nation’s first paid family and medical leave program, make pre-K universal, lower the cost of child care, expand Medicare and prepare the nation for the effects of climate change, the GOP is contentedly sitting on the sidelines, throwing spitballs and complaining that the whole thing is going to cost too much money.
Republican campaigns are increasingly defined by a laser-like focus on cultural issues, such as "critical race theory" or nonexistent voter fraud, with barely a mention of serious substantive policies. None of this is even considered unusual or surprising anymore. It’s just the way things are in politics today …
… The national news media simply accepts that the default Republican position on any and all policy issues is steadfast opposition with no alternative proposals. To evoke a phrase by a former Republican president, the modern GOP is profiting from the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Musical Interlude
I heard this tune on the radio today, and it’s just so good! Without question, it is the best thing REM ever put on tape.
https://youtu.be/IyfDH0HKLjs...in case you never heard the original by the Clique.