Just about every night now, Sean Hannity goes on Fox News to tell his audience that a coup attempt is underway, housed in the FBI and the Justice Department, to overthrow the duly elected president of the United States and to destroy the foundations of our democracy.
“This, so you understand, is so much bigger than Watergate. It’s about our Constitution, about the rule of law,” he said in his harangue Tuesday night. “It has been shredded. All because powerful people at the highest level in the DOJ and the FBI thought they knew better than you as to who should be president. There needs to be serious ramifications if we are going to save our country in all of this. People must be held accountable, they must be investigated, they must be indicted, and probably many of them thrown in jail.”
Now, Hannity is a professional nut, much like his counterparts Lou Dobbs and Alex Jones. He gets paid huge amounts of money to say increasingly nutty things to people who need to believe increasingly nutty things. So in that sense, he’s easy to dismiss.
Ron Johnson, on the other hand, is a Republican senator from Wisconsin and chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. And Johnson is now claiming to have evidence that a “secret society” exists within the FBI that is dedicated to the overthrow of Donald Trump.
“The secret society — we have an informant talking about a group holding secret meetings off-site,” Johnson told Fox News. "There's so much smoke here, there's so much suspicions."
Bob Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia, is chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which oversees the Justice Department and the FBI. Like Johnson, he claims that recovered texts between FBI agents “illustrate a conspiracy on the part of some people, and we want to know a lot more about that.”
Devin Nunes, Republican of California and chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has even produced a secret memo that he claims outlines this vast FBI conspiracy, but so far he has refused to let investigators at the FBI see it so they can assess its validity.
And then of course there’s the president himself, who has been complaining for months about an alleged conspiracy against him within the FBI. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump has even gone so far as to accuse one longtime FBI agent of committing treason, a crime that is punishable by death.
This is grave, grave stuff. If it proves to be true, then yes, those involved should go to prison, and for a long, long time. Let’s investigate, honestly and completely. Let’s also release the Nunes memo, so its claims can be dissected and assessed.
But if this is untrue, if these momentous allegations of high-level treason and conspiracy are being used as mere political chaff to cloud public understanding, then that is almost equally grave. If these charges prove to be groundless, if they have ruined careers and reputations in service to a grotesque lie, then those responsible ought to be permanently exiled from public life and treated as the laughingstocks and charlatans that they would be.
I know which side of that wager I’d take.
Look at the nature of the allegations. These people are not only asking Americans to believe that some of our nation’s top criminal and counterintelligence experts fomented a conspiracy against the president, they are asking us to believe that people who are experts at spying upon terrorists and criminals, people deeply attuned to document trails and other evidence, were stupid enough to openly discuss that conspiracy in texts sent on government equipment.
Look also at the track record of these people, which is full of half-baked conspiracy claims that turn out to be groundless or immense exaggerations. To cite just one of many examples, they made all kinds of allegations against Hillary Clinton about the Benghazi tragedy, and in a nationally televised 10-hour hearing, they got exposed as bumbling fools by Clinton, who coolly beat back their attacks. Seven congressional committees launched investigations into Clinton; one after the other, all came up empty.
Finally, look at the evidence that they offer for these earth-shaking allegations, which is basically none. It is all innuendo, mutterings, leaps of logic and dark suggestions. If you’re going to claim the existence of a conspiracy to overturn the Constitution and oust a president, you need a lot more solid foundation than two lovers gossiping in texts about Trump’s failings.
It’s curious: On one hand, Trump claims to have no fear of the FBI investigation, and to be confident that it will clear him. On the other hand, he is leading a concerted, highly aggressive and inflammatory effort to undermine the credibility and legitimacy of the investigation and the agencies conducting it, as if he is terrified by what it might find.
The dynamic is familiar, if you think about it. Think back to the late days of the 2016 election, when Trump was claiming repeatedly, at rallies and on Twitter, that the election was rigged against him, that if he lost it was because the election had somehow been stolen.
Trump had no evidence for that claim, none whatsoever. But he was preparing his Plan B, and preparing his followers to reject the election results that he feared were forthcoming. In his mind, it would be better to poison the faith of his followers in our democratic system than to allow their faith in him personally to be compromised. And if he didn’t have facts or evidence, he had the will and the shamelessness to make such claims, and an audience eager to believe him.
That’s all he has today as well.
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