"A choice between two parties led by conspiracy theorists and gaslighters"

Post-America has been subjected to a sort of rolling news story for nearly four years now. It's morphed from early rumblings of certain Trump campaign associates being involved in shady dealings, to government investigative bodies proceeding on the basis of a patently ridiculous dossier about supposed lurid behavior by Trump on a trip to Moscow to Comey's evolution from a nice, normal career law enforcement guy to an enigmatic figure whose motives were hard to figure out to a flat-out get-Trump zealot, to the Mueller report's firm conclusion that Trump was not in cahoots with Russian snoops, to the revelation shortly after the report's release that Trump was, however, using a shadow Ukraine-policy team to use the instruments of official power to obtain political advantage, to the resultant impeachment trial we're living through today.

The whole thing is quite arcane, as is generally the case in palace-intrigue stories, and I've not mentioned nearly all the players who have shaped the twists and turns along the way.

What's been needed is a succinct-yet-comprehensive overview, and Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake has provided just that in a Commentary article entitled "The FBI Scandal." He calls it that, for that agency's role in the arc of this whole matter, going clear back to that enigmatic James Comey's taking fifteen minutes at a July 2016 presser to outline the reasons why the Department of Justice should indict Hillary Clinton, only to conclude by saying he would not recommend such an indictment.

The whole thing is, in a sense, an inquiry into what motivates people in highly charged environments to conduct themselves as they do.

I'll provide snippets here, but I recommend reading the whole piece.

He starts by using a particular Trump tweet to illustrate the phenomenon of Trump letting loose with a boneheaded utterance that actually has a kernel of truth at its core:

Donald Trump published the most consequential tweet of his presidency on March 4, 2017. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process,” the chief executive pondered. “This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

The response from Trump’s opposition was outrage. The Washington Post fact checker gave it four Pinocchios. The director of the FBI, James Comey, rebuked Trump and said such a thing had never happened. James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, assured NBC’s Meet the Press that no warrants had been issued in 2016 to surveil members of the Trump campaign.

In a narrow sense, the pushback against Trump’s tweet was correct; Trump himself was never personally the target of an FBI wiretap. In any case, the president doesn’t order such a thing; the FBI applies for a warrant to eavesdrop on Americans from a secret court. No such warrant was issued to bug the president’s offices.

But the furious denials were misleading. To paraphrase a cliché from 2016, Trump’s tweet should have been taken seriously, not literally. Obama did not tap Trump’s phones. But his FBI did spy on Trump’s campaign. That fact is no longer in dispute. The question is whether the FBI was justified in treating the Trump campaign itself as a suspect in this crime against the 2016 election.

The answer is messy. A comprehensive survey of all available information about the matter shows there were grounds in the summer of 2016 for American intelligence and law-enforcement officials at the FBI to turn their attention to the peculiar behavior of some Trump campaign advisers. 

But the FBI sullied its own inquiry by imparting credence to this mythical Moscow-hotel-room episode described in the Steele dossier, "information so spurious that even liberal news organizations . . . wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole."

And

[e]ven after the bureau had good reason to doubt its veracity, it didn’t share the exculpatory information it had uncovered—not with the public, not with the courts, and not even with the Justice Department lawyers who were supposed to check its work.

The result was a debacle. What had been teased as the greatest espionage scandal in American history—a U.S. president conspiring with Russia to steal an election—today should be seen as a cautionary tale about the fallibility of our lawmen and spies, the credulity of our press, and the hubris and hysteria of Trump’s resistance.

Lake then divides the main body of his article into four sections representing the phases of this whole matter: Crossfire Hurricane, the Steele dossier, the aftermath of the 2016 election, Schiff and Comey, and Mueller and beyond.

I'd like to focus on the Comey and Schiff section, because it raises this question about the motive's for people's courses of action and how they come by them. Of all the figures in this story, Comey and Schiff may be the most enigmatic. As I say, there was a time when Comey was regarded as a straight-shooting professional, but all the twists and turns of the past few years have reduced him to a book-hawking proselytizer untethered to any institutional support. It's also true of Schiff. What in his background would indicate that he would become the rabid spearhead of the impeachment push?

Schiff was a fairly moderate Democrat until 2017. As the committee’s ranking minority member, he had worked cooperatively with Nunes on the committee on a number of issues—from legislation on the authorization for the War on Terror to oversight of the National Security Agency process for unmasking U.S. citizens caught up in wiretaps of overseas targets. Schiff ended up supporting Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, but he did so with prudent reservations.

After Trump was elected, Schiff turned into a cyber-age Joe McCarthy. The latest example came in November, in a report to Congress on impeachment, when he published phone logs of journalist John Solomon and Nunes himself. He obtained those records through subpoenas of shady Ukrainian Americans and the president’s lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani. Nonetheless, that was an extraordinary breach of a journalist’s privacy, not to mention decorum. The fact that most journalists didn’t rush to Solomon’s defense—because they disliked the pro-Trump thrust of Solomon’s work—was a sign of how deeply the Resistance mindset had penetrated the mainstream.

Back in 2017, Schiff also hyped Steele’s allegations. At a hearing on March 20 of that year, he repeated most of the ex-spy’s allegations in his opening statement. He asked openly whether Page, Flynn, Roger Stone, and others in Trump’s orbit were all part of an elaborate quid pro quo to relax sanctions against Russia in exchange for assistance during the 2016 election. Schiff was careful to say he did not yet know these things to be true—which made raising the question a perfect example of irresponsible innuendo. But because Schiff was the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, his innuendo appeared to be informed by state secrets. Over time, Schiff repeated these charges—particularly against Page—and he has never apologized for issuing them. Indeed, after Mueller’s report found no evidence of this conspiracy, Schiff then suggested that Mueller had never delved into the counterintelligence dimensions of the Trump-Russia investigation. Like all conspiracy theorists, Schiff was suggesting that the failure to find a conspiracy was proof that the investigation must go on.

When Schiff was not working as a prosecutor of the Trump campaign, he was serving as the FBI’s defense counsel. In early 2018, Nunes pressed the Justice Department to declassify a Republican memo that first flagged the FISA abuse that Horowitz’s report detailed in December 2019. In response, Schiff and his staff prepared their own memo. It said FBI officials would have been “remiss in their duty to protect the country had they not sought a FISA warrant and repeated renewals to conduct temporary surveillance of Carter Page.”

After the Horowitz report’s release, Schiff has said that he was unaware of much of the information contained in it. The FBI and Justice Department leadership also objected to the Nunes memo in 2018, saying it painted an inaccurate picture of the investigation. But Schiff’s job on the Intelligence Committee was and is to perform oversight of those institutions. Instead, he went along with a cover-up, even as the chairman of the committee at the time was uncovering abuse that Horowitz would confirm in greater and more alarming detail.

Of course, Trump tribalists are not interested in the question of Schiff's devolution. Myself, I'm just naturally curious about how people come by a recent behavior pattern that their pasts provide little or no indication of. How the level of character and personality can shed light on a person's change of demeanor is just plain interesting to me. Not so the Trumpists. To them, he's just an obstacle to the Very Stable Genius's "plan" for making America great again.

And then we get to the Ukraine phase of this mess. Lake explains why Dems are unlikely to peel off any Republican Senators in the current trial:

Is it any wonder that no Republican voted to impeach Trump in the House on the Ukraine matter? This cannot just be explained away as political and moral cowardice. It’s a response to the failure of the party leading the impeachment to acknowledge the falsehood of its initial conspiracy theory about Russia.

He also summarily handles this business about a monolithic "deep state":

But it also must be said that this debacle is not evidence of a deep-state coup, as so many on the right have alleged. There are two important reasons for this. First, there is no singular “deep state.” Horowitz also showed in his report that there were FBI agents at the New York field office who were rooting for Trump. Certainly the key deep-state figure here would be James Comey—and if he were, why would he have mortally damaged the campaign of Trump’s rival 10 days before the election by briefly reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server? In any case, the “deep-state” theory suggests there is a governmental hive mind, an unelected bureaucracy that runs things while officials like Comey sit on top, clueless and imagining themselves powerful.
You can see how the “deep-state” theory might let the actual saboteurs off the hook. Comey, McCabe, Brennan, and others had a mix of motivations for making the decisions that they did. To say they were acting on behalf of an unelected bureaucracy is to absolve them.

The deep-state theory also leads those who espouse it to overreact. If the institutional rot is this profound, then why not eliminate the FBI and CIA altogether? But that’s a bit like calling for the abolition of a police department after a brutality scandal. The country needs spies and lawmen to protect us against real foreign threats. The problem with the Trump-Russia investigation is that at the moment the investigators were receiving exculpatory evidence, the false collusion theory became the hottest story in the world. And that happened because the most important evidence the FBI leadership believed was true was also briefed to media.

Terms like "deep state" and "swamp" make tidy shorthand for Trumpism sloganeers, but the truth is somewhat more nuanced.

The two-things-can-be-true-at-once principle applies here. Trump was indeed an entirely different kind of president than the nation had ever had, and by no means completely in a good way. But he wasn't a mastermind of a complex web of nefariousness. He's not bright enough to fill a role like that. On the other hand, elements within the FBI were so focused on that fact of his unprecedented nature that they lost sight of the fact that he was elected in a free and fair fashion.

What's it all doing to our nation?

That folly has deformed our politics. Now, in 2020, voters are faced with a choice between two parties led by conspiracy theorists and gaslighters. Instead of saving America from Trump, the Resistance may have reelected him.

What's going on in the Beltway is emblematic of the attempts on the part of the various factions (and there are several within the left and right sides of our ideological landscape, as well as the basic polarization between the two sides) to make the case for opposing factions being so evil that no legitimacy must be conferred upon them, that they must be driven from the public square into dark corners where they cannot impede a given faction's agenda.

All this has my thought processes churning. Are there signs one can detect when one first suspects that someone is no longer operating from any set of principles, but rather from a pure lust for power?