CUTTING OFF OUR NOSE TO SPITE OUR FACE

 The Durham probe that former Attorney General William Barr ordered in 2019 is an iconic symbol of a political war being waged in the United States. After 873 days (and counting) of investigating the investigators in the Mueller inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, John Durham’s search for dirt on those aiding Robert Mueller in his look into any link between Donald Trump’s election campaign and Russian hackers who sought to swing the 2016 results in the former president’s favor has finally led to the announcement of only its second indictment.

William Barr (left) and John Durham

Durham’s probe was billed by both Barr and Trump as a blockbuster investigation that would uncover a plot by top Democrats to undermine the election results that brought Trump to power. Indeed, Trump at one point said that the investigation would reveal “the greatest political crime in American history.”

But after spending 200 more days investigating investigators than Mueller did probing the Russia connection, Durham has been unable to indict any recognizable faces from the Democratic camp or the FBI for impropriety in the handling of the Russian interference inquiry. It was only this past week when his office was finally able to secure a grand jury indictment against attorney Michael Sussman, a specialist in cyber-security, who in 2016 raised his suspicions with the FBI about what he claimed were secretly channeled data allegedly linking the Trump business empire to the Alfa Bank of Russia. Ultimately, the FBI said that there was “insufficient evidence” to bring charges based on the data provided by Sussmann.

But that isn’t the basis for Durham’s indictment of the attorney. Instead, Sussman is accused of telling the FBI’s chief counsel, James Baker, that he was coming forth as a “good citizen” when, according to the Durham probe’s allegations, Sussman was actually working for a technology company executive and for Trump opponent Hillary Clinton’s campaign when he took his story to the FBI. Durham claims, therefore, that Sussman lied to the FBI, which is a felony. Last Friday, Sussman pleaded not guilty to the charge.

The only conviction Durham has been able to achieve to date was of a low-level FBI attorney named Kevin Clinesmith. Clinesmith was indicted for and later convicted of doctoring an internal FBI e-mail memo in order to secure a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Agency (FISA) Court warrant to investigate Carter Page, a former Trump foreign policy adviser.  In sentencing Clinesmith, Federal District Court Judge James Boasberg—who also was the federal judge presiding over the FISA Court, and whom you might recall as the Republican-appointed judge who in 2016 ordered the release by the FBI to the conservative legal group Judicial Watch of more than 14,000 State Department emails found on Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server—made it clear that while Clinesmith had committed a serious offense, considering other corroborative evidence presented, the FISA warrant application would likely have been approved anyway, without the attorney’s having presented adulterated evidence. He therefore declined to send Clinesmith to prison, handing him a year on probation and community service instead.

Robert Mueller

The Mueller investigation, for its part, did indeed produce both indictments (34) and solid convictions (including those of five Trump lieutenants), as well as eight guilty pleas with regard to Russian interference in US elections. Mueller made it clear that no indictment of Trump had been considered, for the simple reason that, in accordance with Justice Department guidelines, a sitting president cannot be indicted (not even under sealed indictment). The Mueller Report, which was the culmination of that 674-day probe, did not conclude that there had been no pro-Trump Russian interference in the 2016 elections. On the contrary, the Mueller investigative team indicted thirteen Russians—twelve who formed part of the Fancy Bear hacker team under orders from the Kremlin’s largest foreign espionage agency, the GRU, and who were charged with hacking the Democratic National Committee e-mail server and leaking their communications to the public.

The thirteenth Russian indicted by Mueller was businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was charged with financing the Russian hackers. All were charged in absentia and while it is unlikely they will ever be fully prosecuted in the US, the charges have hindered their travel abroad. A fourteenth Russian questioned by the Mueller investigation was Maria Butina, who posed as a Russian-born gun activist with ties to the NRA. Following her statements to the Mueller inquiry, she was arrested and prosecuted for acting as an unregistered agent of the Russian government under the provisions of the National Security Law, pleaded guilty, and ended up serving six months of an 18-month prison sentence.

All of this came in addition to indictments, during the second Trump impeachment inquiry, of Lev Parnas and Igor Furman, both born in the former Soviet Union, and both associates of Trump’s personal attorney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The two were arrested by the FBI in connection with campaign funding violations—more specifically, setting up a shell company to launder a US$ 325,000 donation to the Trump campaign. Through a series of complicated investigations led by Republican campaign watchdog Trevor Potter and by energy sector businessman Dale Perry, it was discovered that both Parnas and Furman were intimately involved in Giuliani’s mission to dig up dirt on then candidate Joe Biden and his son in Ukraine, as well as in Giuliani’s successful attempt to have career diplomat Marie Yovanovitch removed as the US ambassador to that country.

Trump referred to Yovanovitch as being “bad news”. But in fact, Ambassador Yovanovitch had a long history of tackling corruption wherever she found it, and that was one of her priorities in Ukraine.

It is interesting to note that when charges were brought against Parnas and Furman, it was another former Trump lawyer, John Dowd, who became their defense counsel.

Pence, Furman, Parnas,Trump and Giuliani

In other words, while the majority of Republicans seek to bill the Mueller investigation into Russian interference as a political hit job cooked up by Democrats—Robert Mueller is, it should be noted, a lifelong Republican—the probe did indeed produce proof of Russian interference in US domestic affairs and established an at least prima facie association between Russia and Trump loyalists. The Durham Investigation, for its part, has so far not clearly demonstrated its reason for existing, since the two minor indictments produced to date could easily have been achieved without the creation of a special prosecutor’s investigation.

What is most interesting, and sad, about both investigations is that while the judicial bases behind them might be sound—i.e., to root out corruption in the highest spheres of government—the political climate behind them isn’t. As I said earlier, at their root, they are both political skirmishes in a so far cold (or perhaps tepid would be a better word) civil war that is ripping the fabric of America’s two-and-a-half-century-old democratic traditions down the middle.

This is not hyperbole on my part, but the conclusion of a growing number of noted political scientists. When I posited back in 2017 that the US had never been more divided since the actual Civil War, many acquaintances—both Republican and Democrat—on the social media showed skepticism, or openly scoffed at the idea. But since the January 6^th insurrection, many, among both traditional Republicans and Democrats, have come into line with my thinking and are gravely concerned about the fate of US democracy and domestic security in the foreseeable future.

One of those who subscribes to this view of history in the making is Academy and Peabody Award-winning documentary film director Ken Burns. Renowned for his research into such related topics as the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, Nazism in Europe, and the populist reign of Louisiana boss politician Huey “The Kingfish” Long, Burns literally views the current post-Trump presidency era as “the most divisive since the Civil War.”

According to Burns, US democracy is imminently endangered by an internal threat stemming from the inability of today’s Americans to agree on even the most basic of facts. There are already, he posits, casualties of war-like proportions as a result of these divisions if we consider that 676,000 Americans have died in the COVID epidemic (more than perished in the 1918 influenza plague, when there was no medical treatment for the disease), mainly because politicians, led by the former president, have so politicized the use of masks and highly effective and readily available vaccines that nearly half of the country’s population remains stubbornly opposed to public health policies enacted to save their lives.

But COVID deaths, 2,000 of them a day at present, are only one grim symptom of how politicians are pitting one broad sector of Americans against another and, in the process, mortally wounding American democratic traditions—as well as killing their fellow Americans. In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky posit that the breakdown of “mutual toleration” and respect for the political legitimacy of the opposition is a sure formula for murdering democracy. Above all, they point out, it is absolutely necessary for everyone involved in the political process to accept the results of free and fair elections. The basic cornerstone of US democracy is free and fair elections. If you respect even the most basic of democratic tenets, you don’t mess with that. And yet, over the course of the last five years, and especially in the last two, the country’s voting system has taken more hits than a subway turnstile. 

It is worthwhile recalling that they were writing this veritable textbook on how democracies are killed quite early on in the administration of Donald Trump. But their warning that contrary to these basic rules of democratic life were spurious complaints about election outcomes and, graver still, attempts to overthrow the established democratic order and replace it with an authoritarian regime now seems prescient. Their then largely academic proposal has since transformed into a cogent prediction, provided a full two years prior to the January 6^th Capitol insurrection and the perpetuation by Trump’s political cohorts of “the big lie” that has convinced a very large segment of the public that Democrats and President Joe Biden “stole” the 2020 election from Trump. Nearly a full year after that election, Trump keeps calling for the election results to be overturned, thus continuing to feed his most loyal base with a divisive lie that is perpetuating hatred between the two main American political camps.

And just how large is that democracy-dubious base? Polls suggest that more than 50 percent (some pollsters say more than 70 percent) of all Republicans—or about one in four American voters—believe that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and that Democrats in general and President Joe Biden in particular stole the presidency from their far-right populist icon, Donald Trump. As recently as this month, Trump has continued to call for the election to be overturned, thus revitalizing his own lie (or perhaps delusion) among his closest followers and leading them to believe that the system is corrupt, that democracy no longer works, and that perhaps the January 6^th insurrection was the way to go in seeking to “win back their rights and nation.”

Despite this narrative, seldom has representative democracy worked better than it did in the 2020 election. That’s not an opinion. It’s a proven fact. In spite of desperate efforts by Trump and his allies to sully election system credibility, that system and the results it yielded, numerous machine and hand recounts, some sixty court judgments and a Supreme Court rejection have all clearly demonstrated the accusations of Trump and his closest cohorts to be utterly and completely false. Worse still, all of this proof has shown the Trump camp’s machinations to be a ruse designed to fool the gullible within his base—who, it turns out, are incredibly numerous.

Even the long, tortuous, so-called “audit” carried out by the comic book-named Cyber-Ninjas in Arizona couldn’t make Trumpian accusations of voter fraud stick. That ghost-like firm that sprang up out of nowhere, financed with 5.7 million dollars in Trump-supporter donations, allegedly channeled to them mostly through prominent Trump camp figures like lawyer and confessed prevaricator Sidney Powell and disgraced retired Army general Michael Flynn, has had to confess in its final report, leaked to the press this week, that there was no evidence of fraud against Trump in that state’s election process. On the contrary, their meticulous and decidedly partisan look at Arizona’s crucial Maricopa County ended up demonstrating that Joe Biden had actually beaten Donald Trump there by an even wider margin than original tabulations revealed.

And yet, this past week, after unsuccessfully harassing the main states where he lost, Trump turned to places where he won, bullying Governor Greg Abbott of Texas into auditing election results in several cities where the former president is nursing the delusion that he should have done better. Clearly, to any reasonable person’s mind, the election has been over for eleven months now, the result is unquestionable and Joe Biden, everywhere but in Mar-a-Lago, is president of the Unites States.

What is happening right now in the US is tragic, not only for the Nation but also for Western democracy as a whole, particularly because it plays to the narrative of two of America’s staunchest rivals, the authoritarian regimes today governing China and Russia, both of which hold that democracy is a messy, recalcitrant and ineffective form of government that is highly overrated. The Trump era has provided them with ample reason to scoff and they are doing so with abandon. The current situation in America is made to order for their anti-American propaganda machine, because they no longer even have to lie. It really is as bad as they say it is.

It is hard to see how the two and a half-century-old experiment in American liberal democracy can survive when the leadership of one of the two main parties governing it has deformed its definition of “democracy” and molded its entire political platform to suit the whims and power-mad delusions of a single personality, much in the same way that the Nazi Party did in embracing the absolute power of Adolf Hitler. Furthermore, over the course of the last twelve years, the Republican political leadership has basically abandoned its duties—lawmaking and representation of the rights of its constituency—in favor of obstructionist practices designed specifically to keep much needed legislation from passing and, worse still, of political strategies developed to discredit and paralyze its political opponents.

Wyoming Rep.Liz Cheney

An obvious symptom of the GOP leadership’s giant leap into the abyss of authoritarianism is its ostracizing of all fellow Republicans who fail to fall in, rank and file, behind the autocratic figure of Donald Trump. Iconic examples of traditional Republican figures (and true liberal-democratic conservatives) who have fallen victim to this type of ostracism include, the late Senator John McCain, Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, Utah Senator Mitt Romney, Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger, Ohio Representative Anthony Gonzalez, and even, to a certain extent, former Vice President Mike Pence, to name just a few. Meanwhile, dangerous fascistoid radicals like Georgia Representative Majorie Taylor Green and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who would have once been political pariahs among Republicans, are now party rock stars. 

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green

Many expert political observers say that the only hope for the future of American democracy is for the Democratic Party to take advantage of the power that it wields right now—and perhaps not for more than a year to come—to try and shore up democracy, and make it less vulnerable to attack in the future. Especially considering plots in Red states in several areas of the country to ram through laws that will “keep what happened in 2020 from ever happening again.” Considering that the 2020 election has been repeatedly proven to be one of the fairest in history, the underlying meaning of this stated mission is, then, to ensure that elections are skewed to make certain that the GOP has brass knuckles in its glove the next time it steps into the ring with Democrats. 

And it matters not one iota to the current GOP chiefs that in order to win by hook or by crook they will be disenfranchising millions of American voters. On the contrary, their purpose is precisely that.

Missouri Sen.Josh Hawley

But I believe that the only way for democracy to survive in the current climate is for the purge of authoritarianism to come from within the conservative movement itself. And I’m not alone in this belief.

Back in May, some 150 former Republican officials sent an open-letter message to their party warning that if the GOP didn’t break with Donald Trump, they would back the creation of a third party. Miles Taylor, one of the organizers of this new conservative movement within the GOP, said at the time, “The Republican Party is broken. It's time for a resistance of the ‘rationals’ against the ‘radicals’.”

Taylor had already begun to resist Trump’s authoritarian designs while he was serving in the former president’s administration. A Trump appointee and former Bush administration staffer, he served from 2017 to 2019 as chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security. He eventually outed himself as the Trump administration official who had written a 2018 anonymous op-ed in The New York Times entitled I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration. But the last straw for most of the rest of the signers of the ultimatum, which they entitled A Call for American Renewal, was the Trump-incited January 6^th insurrection at the Capitol.

The signers include four former governors and 27 former members of the House of Representatives, as well as Trump and Bush administration officials, diplomats and former high-ranking party officials. Among the most familiar names are former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, former National Security Agency chief General Michael Hayden, former homeland security director Michael Chertoff, Republican strategist William F.B. O’Reilly, former Representative Barbara Comstock, former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, and former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld.

The most high-profile opponent to the Trumpian takeover of the GOP, Congresswoman Liz Cheney, has so far resisted joining the movement, since she fears splitting the party would hand greater power to the Democrats. But with her effective removal by Trump authoritarians from any position of power within the party, observers feel she could eventually rethink that position and perhaps even end up being an alternative conservative candidate for the presidency.    

This incipient rebellion within the GOP is, to my mind, the only real hope for the future of democracy in the United States. As noted historian John Meacham pointed out in the final days of the Trump administration, politics in America are no longer a matter of two parties debating issues from distinct viewpoints, but of two parties speaking two entirely different languages. And the language of the current GOP leadership is that of personality-cult authoritarianism, a language not so very different from that of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party.

True conservatives deserve to be represented by better minds and by genuinely patriotic hearts that put service above self-interest, Nation above party and democracy above personality. If the GOP has leaped permanently into the void of personality-cult autocracy and obstructionism aimed at destroying the opposition no matter what the cost to the Nation and to democracy, then the only hope for the future of democracy in the United States of America lies in the hands of conservatives who either rebel and take their party back from Trump and his cohorts, or in those with the courage to forge an entirely new conservative movement based on the original ethics of the party of Lincoln.

The current cold civil war between the two traditional parties is not a democratic option. The only thing it promises to ensure is that whoever “wins” will end up administrating the crumbling ruins of one of the greatest political systems ever devised.