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We’ve now seen Volume 1 of Jack Smith’s report,
released just after midnight when Judge Aileen Cannon’s order prohibiting DOJ
from making it public lapsed. We already knew a lot of the information in
Volume 1, which covered the January 6/election fraud case Smith charged
Donald Trump with in Washington, D.C. We know less about the classified
documents case, which is memorialized in Volume 2 of the Special Counsel’s
report, including what Trump’s motivation for keeping classified materials in
the first place and then lying to prosecutors about it was. Volume 2 wasn’t released because there is still a
pending case against Trump’s two former co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos
De Oliveira—sort of. Judge Cannon dismissed the case, and it’s on appeal to
the Eleventh Circuit. The only thing that seems clear about the case is that
it will never go to trial. Once Donald Trump is back in the White House, his
Justice Department can dismiss it, or Trump can pardon the defendants. As
sensitive as Trump is about releasing the report, there is no way he will permit
a full trial, with witnesses testifying to what they know, in this matter. Given the case’s inevitable fate, why won’t Merrick
Garland just dismiss it now, so he can release Volume 2? Maybe he still will.
There is little reason not to. Although there is grand jury and possibly
classified information in the report that would need to be redacted, it would
serve the truth-telling function of the criminal justice system. There will
be no punishment for defendant Trump in the federal cases. He will not be
deterred, not will others, by two failed prosecutions. He will not be incapacitated
so he can do no further harm. So all that is left is releasing the report so
the public can get some semblance of the facts, not conjecture, but evidence.
It would be uniquely ironic if the Special Counsel’s report on this case,
alone, out of all of the special counsel matters—Mueller, Durham, Hur, Weiss,
and so on—remained unreleased. The issue pending before the Eleventh Circuit,
whether Judge Aileen Cannon was correct when she concluded that the Special
Counsel statute Jack Smith was appointed under is unconstitutional, is an
important one. Because Cannon is the lone Judge to rule that it is not, the
Solicitor General would undoubtedly like to pursue the appeal in hopes that
decision can be reversed. But as a practical matter, the time for that has
come and gone. Instinctively, no prosecutor wants to dismiss the appeal in
what should be a viable prosecution. But the moment calls for more than
traditional institutionalism. We are past due for an infusion of a new kind
of institutionalism—a forward leaning variety that speaks to the moment and
takes the challenge Donald Trump brings to the rule of law head on. In his cover letter to the Attorney General, sent
over with the report, Jack Smith quoted Attorney General Edward H. Levi, who,
he noted, “assumed the Department's helm in the wake of Watergate, summed up
those traditions best: ‘[O]ne paramount concern must always guide our way.
This is the keeping of the faith in the essential decency and even-handedness
in the law, a faith which is the strength of the law and which must be
continually renewed or else it is lost. In a society that too easily accepts
the notion that everything can be manipulated, it is important to make clear
that the administration of federal justice seeks to be impartial and fair
....’” It is hard to preserve public confidence in the rule of
law after the last eight years. But Smith seemed to be appealing to an idea
we’ve touched on frequently—not letting Donald Trump drag everyone else down
to his level. In that regard, even if they didn’t get to take their cases to
trial, Smith believes his team succeeded. Many people have lost confidence in
the sine qua non of our democracy,
that no man is above the law. Smith wrote, “That is also why, in my
decision-making, I heeded the imperative that ‘[n]o man in this country is so
high that he is above the law.’” In Smith’s view, as he related his team’s
work, this principle was of primary importance as they pursued the case, more
than Trump’s ultimate fate. It’s a very different take. Trump may have made a
mockery of the system, but in Smith’s view, prosecutors treated him like
everyone else and that counts for something. It was the Supreme Court and
ultimately the voting public that failed, not the prosecution. I suspect many of you will be skeptics, and that we will
be rereading this transmittal letter and discussing it for some time. My
co-host on the Insider Podcast, Preet Bharara, pointed out
this morning that the letter reads like an opening statement at a
congressional hearing, with Smith already defending the integrity of his team
and their work. But it is worth contemplating the spirit of a team of
prosecutors who, in the face of a powerful man who publicly taunted them and
even threatened to prosecute some of them, continued to do their jobs and
remained committed to the idea that we can still be a viable rule of law
country if enough of us remain insistent on that path. That’s what it comes to down to at this point.
Courage and vision, and refusing to give up in the face of a would-be
authoritarian. Trump, of course, had a take on Truth Social:
“Deranged Jack Smith was unable to successfully prosecute the Political
Opponent of his ‘boss,’ Crooked Joe Biden, so he ends up writing yet another
‘Report’ based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks
and Thugs ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED, because it showed how totally
innocent I was, and how completely guilty Nancy Pelosi, and others, were.
Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before
the Election, which I won in a landslide. THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!” Trump’s view seems to be that he and his lawyers were
playing a game and the only goal was to outflank prosecutors. How very Roy
Cohn of him. Not about justice. Not about the American people. Yes, criminal
defendants are entitled to vigorous representation from their lawyers. But
Trump is a former president who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and
serve the American people. Here, as he reembarks on the presidency, the best
he can muster is to deride Jack Smith for being “unable to successfully prosecute
the Political Opponent of his ‘boss,” engaging in schoolboy level taunting.
But it’s worse than just a taunt, because Trump is confirming that in his
view, presidents can direct prosecutors to go after their political opponents
and prosecutions who don’t pull it off are objects of derision. Not justice,
just politics, and dirty politics at that. Jack Smith didn’t get his cases to trial. Our
democracy would be better off if he could have. A jury should have decided
these cases. Ultimately, the Supreme Court and Judge Cannon will have much to
answer for when we see what path a president who conflates politics and the
rule of law puts the country on. It’s a stark warning about what is coming. It has become popular for people to say, as they did
in 2016, “it won’t be as bad as everyone said.” I’ve heard so many variations
on this. People who are counting on Trump’s ineptitude or Americans’ lack of
willingness to go along with extreme measures like mass deportations. Then there was Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing to
be Secretary of Defense today. If Jack Smith’s report is the past, it is the
future. Yesterday evening, NBC reported that Hegseth’s FBI
background check did not include interviews with his ex-wives or with the
woman who accused him of sexual assault—which he denies—in a hotel room in
2017. Shades of the investigation that was (or wasn’t) conducted during
Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. That’s some big stuff to leave out.
Makes you wonder what else is missing and how the Senate can advise and
consent if it isn’t first willing to learn the facts. “I just want to emphasize there’s already ample and
abundant information on the public record that shows Peter Hegseth lacks the
character and confidence to be secretary of defense,” Connecticut Democratic
Senator Richard Blumenthal said, according to the report. “There has never
been a nominee for this position as unqualified as he is by virtue of
financial mismanagement, as well as sexual impropriety and alcohol.” In today’s hearing, Democratic Senators were on
target, revealing the nominee’s lack of experience and character. It’s
unlikely to impact Hegseth’s eventual confirmation, but it will make for some
interesting finger pointing about who knew what when he implodes. Senator
Warren pushed him to explain his sudden change of heart about the role of
women in combat after he was nominated. Senator Angus King questioned Hegseth
about views that suggest he doesn’t believe in the Geneva Convention, and got
an entirely unsatisfactory response. Senators Tim Kaine and Elissa Slotkin
were polite but persistent, and their questions about Hegseth’s personal life
and professional qualifications and his lackluster answers likely would have
been enough to end any other candidacy. Hegseth claimed every allegation he was drunk or
abused women was anonymous and not true. When it was Republicans’ turn,
Senator’s like Oklahoma’s Markwayne Mullin excused—“he’s saved”—and even
embraced—I’m not in prison because “my wife loved me too”—Hegseth’s alleged
misconduct. Saturday Night Live really couldn’t have done it any better, with
Mullin asking Hegseth to tell the Senate what he loved about his wife, who
was sitting behind him. Hegseth came up with, “She's the smartest, most
capable, loving, humble, honest person I've ever met. And in addition to
being incredibly beautiful.” He had to be prodded to compliment her for being
“an amazing mother … of our blended family of seven kids.” A suitable metaphor for what America under Trump 2.0
is going to look like. We’re in this together, Joyce |
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Between the Lines of Jack Smith's Final Report The Jack smith report does more than outline trumps
crimes; it lays bare the delays inherent in the system - and if we don’t
address them - no AG will be able to hold future despots accountable.
There are countless reasons that the release of the
Jack Smith final report on Donald Trump’s January 6th crimes is valuable -
despite having been released after the election. The least of which are the
details of his conspiracy to retain power through fraud, trickery, and
deceit. The truth matters, regardless of when it arrives. But deep within the report, Jack Smith exposes the
myriad causes of delay that resulted in a failure to achieve accountability
for one of the most heinous crimes perpetrated against the republic in modern
history. Of course the details of Trump’s criminal activity
are important, but we understood those in glaring detail when Jack Smith
docketed his immunity brief with Judge Chutkan in September prior to the
election. What seems to be missing from the corporate media narratives is
that Jack Smith spends more than a quarter of Volume I addressing the delays
that plagued the investigation. Up until the release of this report, nearly everyone
believed the delays were caused by a timid, foot-dragging Attorney General
who twiddled his thumbs while Rome burned. But Jack Smith spends a lot of time exposing the true
causes of the delay. Now, listen. You can go on and dislike Merrick
Garland. I’m not here to push back on that, though I’ve been breathlessly
defending the facts about the investigation timeline on social media. This
essay is NOT about that. This is about understanding what Jack Smith is
trying to tell us about the roadblocks that gum up our institutions in favor
of a unitary executive. Given the Oval Office’s new cloak of criminal
immunity, we’re likely going to have to deal with more oligarchs hungry to
turn the White House into what Ketanji Brown Jackson called the new seat of
criminal activity in America. It’s important that we don’t shoulder the
person occupying the office of Attorney General with the blame, when the
culprits for delay are part of an antiquated system that would set any
Attorney General up for failure. If we shove it all on him, we miss the
opportunity to address and resolve the problems that made it impossible to
hold Donald Trump accountable. And this will happen again, given the sickass draw of
presidential immunity. The Supreme Court Before Jack Smith says that Trump would have been
convicted were he not elected, he details the immunity ruling from the
Supreme Court. That context is important. Ignoring it lets the Supreme Court
off the hook for their inexcusable delay and ultimate monarchical designation
of an all-powerful executive. As you may already know, Jack Smith filed with the
Supreme Court to quickly attend to the immunity issue in December of 2023 -
with a looming court date of March, 2024. While Smith doesn’t explicitly lash
out at SCOTUS for their delay, he takes a lot of effort to ensure we are
aware that the high court halted everything for the first 7 months of 2024. Aaron Blake writes for the Post: But
the sum total of the report’s language is that Smith is conspicuously
emphasizing the ways in which the court set aside precedent and the letter of
the law and did things that plenty of others — even Trump’s allies and
appointees — disagreed with. And he’s saying all of it thwarted a case he said
could have been brought in plenty of time and righteously convicted someone
whose alleged crimes were of the utmost severity. Plus, had Trump not won the election, there would be
a second trip to the Supreme Court for the corrupt justices to weigh in on
what Judge Chutkan would have ruled as unofficial acts. We would have been at
least another year out from a trial, and that’s assuming that this Supreme
Court wouldn’t have killed the case upon a second swipe. Privilege Battles Aside from the ultimate delay caused by the Supreme
Court, Jack Smith addresses the protracted privilege battles waged by Merrick
Garland beginning before Jack Smith was even appointed. If you follow me on social media, you might have
heard me remind people that there was a nearly year-long court battle waged
by Merrick Garland to compel the testimony of key witnesses. Jack Smith took
time to relay the details of what was known, and some of what we hadn’t heard
regarding that delay. Smith writes: "During the
investigation, former VP Pence... invoked his privilege under the Speech or
Debate Clause. Through litigation over the scope and applicability of the
claimed privilege, the Office obtained important evidence." Pence had argued that because he was acting in his
capacity as president of the senate, that he didn’t have to testify to the
grand jury because of the Speech or Debate Clause. The Senators and Representatives shall in all Cases,
except Treason, Felony, and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest
during their attendance at the Session of their Respective Houses, and in
going to and from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House,
they shall not be questioned in any other Place. Pence argued that he didn’t have to testify at all,
but after a long court battle, the court ruled that only two bits of
information were subject to the clause: Pence’s discussion with his lawyer
about the disclaimer he was going to announce before the count, and his
discussion with the Senate parliamentarian about that language. That battle
delayed the case. Then Jack Smith talks about Garland’s fight with a member
of congress over his phone: The government also
litigated Speech or Debate Clause issues against a Member of Congress. In Aug
2022 before Special Counsel was appointed...the Government obtained warrants
to seize and search the cell phone of Scott Perry. That’s not to mention how long it takes to break into
a phone. In the case of Scott Perry, they were able to get him to open his
phone for them, but that’s not always the case. A great example is Rudy
Giuliani’s 17 devices. Those took forever to crack after they were seized.
And it was Lisa Monaco who expanded the warrant to include January 6th, which
previously only covered his time in Ukraine. He continues: In August 2022, before
the Special Counsel was appointed, the Government began to seek evidence from
two former Executive Branch employees of Mr. Trump's, including by issuing
subpoenas for testimony before the grand jury. And then later: Mr. Trump's repeated
assertion of the presidential-communications privilege as a basis to withhold
evidence required extensive preindictment litigation that delayed the
Office's receipt of important testimony and other evidence. Finally, he reminds us: This
record, including the period predating the Special Counsel's appointment,
encompasses voluntary interviews of more than 250 individuals and grand jury
testimony from more than 55 witnesses. So in addition to a corrupt and lawless Supreme
Court, we have a privilege issue coupled with a backlogged federal bench to
deal with it. The January 6 Committee Aside from the two major holdups from the Supreme
Court and the district court’s resolution of privilege, there were several
other factors that delayed the prosecution. First, the handing over of the
interview transcripts from the January 6th Committee. To be sure, the DoJ
upset Committee members by refusing to share what they had - especially the
John Eastman emails obtained by Garland, but that took the Committee multiple
months of public litigation to obtain. On the other hand, the Committee took months to hand
over their materials to the DoJ. Many believed the DoJ wanted the committee
materials because they didn’t want to do the work themselves and were
waiting, or some even say “shamed” into beginning work by the January 6th
committee. But Jack Smith addresses that in his report, too: [The committee's] materials comprised a small part of
the Office's investigative record, and any facts on which the Office relied
to make a prosecution decision were developed or verified through independent
interviews and other investigative steps. That is Jack Smith informing the public that none of
their prosecution decisions were based on the Committee’s work. The reason
the DoJ needed the interview transcripts was to check that witness testimony
was consistent. During discovery, the DoJ is required to hand over any and
all material from witness testimony that’s contradictory. If a witness says
one thing to the grand jury, and something not exactly the same to a
congressional committee, that inconsistency can be used to impeach the
witness. That’s what happened to Special Counsel Durham’s case against lawyer
Michael Sussman. His star witness said different things to congress and the
grand jury, and the defense used that to damage his credibility. DoJ had to make sure that the testimony they already
obtained in the grand jury matched that of the testimony given to the January
6th Committee. Yet for some reason, the Committee stalled for months handing
it over, delaying the case further. As a side note, many people argue that Cassidy
Hutchinson’s explosive testimony during the committee hearings is what “woke
up” DoJ, but there’s not a single lick of her testimony used in Jack Smith’s
case. Silence Another issue not mentioned in the report but that I
think is worthy of attention is the DoJ policy about not discussing open and
ongoing investigations. While that may have made sense in a previous
timeline, silence leaves a vacuum for disinformation. The fact that the public wasn’t made aware of the
urgency or resources being used to investigate the attack on the Capitol left
an opening for all of us to draw our own conclusions. I totally get why the Attorney General can’t talk
about open and ongoing investigations for a lot of good reasons. It taints a
jury pool. That it’s unconstitutional to accuse unindicted people of crimes.
The importance of the presumption of innocence. But if we’re only applying
those concepts to the rich and powerful, then that goes against the concept
of equal justice under law. I’ve long said that we shouldn’t deprive Trump of
due process, but that we should aspire to apply the same due process we afford
Trump to everyone else. Regardless, there’s an information desert. It would
have been nice to hear that the leaders of the coup were being vigorously
investigated with maximum resources. Regardless of where you place the blame
for the delay, a lack of information leaves us all guessing. I’m not quirt sure where the middle ground is between
keeping the public informed and preserving a criminal defendant’s rights, but
what we’re doing isn’t working. Corrupt Holdovers Another issue that needs to be addressed and overcome
is the delay caused by hand-wringing between agencies. We know through public
reporting that multiple people not only delayed the investigation, but
blocked it at every turn. Unfortunately, you can’t charge leaders in the FBI
with obstruction of justice for making investigative decisions. It’s quite normal for there to be disagreements among
agencies, particularly between the FBI and the DOJ. In this instance, there
were people atop the Washington Field Office and the DC US Attorneys office
after the 2020 election that were at loggerheads with the Justice Department
about whether to execute search warrants, or even read Merrick Garland in on
prosecutorial concepts. Some may say “just fire them,” but our protections
for civil servants in normal times don’t allow for that, and we’re going to
need those protections in place in the next four years. But something’s gotta
give. When D’Antuono, the head of the FBI Washington Field
office refused to execute subpoenas and search warrants in 2021, the DoJ had
to circumvent them by having the post office inspector general execute the
search warrants. It wasn’t until February 2022 when the FBI, black and blue
from what they experienced in 2017, started playing ball with the DoJ. Even
then, later that year they were hesitant to search Mar-a-Lago as Garland
wanted. As a former federal employee myself, we can’t ignore the protections
put in place to protect the jobs of government workers, but there has to be a
better way. Conclusion Aside from the final statement Jack Smith makes in
his report about the voters ultimately electing Trump and excusing him from
accountability, there are multiple issues inherent in our system that have to
be dealt with. Whether it’s a corrupt Supreme Court, an understaffed federal
bench, disputes between DoJ and Congress, conflicts with the FBI, issues with
stonewalling from the holdovers of a corrupt administration, silence from our
agencies, or something I haven’t even mentioned until now - the corporate media
failures, there are fixable problems that go beyond blaming a single person. We must pay attention to the delays inherent in the
system if we’re going to give any kind of chance to the next Attorney
General. That is why I implore you to read the report. Jack
smith is trying to tell us something, and we would do well to listen. You can read the full report here, or better yet, listen
to the audio version that Andy McCabe and I are releasing for free in
the Jack podcast feed. ~AG |
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Shortly after midnight
last night, the Justice Department released special counsel Jack Smith’s
final report on former president Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the
results of the 2020 presidential election. The 137-page report concludes that
“substantial evidence demonstrates that Mr. Trump…engaged in an unprecedented
criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order
to retain power.” The report explains
the case Smith and his team compiled against Trump. It outlines the ways in
which evidence proved Trump broke laws, and it lays out the federal interests
served by prosecuting Trump. It explains how the team investigated Trump,
interviewing more than 250 people and obtaining the testimony of more than 55
witnesses before a grand jury, and how Justice Department policy governed
that investigation. It also explains how Trump’s litigation and the U.S.
Supreme Court’s surprising determination that Trump enjoyed immunity from
prosecution for breaking laws as part of his official duties dramatically
slowed the prosecution. There is little in the
part of the report covering Trump’s behavior that was not already public
information. The report explains how Trump lied that he won the 2020
presidential election and continued to lie even when his own appointees and
employees told him he had lost. It lays out how he pressured state officials
to throw out votes for his opponent, then-president-elect Joe Biden, and how
he and his cronies recruited false electors in key states Trump lost to
create slates of false electoral votes. It explains how Trump
tried to force Justice Department officials to support his lie and to trick
states into rescinding their electoral votes for Biden and how, finally, he
pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to either throw out votes for Biden
or send state counts back to the states. When Pence refused, correctly
asserting that he had no such power, Trump urged his supporters to attack the
U.S. Capitol. He refused to call them off for hours. Smith explained that
the Justice Department concluded that Trump was guilty on four counts,
including conspiracy to defraud the United States by trying “to interfere
with or obstruct one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft or
trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest”; obstruction and
conspiracy to obstruct by creating false evidence; and conspiracy against
rights by trying to take away people’s right to vote for president. The report explains
why the Justice Department did not bring charges against Trump for
insurrection, noting that such cases are rare and definitions of
“insurrection” are unclear, raising concerns that such a charge would
endanger the larger case. The report explained
that prosecuting Trump served important national interests. The government
has an interest in the integrity of the country’s process for “collecting,
counting, and certifying presidential elections.” It cares about “a peaceful
and orderly transition of presidential power.” It cares that “every citizen’s
vote is counted” and about “protecting public officials and government
workers from violence.” Finally, it cares about “the fair and even-handed
enforcement of the law.” While the report
contained little new information, what jumped out from its stark recitation
of the events of late 2020 and early 2021 was the power of Trump’s lies.
There was no evidence that he won the 2020 election; to the contrary, all
evidence showed he lost it. Even he didn’t appear to believe he had won. And
yet, by the sheer power of repeating the lie that he had won and getting his
cronies to repeat it, along with embellishments that were also lies—about
suitcases of ballots, and thumb drives, and voting machines, and so on—he
induced his followers to try to overthrow a free and fair election and
install him in the presidency. He continued this
disinformation after he left office, and then engaged in lawfare, with both
him and friendly witnesses slowing down his cases by challenging subpoenas
until there were no more avenues to challenge them. And then the U.S. Supreme
Court stepped in. The report calls out the
extraordinary July 2024 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Trump v. United States declaring that presidents cannot be prosecuted for
official acts. “Before this case,” the report reads, “no court had ever found
that Presidents are immune from criminal responsibility for their official
acts, and no text in the Constitution explicitly confers such criminal
immunity on the President.” It continued: “[N]o President whose conduct was
investigated (other than Mr. Trump) ever claimed absolute criminal immunity
for all official acts.” The report quoted the
dissent of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and
Ketanji Brown Jackson, noting that the decision of the Republican-appointed
justices “effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting
the status quo that has existed since the Founding.” That observation hits
hard today, as January 14 is officially Ratification Day, the anniversary of
the day in 1784 when members of the Confederation Congress ratified the
Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War and formally recognized the
independence of the United States from Great Britain. The colonists had
thrown off monarchy and determined to have a government of laws, not of men. But Trump threw off
that bedrock principle with a lie. His success recalls how Confederates who
lost the Civil War resurrected their cause by claiming that the lenience of
General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States toward officers and soldiers
who surrendered at Appomattox Court House in April 1865 showed not the mercy
of a victor but rather an understanding that the Confederates’ defense of
human slavery was superior to the ideas of those trying to preserve the
United States as a land based in the idea that all men were created equal. When no punishment was
forthcoming for those who had tried to destroy the United States, that story
of Appomattox became the myth of the Lost Cause, defending the racial
hierarchies of the Old South and attacking the federal government that tried
to make opportunity and equal rights available for everyone. In response to
federal protection of Black rights after 1948, when President Harry Truman
desegregated the U.S. military, Confederate symbols and Confederate ideology
began their return to the front of American culture, where they fed the
reactionary right. The myth of the Lost Cause and Trump’s lie came together
in the rioters who carried the Confederate battle flag when they breached the
U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump’s nominee for
Secretary of Defense, Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth, is adamant about
restoring the names of Confederate generals to U.S. military installations.
His confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee began
today. The defense secretary
oversees about 1.3 million active-duty troops and another 1.4 million in the
National Guard and employed in Reserves and civilian positions, as well as a
budget of more than $800 billion. Hegseth has none of the usual
qualifications of defense secretaries. As Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare pointed out today, he has “never held a policy
role…never run anything larger than a company of 200 soldiers…never been
elected to anything.” Hegseth suggested his
lack of qualifications was a strength, saying in his opening statement that
while “[i]t is true that I don’t have a similar biography to Defense
Secretaries of the last 30 years…as President Trump…told me, we’ve repeatedly
placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly ‘the right credentials’...and
where has it gotten us? He believes, and I humbly agree, that it’s time to
give someone with dust on his boots the helm.” The “dust on his
boots” claim was designed to make Hegseth’s authenticity outweigh his lack of
credentials, but former Marine pilot Amy McGrath pointed out that Trump’s
defense secretary James Mattis and Biden’s defense secretary Lloyd Austin,
both of whom reached the top ranks of the military, each came from the
infantry. Hegseth has settled an
accusation of sexual assault, appears to have a history of alcohol abuse, and
has been accused of financial mismanagement at two small veterans’
nonprofits. But he appears to embody the sort of strongman ethos Trump
craves. Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic did a deep dive into Hegseth’s recent books and
concluded that Hegseth “considers himself to be at war with basically
everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.” Hegseth’s books suggest he thinks
that everything that does not support the MAGA worldview is “Marxist,”
including voters choosing Democrats at the voting booth. He calls for the
“categorical defeat of the Left” and says that without its “utter
annihilation,” “America cannot, and will not, survive.” When Hegseth was in
the Army National Guard, a fellow service member who was the unit’s security
guard and on an anti-terrorism team flagged Hegseth to their unit’s
leadership because one of his tattoos is used by white supremacists.
Extremist tattoos are prohibited by army regulations. Hegseth lobbied Trump
to intervene in the cases of service members accused of war crimes, and he
cheered on Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally. Hegseth has said women do not
belong in combat and has been vocal about his opposition to the equity and
inclusion measures in the military that he calls “woke.” Wittes noted after
today’s hearing that “[t]he words ‘Russia’ and ‘Ukraine’ barely came up. The
words ‘China’ and ‘Taiwan’ made only marginally more conspicuous an
appearance. The defense of Europe? One would hardly know such a place as
Europe even existed. By contrast, the words ‘lethality,’ ‘woke,’ and ‘DEI’
came up repeatedly. The nominee sparred with members of the committee over
the difference between ‘equality’ and ‘equity.’” Senate Armed Services
Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) spoke today in favor of Hegseth, and
Republicans initially uncomfortable with the nominee appear to be coming
around to supporting him. But Hegseth refused to meet with Democrats on the
committee, and they made it clear that they will not make the vote easy for
Republicans. The top Democrat on
the committee, Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) said he did not believe Hegseth was
qualified for the position. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) exposed his lack
of knowledge about U.S. allies and bluntly told him he was unqualified, later
telling MSNBC that Hegseth will be an easy target for adversaries with
blackmail material. Hegseth told the armed
services committee that all the negative information about him was part of a
“smear campaign,” at the same time that he refused to say he would refuse to
shoot peaceful protesters in the legs or refuse an unconstitutional order. After the release of
Jack Smith’s report, Trump posted on his social media channel that regardless
of what he had done to the country, voters had exonerated him: “Jack is a
lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the
Election, which I won in a landslide,” he wrote, lying about a victory in
which more voters chose someone other than him. “THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!” It’s as if the
Confederates’ descendants have captured the government of the United States. |
