Trump Is Only a Co-Star in America’s Unreality Show
This is exactly what happened in the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email case, though the press is loath to acknowledge it. It happened again in the collusion investigation. The same pattern was used in the Hunter Biden laptop episode.
The pattern is surprisingly applicable even in the latest kerfuffle, the indictment of Donald Trump for improperly keeping intelligence documents. Don’t expect actually to see the documents. Do expect to be inundated with official statements and press leaks characterising Mr Trump’s possession of them as a Defcon-level threat to national security. Every bit of recent history suggests government claims require careful flyspecking. Take the indictment’s emphasis on an audio recording of Mr Trump allegedly flaunting a military strike plan for Iran to a visiting writer at his club in Bedminster, N.J. – rather than at Mar-a-Lago, where an FBI raid showed Mr Trump stored his presidential papers.
The government doesn’t actually specify that such a document was found or that it was secret (a separate catalogue in the indictment suggests a possibly relevant document was “unmarked” as to classification). Prosecutors may already know they can’t prove Mr Trump wasn’t waving a takeout menu to rebut a former military adviser then criticising him in the news. But the anecdote was featured in the indictment and went over well in news coverage.
The larger problem here is becoming metastatic. Anybody can claim anything, then a government official can dignify the claim as “intelligence” and use it as the basis for action. The FBI in particular has shown itself increasingly willing to use false information to advance its goals. It started when FBI chief James Comey used false Russian “intelligence” to clear Hillary Clinton’s path to the 2016 nomination and spare the Obama Justice Department the political embarrassment of having to do the job itself.
Of course, it’s only a small step from here to fabricating the desired “intelligence” out of whole cloth. The telltale duo of our time is Christopher Steele, the gullible British ex-spy, and his hired helper, Igor Danchenko, who invented for Mr Steele’s benefit the secrets Mr Steele was eager to sell to his clients in the Clinton campaign.
The real world implies limitation; fantasy doesn’t. Fantasy-creation is becoming a major occupation of our intelligence agencies and the FBI. Falsehood, after all, can be tailored to need, whereas the incentive for truth largely dissipates if officials and the media don’t feel chastened or even slightly disadvantaged when their assertions are shown to be false.
For another day is the strangest manifestation (which happily some other journalists are starting to notice), the recurrent footsie between the Pentagon and the UFO crowd. The latest “whistleblower,” recently resigned Air Force and intelligence veteran David Grusch, takes a revealingly Steele-like approach, suitable to a click-driven world that wants sensational claims rather than plausible ones. He claims to have seen documents and spoken to sources who say the Pentagon is swimming in alien artefacts, first obtained from the Mussolini government in Italy in 1944 or 1945, and has killed people to protect its secret.
I keep trying to point out to Trump critics: We live not in a Manichaean political world but a world of competition and emulation. Hence the blinkered and self-serving nature of their demand that Trump supporters disown their unsavoury tribune and his unsavoury tactics against an equally dishonourable opposition.
The left’s favourite accusation of “whataboutism” is a manifesto of this delusion that irrationalism and conspiracy mongering are features only of Republican Party politics. The mirror doesn’t lie. A related symbol is the near-disappearance of the policy tome. White papers once flooded press inboxes. They’ve slowed to a trickle because appeals to rationality no longer carry much weight in the battle for political power.
If you worry that artificial intelligence will only make the disinformation problem worse, you may not be aware of how bad it has already become. This was an interesting week for House Republicans at least to float a short-lived censure of chief collusion hoaxer Adam Schiff. I’ve given a half-cheer to the voting-machine company lawsuits and twice urged Joe Biden to endorse the Durham investigation for the same reason. The challenge of our time is reclaiming the rule of reason and evidence from cynical fantasists of every description. The FBI would be a good place to start.
The Wall Street Journal
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Decide how you want to intervene to influence a presidential election. Identify some top secret “intelligence” dredged from the compendious internet to justify your desired action, confident the justification can’t be examined or easily criticised by outsiders.