Trump’s best bet to counter Mueller probe
While the US president is expected to continue scorched-earth tactics, his most powerful defence team remains the Fox News network
The US president has doubled down on his strategy of undermining the Mueller investigation. If his tweets attacking Mueller by name didn’t make that clear enough, in comes the news of the resignation of John Dowd, the president’s lawyer who had urged cooperation with the special counsel.
Dowd’s departure — and the hiring of Joseph diGenova to Trump’s legal team — will provide the US president with greater freedom to pursue the scorched-earth tactics he evidently believes hold the key to his political survival. These include working tirelessly to destroy the credibility and impartiality of the Mueller probe to the point that firing the special counsel or ignoring his recommendations do not spell political suicide. That in turn, will require maintaining his popularity with his core supporters, as only then can he count on congressional Republicans to capitulate to his deformation of constitutional governance. In diGenova, a former federal prosecutor and a long-standing Trump friend, the president has found an enthusiastic enabler of his attacks on the nation’s intelligence communities and Department of Justice (DOJ). In recent months diGenova has been a regular fixture on Fox News, peddling the president’s extravagant conspiracy theories.
In January, on Tucker Carlson Tonight, diGenova detailed “a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn’t win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime.” “The FBI and senior DOJ officials conspired to violate the law and deny Donald Trump his civil rights ...” diGenova shockingly reported. “They ... didn’t like Donald Trump, they didn’t think that he was fit to be president, and they were going to do everything within their power to exonerate Hillary Clinton, and if she lost to frame Donald Trump with a false crime ...”
In February, the former prosecutor expanded on these themes, telling Fox News host Sean Hannity: “We are headed toward a very sad ending for the FBI and senior DOJ officials . ... I believe that several high FBI officials will be charged criminally. And it is conceivable that some DOJ people will also be charged criminally . ... I would consider this the largest law enforcement scandal in history for this reason.” And earlier this month, he opined: “This is the single most important scandal of the last 50 years because senior DOJ and FBI officials engaged in conduct that was designed to corrupt an American presidential election. It wasn’t the Russians who corrupted the presidential election; it was the American officials at the Department of Justice and the FBI.”
Sobering conclusions
These scandalously irresponsible claims, offered without a scintilla of supporting evidence, would have little traction and less plausibility if they weren’t given a national platform on Fox, where they are received by the likes of Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson as the impartial and sober conclusions of a legal expert.
At least we can be grateful that Ralph Peters, a retired lieutenant colonel in the US Army and himself a regular on Fox, announced this week that he was severing his ties with the network. Those who have seen Peters’ appearances on Fox over the years will recall the strategic analyst as a vehement critic of Obama’s refusal to use muscle in foreign affairs. But evidently Peters has discovered there are things worse than being a total weakling, the charge he once levelled against former president Obama on live television.
Peters is of course correct that Fox News has essentially turned into a domestic version of the kind of state-run media vehicle that we associate with Putin’s Russia — with one key difference. Russians know not to trust the state-run media; they understand that it peddles disinformation and takes its cues from the man whose electoral victory our President so recently celebrated. Fox, by contrast, continues to indulge the myth that is a reliable, if conservatively inflected, source of news. Indeed, the durability of the president’s support among Republicans would be unintelligible without the support delivered by Fox. So while diGenova’s addition to the US president’s team will empower Trump to ramp up his defamations of Mueller and his team, the most powerful member of the Trump’s defence team remains the Fox News network.
Poor Richard Nixon! He never would have had to resign, not if he been president in today’s media ecosystem, not if could have relied upon the folks at Fox News to provide journalistic cover for his crimes.
Lawrence Douglas is a legal luminary. He is currently the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College, Massachusetts.