The president’s man who crossed the GOP’s line
“Forget the myths the media’s created about the White House. The truth is, these are not very bright guys. And things got out of hand ... Follow the money ... Just follow the money.”
That’s Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat, speaking in “All the President’s Men.” There’s an eternal perfection in the words. They’re so easily transferable to myriad American political scandals, although — compared to some of the dingdongs we’re dealing with right now — Hunt, Colson and Liddy were Brookings Institution scholars.
Ding-dong of the Week is — take a bow, Connecticut — Robert F. Hyde, a long-shot Republican candidate for Congress in the Fightin’ 5th District. Hyde has already accomplished a remarkable feat. He has rendered himself so toxic and defective that the Connecticut Republican Party will not entertain the idea of him running for Congress.
The party has great difficulty getting anybody to run in some of these races and has frequently subscribed to the Any Warm Body theory of populating the ballot line. Consider, if you will, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s opponents since 2000. But nothing will top last cycle’s 2nd District race in which Dan Postemski, the Republican opponent of incumbent Joe Courtney, essentially dropped out of sight in the middle of the campaign.
Columnist David Collins of The Day in New London wrote a hilarious column about just trying to find Postemski. You know, get a phone number or something. He eventually called Republican state chair J.R. Romano who didn’t know how to find Postemski either and told Collins that, with 300 candidates in the field, it was understandable that he might lose track of one. (Note to J.R.: your next career should not be in the day care field.)
Postemski eventually surfaced and said he only ran for Congress because no other Republican would, and then, because nobody from the party would help him, he quit trying.
I tell you this to illustrate how monumental it is that the entire Connecticut Republican establishment — including J.R. — has deemed Hyde unfit to run. They can live with Amber Alerts on their candidates, but Hyde is more of a BOLO guy.
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably generally familiar with Hyde and the manner in which he was featured this week. The House Intelligence Committee released a tranche of documents relating to Rudy Giuliani confederate Lev Parnas. Among them was ... you might call it a WhatsApp Doc. (Sorry.) It was a series of March 2019 text exchanges between Parnas and Hyde on the encrypted WhatsApp service. Hyde appeared to be providing details about the whereabouts of Marie Yovanovitch, at the time our Ambassador to Ukraine.
And not just her whereabouts, but whether she was well-guarded and whether there were people in Ukraine who could be paid to do something about her.
Parnas, speaking to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Wednesday night, said he shut the conversation down once it veered into crazyville. Maddow countered that the back-and-forth went on for a week as opposed to “New phone. Who dis?” the first time Hyde texted, “She’s under heavy protection outside Kyiv.”
OK. Let’s put on the table the most benign explanation, which I have assembled from remarks by Parnas and Hyde. Hyde is basically a nobody who got his foot in the door by hanging around Trump hotel property bars and through five-figure Republican campaign donations. To Maddow, Parnas painted him as a Mr. Hyde with no Dr. Jekyll side. “I have never seen him not drunk.”
So for six days in March, the two men were in different locations, neither of which was Kyiv. They amused themselves by pretending they were going to do something bad to a fairly obscure (in those days) American diplomat. You know. The way people do.
That’s the benign explanation.
When it comes to malign explanations, the abyss is the limit. Yovanovitch, through her lawyer, has asked for an investigation. The chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee called the exchanges “profoundly alarming.”
You want alarming? Last June, after the U.S. Secret Service contacted Connecticut police about “veiled threats” from Hyde on social media, Simsbury police removed from Hyde’s home, with his cooperation, a bunch of rifles and shotguns.
This came fast on the heels of a prior incident in Miami at the Trump Doral, where Hyde was apparently behaving so oddly that (a) it stood out in Florida and (b) he was detained by the police, held and transported somewhere under the Baker Act, an absolutely indispensable Florida statute that provides for the detention of persons who may pose a threat to themselves or others. According to Mother Jones, Hyde later complained on Instagram of having been “Baker Acted,” perhaps the first use of the law as a verb. I smell a Hold Steady lyric in the future.
Tales of Hyde are now rampant. NBC News found neighbors who said he shined a stadium-level spotlight on their house every night for months. And a church in Simsbury whose website proclaims “There is a place for you at First Church,” called the cops because Hyde was hanging around in a way that freaked people out.
So it’s still unclear what kind of story this is, but let’s go back to Holbrook’s famous speech. “Follow the money.” Hyde has a seesaw pattern of appearing to have no money — hence, his eviction from his business property for failure to pay rent and complaints about his getting way behind on child support. Also a pattern of, well, having money: he lives in a nice house, suddenly cleaned up his child support problem, appears to have made at least $56,000 in campaign contributions since 2016 and, according to the New York Times, gave $25,000 to the Trump inaugural committee.
In fairness, my experience in covering campaigns tells me that, if you can write five-figure checks that don’t bounce, political operatives Republican or Democratic will grant you all kinds of access even if you have DefCon 1 halitosis and claim you see dead people. That’s the state of politics in the modern age.
Back to Parnas. He and Igor Fruman were arraigned in federal court last year of charges of illegally funneling foreign money into U.S. elections. So it’s fair to ask where Hyde’s campaign bucks came from.
One last thing. Even though he’s currently persona non grata, Hyde, with his big cigars and his “Make Ammo Great Again” T-shirt, wouldn’t look all that out of place in a 2020 American Republican Party Diorama.
Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, in their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” describe a roughly 30-year tilt of the GOP to be more and more welcoming of the kind of people who used confine themselves to backwoods militias, agrarian compounds and apocalyptic Christian cults.
It’s a party more tolerant of aggression than the one my parents belonged to. Hyde is the kind of person you meet on that road.