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Missing messages and other things [1]
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Date: 2022-08-03
They didn't call him Tricky Dick for nothing...
There seems to be a certain amount of surprise in some quarters that Secret Service texts, Homeland Security texts, and now DOD messages have all gone missing, all of them from around January 6.
Really? Surprise?
It’s almost as though anything that took place more than 5 minutes ago just disappears from common memory.
Has everyone forgotten Watergate, and how one of the things that broke it wide open was the revelation that Richard M. Nixon had been secretly recording things in the White House?
One of the more notable elements of that story was the 18 ½ minute gap that was mysteriously erased from one of the tapes. There’s still no convincing explanation for how it happened or what might have been on there.
But that was Nixon.
To talk about all the things that took place on Ronald Reagan’s watch that they tried to keep out of the spotlight would take multiple books. And there’s a reason George H.W. Bush was handing out strategic presidential pardons on his way out of office.
George W. Bush took things to an entirely new level: 22 million emails went missing on his watch. The party that had an extended hissy-fit over Hillary Clinton’s emails had no shame when it was their turn.
Clinton's email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House "lost" 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America's recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons. Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. "It's about as amazing a double standard as you can get," says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. "If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers' emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton's emails set up on a private DNC server?"
Astonishingly, the press seems to have overlooked all this when it was Hillary Clinton’s turn in the barrel. /s
So, it should come as no surprise that critical information has mysteriously evaporated from the time Donald Trump was instigating a coup attempt. It’s a Republican reflex — one Trump was already primed to adopt after decades of duplicitous tax filings and other tactics. Forget “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about.” The GOP principle is “If they can’t prove anything, you can get away with whatever you want.”
Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen testified how Trump ran his business empire like a mob boss, speaking in code, never directly saying things that might be considered actionable.
In Cohen’s scathing testimony at a House committee hearing, he repeatedly described Trump, the onetime head of a family business, like a mob boss minus the body count: quick to bully and expecting others to do his dirty work. Cohen described himself as a consigliere, telling lawmakers he did Trump’s bidding for years, intimidating maybe 500 people and lying to scores, including the first lady. But Trump never directly told him to do it, he said. “He doesn’t give you questions, he doesn’t give you orders,” Cohen said. “He speaks in a code, and I understand the code because I’ve been around him for a decade.” ...In his book “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership,” former FBI director James Comey said he got the sinking feeling that Trump’s operation functioned like the mob. Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe spun a similar story, and a former agent and former federal prosecutor tweeted Wednesday that Trump’s tactics as detailed by Cohen sure felt a lot like the mafia. There’s even a “Godfather: Part II” reference in the indictment by the special prosecutor investigating Trump’s possible ties to Russia. Trump confidant Roger Stone told an associate to pull a “Frank Pentangeli” before a House committee, the indictment says. In the film, Pentangeli, an associate of the Corleone crime family, lies to protect the family during congressional testimony.
Trump certainly had a thing about not leaving a paper trail. And Mark Meadows certainly has some questions to answer. Given how Trump operates and the kind of people he surrounds himself with, it is surprising there’s any record of anything.
But… lies and missing records is a Republican tradition after all. You’d think people might remember that by now.
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