Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America

by Kimberley Strassel

All of this makes the incessant allegation and emotion over the “lawless” Trump something close to hilarious. A politicized Justice Department? Check, under Obama. Ruling by decree? Did that, under Obama. Blatant disregard for checks and balances? Been there, under Obama. Changing laws at will? Hello, Obama.

Trump has overseen the most dramatic reduction in the size of federal government of any president in the modern era.

Instead, the FBI did something it had never done before, breaking perhaps one of the biggest rules of all: It launched a counterintelligence investigation into a domestic political campaign. The public has never fully appreciated how dishonest this was. The FBI didn’t have a crime to investigate. Page had broken no laws in going to Moscow; people do it all the time. Papadopoulos had broken no laws in talking to a work colleague who had Russian associates. The FBI didn’t even have evidence to suggest a crime.

The leaks that accompanied the first part of the Trump administration were so numerous and damaging that Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson felt compelled to study it. His team examined media leaks between January 20, 2017, and May 25, 2017—Trump’s first 126 days in office. The report found the Trump administration had “faced 125 leaked stories—one leak a day—containing information that is potentially damaging to national security under the standards laid out in a 2009 Executive Order signed by President Barack Obama.” The leaking was seven times faster than that in Obama’s first 126 days. Nearly 80 percent of the leaks focused on the Russia probe, and many revealed “closely-held information such as intelligence community intercepts, FBI interviews and intelligence, grand jury subpoenas, and even the workings of a secret surveillance court.”

In a column titled “Who Paid for the Trump Dossier,” I wrote: “Here’s a thought: What if it was the Democratic National Committee or Hillary Clinton’s campaign? What if that money flowed from a political entity on the left, to a private law firm, to Fusion, to a British spook, and then to Russian sources?” The left ridiculed that claim for months, but it was, in fact, exactly what happened. For so long, we’d heard the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign had been colluding with Russians. It was backward. From the start, it was the Hillary campaign playing footsie with the Russians. Move aside the middlemen of Fusion and Steele and you ended up with this: The Democrats were paying dollars to collect Russian-provided accusations against Trump.

The committee’s findings, in late October 2016, proved that Clinton and the DNC had paid for the dossier, via the law firm cutout of Perkins Coie.

Which meant a lot of people in Washington knew. Fusion delivered its product to its paymasters. It also filtered it through the State Department, the Justice Department, and the FBI. Comey in the spring of 2016 had briefed the Obama administration on his Trump-Russia concerns, and Brennan had briefed Senate minority leader Harry Reid.

But this was the purest case in modern times of political actors co-opting the nation’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies for political purpose, an unspeakable affront to free elections and liberty.

the end of March 2018, committee Republicans announced they had finished their investigation and had readied a final report on Russia’s interference in 2016, along with recommendations to prevent a repeat. The committee had engaged in an exhaustive probe, one that proved spot on. It managed to conclude a full year before Mueller that there was no Trump-Russia collusion and to spotlight Russia’s damaging efforts in the election.

In May, we at the WSJ, via our own reporting, realized there had been an informant. I’m proud to say we were the first to report that the FBI had used an asset—a “top secret intelligence source”—to spy on members of the Trump campaign. I’m also proud to say that we independently figured out the name of the informant—Stefan Halper.

But Barr was something else to reckon with, and Mueller hastily moved to close shop. He delivered his final 448-page report on March 22, 2019. Barr two days later released a summary of the report’s principal conclusions, and less than a month after that released a largely unredacted version of the report to the public. Volume I—on “collusion”—offered complete and total vindication for the Trump team, much to the haters’ mortification. As with his indictments, the Mueller report sought to play up every tie, every meeting, every conversation between Trump folks and Russians. And yet the report had to acknowledge it could find no prosecutable evidence that the Trump campaign had coordinated in Russia’s efforts to undermine the election.

It was an even greater vindication than that. A close read of the report showed that, if anything, the core Trump campaign circle had been highly wary of Russian outreach and had repeatedly turned down offers of access. A close read also revealed just how diligently and creatively the special counsel’s legal minds had worked to implicate someone, anyone, in Trump world on Russia-related crimes.

The equally important takeaway from Volume I was (again) what was not in it. A significant number of the allegations Mueller had spent all that time investigating had come straight from a dossier supplied by the rival political party. Mueller’s failure to establish the veracity of any of those claims was a searing indictment of the FBI and its decision to proceed with that document. The nation had spent years engulfed in the dossier’s conspiracy theories, and Mueller had proved it all a hoax.

Mueller’s job was to investigate Trump for crimes and decide if there was evidence enough to charge. Mueller conceded in his report that he lacked evidence to know Trump’s motives in his actions.

“The special counsel said the Russians he indicted for interfering in the 2016 election are innocent until proven guilty. About Mr. Trump he said only that ‘there was insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy’ between the Trump campaign and Russia.” No one ever obstructed Mueller’s probe, as evidenced by his fulsome report. He nonetheless went out of his way to weigh in for the Democrats who wanted to impeach Trump.

Many of these civil servants work for the government because they believe in big government; they already lean left. And they were turbocharged by an Obama administration that ruled by regulation and executive order, thereby handing to the bureaucracy decisions that are supposed to be made by an elected legislature. The career bureaucracy was put in charge of vast new programs—regulating energy, transportation, water, health care, taxes, finance. And as the Obama administration had no interest in policing them, they were left to run the show. This is the bureaucracy Trump inherited—big, bold, overweening.

Resistance deep-staters aren’t alone in their anti-Trump work. They have a new, thriving, and growing outside network to help spread their leaks and tie up the internal works. Together, this triad of internal resisters, outside activists, and left-leaning press have pioneered a new form of the political takedown. It piles manufactured scandal upon manufactured scandal to create the pressure necessary to drive Trump cabinet heads out of their jobs.

Many talented and qualified—and highly ethical—people have since passed on opportunities to work in the Trump administration. They have no desire to have their personal lives ransacked and their reputations smeared, or to open themselves up to litigation—which is now a risk even for people who do nothing wrong. The Resistance might call this a victory.

Every American has the right to a political view and a vote. But federal employees don’t have the right to carry those views into their work environment and act upon them.

The travel ban drama was a great case study in just how willing the judicial Resistance was to break norms in aid of thwarting Trump. The problem wasn’t that the courts had come up with flawed opinions. The problem was that they’d ignored all the usual safeguards that are meant to protect against frivolous lawsuits and flawed opinions. And it wasn’t just one or two judges indulging in occasional reckless behavior. Dozens of judges and significant numbers of appeals courts began routinely trashing basic judicial norms. The practice has become so overt that the Supreme Court has on occasion felt compelled to chide the lower courts for ignoring first principles.

Resistance judges begin from the position that Trump is operating outside of norms. The irony, as Blackman has noted, is that their reaction has been to operate even further outside norms. But it isn’t the courts’ job to judge Trump’s behavior. Their job is to interpret the law. Judges don’t get to ignore the rules simply because they loathe the president. And their decision to insert political animus into our judicial system is undermining American belief in a blind Lady Justice.

I’ve never engaged much in media criticism, for two simple reasons. First, it’s almost too obvious. Yes, the mainstream media is liberal. Always has been. And—just as important—always will be. Mainstream journalism tends to attract do-gooders who are out to save the world. Researchers from Arizona State University and Texas A&M University in 2018 surveyed 462 financial journalists. More than 58% admitted to being “very liberal or somewhat liberal.” Another 37% described themselves as “moderate.” Precisely 4.4% said they leaned right of center.

The media understands that the juicier and more outrageous the story, the more the clicks, views, and revenue. And Trump is juicy stuff. Yet it has had terrible consequences for the industry and for the country. Gallup since the 1970s has been tracking American trust in the media, which reached a high in the mid-1970s following Watergate reporting. In 2016, U.S. opinion that the media reported news “fully, accurately and fairly” hit an all-time low—32%. It was an eight-point drop from just the year before.

In Gallup’s 2018 poll, only 21% of Republicans reported trust in the media, compared to 76% of Democrats.

Meanwhile, a Monmouth University poll in early 2018 found that a whopping 77% of Americans believe traditional TV and newspaper outlets report “fake news.”

These kinds of numbers are alarming for civil society. The press is supposed to play an integral role in holding officials to account and helping the public make informed decisions. The more Americans are turned off from traditional news, the more they turn to social media and other truly dubious sources of information. It also creates a world in which Americans self-select their news sources, meaning they increasingly read or listen to only things with which they agree. America is growing more radical and polarized, and the press in recent years has played a big role in that change.

One particularly huge mistake helped drive all the rest: The press became willing advocates for government officials and agencies (at least the ones they liked). This is the reverse of the role the press is supposed to play. The media exists to be a government watchdog; the public depends on it to expose corrupt behavior.

When it has come to Trump administration actions, the press has done that with great energy, riding herd on every fact and issue. But when it has come to former Obama officials (Comey, Clapper, Brennan) and FBI and DOJ whisperers, they have served as willing scribes. They not only swallowed everything they were told, they also fought on those officials’ side. It’s hard to explain just how big a dereliction of duty this is. Reporters learn on day one that government officials exist to spin and lie, and that they do so with impunity. And the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation fell so clearly into the government-abuse-of-power stories that the press usually exists to expose—spying on a presidential campaign, wiretapping U.S. citizens.

Aside from occasional scandals of reporters deliberately fabricating stories in order to advance themselves, nothing in recent years compares to this level and frequency of misinformation. The press gets furious when Trump talks about its “fake news.” But what else would you call it?

Another low of the past few years has been the media’s willingness to run fact-free accusations.

A functioning civil society needs a much higher level of engagement. We need to be just as picky and just as demanding about our political outcomes as we are about our toaster, gutters, and employees.