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What’s becoming notable is to the extent that the GOP argues like an unscrupulous defense attorney.
One GOP canard-they’ve got a lot of canards-is after Mueller begun his investigation that the Congress would have to step back in its own investigation lest it step on Mueller’s toes. This was risibly fallacious as in Watergate you had the Watergate Select Committee alongside Leon Jaworski’s Special Counsel. But it was yet another misleading GOP argument that preys on the ignorance of people.
Indeed, when you think about it, the structure of so many GOP arguments are the same. When Nunes and friends prematurely closed down the investigation in February, 2018 they asserted that ‘there’s no evidence of collusion.’ But, of course, they never even looked. They didn’t even interview George Papadopoulos-who”s loose lips about Russia’s incriminating emails on Clinton to Australia’s top diplomat started the Russia probe in the first place. Of course, Nunes and friends pushed yet another canard-that it was actually the Steele Dossier that begun the investigation.
This is the same way they argued for Kavanaugh’-‘There’s no corroboration of sexual assault’ which is actually totally false. But clearly they didn’t want corroboration-if they did they would have had actual witnesses in the hearings and not outrageously circumscribed the FBI’s investigation. Of course, if they really wanted to corroborate the charges the investigation would have occurred prior to the Senate hearing and the report would not have been hid from the public.
And this is how they argue against climate change as well: there’s simply no evidence.
In every case they employ this same bad criminal defense attorney argument in a totally ad hominem way that rules out at the outset actually attempting to analyze the existing evidence. Remember that most of these Congressional GOPers are lawyers so they know perfectly well these are bad arguments but they’re counting on the ignorance of the public and the media.
Examining the transcripts from when the GOP Senate Intelligence Committee interviewed Glenn Simpson is a case in point-this is a party that very widely employs the bad faith arguments of a bad faith defense attorney. Thankfully we’ve got a defense attorney like Seth Abramson who seeks to enlighten rather than further discombobulate and confuse. He has some interesting analysis of Glenn Simpon’s testimony. Let me start by saying that as a layperson I found the interview very interesting and rewarding-though it took a couple of days to get through.
I think what stood out to me initially in following his testimony is Simpson’s intelligence, his knowledge, and perhaps most of all his candor. When I say he was candid, I’m contrasting him with the other interviews in the Senate IC transcripts
These other transcripts are from the participants in the Trump Tower meeting between the Trump campaign and the Russians on June9. 2016.
What strikes me in the testimony of Don Jr, Rob Goldstone, Natalia Vessentiskaya, Jared Kushner’s statement, Rinat Akhmetshin ,Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze and friends is a general lack of candor. I’m not saying dishonesty-the transcripts only have their statements with no effort to corroborate their stories. But even if you take what they say at face value, they are not candid-even if not untruthful in a purely legalistic way. They aren’t forthcoming-they tell you as little as they need to
Not so with Simpson who answers expansively-or as Don McGahn would put it fulsomely.
He definitely impresses me as highly credible. The GOP plays it’s usual tricks; It tries to find ways to pigeonhole him into some sort of counternarrative that exonerates ‘President Trump.’ They are his unscrupulous defense attorneys just as they were for Kavanaugh or for those companies and industries whose actions harm the environment.
They want to intimate that he just does a cut and paste job where he tells clients whatever they want to hear. So if a client wants oppo on Trump he slaps something together wether it’s true or not. This cynical understanding actually says a lot about them-it’s pure projection. So when Kavanaugh warned ‘what goes around comes around’ and Lindsay Graham seemed to suggest they would deal Dem SJC nominees dirty in the future this was pure projection-in truth what more could they do to the Democrats than simply refuse a hearing as they did in 2016? They accuse the Democrats of paying protesters but Roger Stone boasts in his own book on 2016 that they paid protesters to wear t shirts calling Bill Clinton a rapist.
But any ‘oppo’ provided by Simpson is clearly fact based.
17/ Simpson also notes that Fusion GPS does not do payment arrangements which incentivize Fusion GPS getting a government body to initiate an investigation of something, though of course Fusion GPS may tell a client that—based on information found—that's one recourse they have.
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) January 9, 2018
43/ Second, the Democrats establish what even a small baby would know instinctively: when you're doing research for a client, you *can't and don't share that research with other clients*.
No one in Simpson's line of work could operate unless he stuck to that hard-and-fast rule.
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) January 9, 2018
Another GOP canard during this interview was trying to allege that actually Fusion GPS was a Russian company and therefore, the Clinton campaign is who really colluded with the Russians. Their reasoning? Because GPS did some work in another case for a Russian firm.
27/ All anyone would take from this is: (a) Fusion will work for anyone, regardless of their politics (and indeed the Steele Dossier was paid for by Republicans, then Democrats); (b) Fusion was (only in working for Prevezon) "on Trump's side" in opposing certain Russia sanctions.
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) January 9, 2018
29/ What the GOP is hoping, instead—and it's going to be tough to follow this pretzel-shaped logic—is that Fusion doing indirect work for a cause Putin supports means that Steele (wait for it) was, on a wholly different job, secretly working for Putin in trying to damage Trump.
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) January 9, 2018
31/ Yes! Simpson has done what his attorney should have done (see my earlier tweet): "It's going to be difficult [to answer your question] because it's really hard for me to answer questions where you lump in all these things that other people were doing and impute them to me."
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) January 9, 2018
But what’s really notable is what the GOP didn’t ask about? The actual work GPS did on Trump. They were very interested in trying nibble around the edges suggesting he would say anything to please a client-basically the same argument Trump used against Rick Gates-an informant will say anything to please a prosecutor-or suggesting that GPS was actually working with Putin to make it look like Trump was in bed-with Putin. But what they were much less interested in was the actual research.
Yes as an interested layperson who read the Simpson transcripts-it took a few days but was very rewarding reading-it's notable the total lack of curiousity regarding Simpson's actual findings about Trump
— Expand the Court (@ProChoiceMike) October 10, 2018
In any case, after all the heavy weather the GOP made over Glenn Simpson, they naturally fought the release of his testimony-Dianne Feinstein ended up having to leak it herself.
We’ve talked about the GOP tactic of pretending to be concerned that ‘there’s no evidence’ while they don’t look at the very abundant and available evidence. Another tactic is to refuse to make information public that should be public but then cherrypicking certain snippets for leaks and then totally misinterpreting the snippets shorn of any context.
This is not how a party confident in their so-called ‘President’s innocence of collusion would act.
UPDATE: Ok so I wrote this chapter initially back on October 10, 2018. Today on May 24, 2019 it’s still fairly ambiguous what to say regarding the Steele dossier a much maligned and slandered document. Many treat it as being disproved though I’m not aware of anything that’s actually been disproved-some things in it have been proven many have not been proven or disproven,
For instance it’s widely believed that what was said about Carter Page was disproven but that’s not at all true-as Emptywheel points out Mueller seems to have decided that Page could have been charged as a foreign agent but chose not to do so.
Why he declined to charge Page is one of many questions the Dem Congress needs to ask Mueller.