What Just Happened?
Terry H. Schwadron
June 2, 2022
OK, we all understand the desire to put the best face on bad news or an outcome we wish never happened.
But we find ourselves increasingly drowning in our societal desires for denial and disinformation.
For those of us who believe that a baseball game score is just that — that one team won, and one lost, with another game pending for tomorrow — the retelling of public events through “spin” to persuade that the outcome was rigged or never happened is just plain upsetting.
Sure, there always were some good hits or defensive plays for the losing team, and maybe even the promise of how to adjust for a better outcome, but shouldn’t we be able to recognize a loss for what it is, whether in sports, elections, politics or even economics?
At the risk of overemphasizing a single instance, it is worth looking at a politics-inspiried court case this week. For three years, special counsel John Durham, a Connecticut federal prosecutor, has been working to prove that the beginnings of associations between Russian operatives and the then Donald Trump campaign of 2015 were legally faulty.
Over that entire time, he brought two cases to the fore: One, still pending, has charged Russian expat Igor Danchenko with five counts of lying to the FBI in 2017 about claims made in that Christopher Steele dossier of raw, unchecked, and now questionable intelligence reports about Russian contacts with Trump. And one against attorney Michael Sussman, whose law firm has represented Democrats, over the narrow charge of lying about whether he was working for Hillary Clinton’s campaign at the time he took a report to the FBI about a bank with Russian ties and the Trump campaign.
This week, a federal jury in Washington found Sussman not guilty.
But from news coverage from Fox News and other right-leaning news sites, you would never know it was a loss for the Durham effort.
The Durham Effort
Instead of reports about how the Durham prosecution efforts have basically proved fruitless or that they have shed little new light on the origins of multi-hundred-page Mueller Report on Trump’s Russian contacts, we got broadsides from the Right about how the jury pool in Washington, D.C, is tainted.
Essentially, the legal outcome was rigged, said any number of Fox hosts and the likes of Donald Trump Jr. With too many registered Democrats in Washington, how could anyone expect a different verdict for a guy who has worked for Democrats?
“Despite acquittal, Durham trial of Sussmann added to evidence Clinton campaign plotted to tie Trump to Russia,” the Fox News.com headline read. The headlines in other publications stated baldly that the Durham prosecution had lost.
We should note that this is not a “Democratic” win or loss, but the outcome of a criminal court case that Republicans, at least, wanted to showcase as evidence of a Clinton campaign to undercut Trump. During the trial, which was spent talking about taxi receipts and specific identifications about whether Sussman was at the moment of his interview working for the Clinton campaign, Clinton’s campaign manager said that Clinton was aware of the information that was being leaked to reporters about Trump.
In the end, the jury decided that the prosecution did not prove that Sussman was lying. The case is so narrow as to have little lasting meaning other than to the individuals involved. Indeed, isn’t the right question now how long Attorney General Merrick Garland lets Durham rove through six-year-old files in search of a case to bring?
Notwithstanding this verdict, those who believe that Trump was unfairly tagged with responsibility for numerous contacts between his campaign and Russian operatives — including former Attorney General Bill Barr, who appointed Durham — will continue to argue that case.
What is interesting to me is the absolute need to restate a court loss as a court win.
Danger of Alternative Outcomes
The wider point is that we have reached a point in which there are warring explanations and spin on all public events. We can’t agree on what happened, never mind on what to do about the issue.
We hear would-be Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy denying what he said on and about Jan. 6 just as we hear the video clips of him saying it. We see police in Uvalde, Texas spinning an entire fantasy of police bravery in the school shooting there only to have to own up to a totally different story. The White House is talking a strong economy while gas prices are up dramatically, and reports about inflation fail to note that this is a global problem.
“As the rest of the country mourned the latest young victims of gun violence, the QAnon crowd and their enablers in the Republican Party have constructed a walled fortress of alternative facts,” summarized Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. “In the hours after the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, right-wing social media churned out every manner of conspiracy theory: The shooter was an illegal immigrant! No, he was transgender! Or maybe the massacre was a false-flag operation perpetrated by the anti-gun left! And the grieving families are paid crisis actors!”
We can’t prevent school shootings or reach common-sense compromises about gun violence, or lessen immigration and inflation issues without agreement on what the problem at hand is. And how does it help anything about Uvalde to demean — wrongly as it turns out — the shooter for traits that have nothing to do with the obvious, that he bought two assault-style rifles for $3,500 for his 18th birthday and sent around posts with anger towards schools and institutions.
In an emergency ruling, even the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on disinformation on social media, temporarily blocking a Texas law aimed at barring big tech companies from barring posts based on their political content. In a decision with little explanation, the court acknowledged that balancing free speech and disinformation is more complicated than can be easily addressed in such a ruling.
Even in a society that insists on winning over all else, it is outlandish that we cannot seem to accept the fact of what just happened before leaping to the partisan lines to tell folks how to feel about it.
Our job is clear here: Don’t leap before you learn.
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