For some reason that we are all invited to tease out for ourselves, New York Post columnist Richard Johnson gave up his column-inches yesterday to allow an anonymous pro-Trump witness hauled before Special Counsel Robert Mueller's federal grand jury to complain at length that there were too many black people in that room.
“The grand jury room looks like a Bernie Sanders rally,” my source said. “Maybe they found these jurors in central casting, or at a Black Lives Matter rally in Berkeley [Calif.]”
Of the 20 jurors, 11 are African-Americans and two were wearing “peace T-shirts,” the witness said. “There was only one white male in the room, and he was a prosecutor.” Mueller was not present. [...]
My source said, “That room isn’t a room where POTUS gets a fair shake.”
My goodness, there is a lot to unpack there. One clue as to the "witness" identity here could be, you might think, that peculiar string of insults that seem to have little to do with one another. Bernie Sanders rallies were almost always majority white; the "Central Casting" bit is a strange insult that matches up with none of the others; the curious inclusion of "Berkeley" pins the speaker as being a certain kind of conservative, namely one who gets twitchy when seeing “peace” T-shirts and who obsesses over "Berkeley." So the complainer can't seem to decide if their target is black people, Bernie Sanders supporters, or their own personal hippie stereotype, or all of the above.
Then there's the core complaint, and the presumed reason for the whole column: Why, half the jury is black! This is an outrage! Except that this is a grand jury impaneled in Washington D.C.—and so the makeup of the jury is pretty much exactly what you would expect.
The complainant contended that 11 of the 20 grand jurors in the room during the testimony were African-Americans, which isn’t a surprising figure because it roughly lines up with the percentage of black residents of the District of Columbia.
So what we have here is evidently someone who was shocked by seeing ... the same jury makeup as you would expect to see, for a jury not impaneled from the Mar-a-Lago guest list. (Our anonymous Trump supporter is also aggrieved by the presence of women, apparently, which only adds to the rich tapestry of whatever-the-hell on display here.)
Who could our mystery racist be, based on these clues? There's the rub; there's few people in Trump's orbit who it doesn't match up with. The attacks line up with the standard public operating rhetoric of Breitbart conservatives; it could very well be any one of a number of Republican lawmakers, and you and I both know it; it could be anyone in Trump's immediate circle of White House advisers; it could be anyone involved with Trump's businesses or finances. It could be Jared Kushner himself, with a stiff drink in him and a ironclad promise of anonymity.
For that matter, we're offered no evidence other than a Rupert Murdoch-paid columnist's say-so that the source truly is a "witness" called before the grand jury, rather than merely a provocateur claiming so. It could be, based on the conspicuous "Central Casting" tell and the general pattern of hurling unconnected insults in the hopes that something sticks, Donald Trump himself.
But anyone looking to narrow down the list of pro-Trump suspects here by attempting to cross off the ones who would not be so racist as to suggest that a majority-black grand jury would not give Trump a "fair shake" will not be able to cross off many names, either in the Breitbartian, the Trump loyalist, or the Republican functionary columns. It’s the calling card of Trump’s entire “movement.”
Setting all that aside, there's the question of just why our Page Six columnist Richard Johnson felt it worth devoting an entire column to this one pro-Trump witness's racist attacks on the credibility of the grand jury. Johnson offered no pushback, but offered up the attacks as-is. Why?
And why would you offer anonymity to a source peddling nothing but a string of rote insults? Of what value is presenting that, without further comment or pushback?
In any event, the column had the intended effect. By this morning Rupert Murdoch's Fox & Friends had picked up the accusations and run with them, as could be expected from the president's personal team of televised fluffers.
Now we watch to see which other Trump supporters are desperate enough to make the case that the grand jury is tainted by having exactly the same percentage of black Americans as Washington D.C. itself has. It may not go as far as it might, if only because the column was so very crass and the "leaker" so transparent in their racism.