At the request of Fox News, Donald Trump has ordered the Department of Justice to declassify both a series of documents related to the FISA warrant against Trump adviser Carter Page, and a raft of tweets from current and former employees of both the FBI and DOJ. Though Trump claims that he hasn’t read the documents he’s ordering released, it’s clear that someone has, and Republicans are planning to generate a stack of last minute scandals and conspiracy theories that will save them from the Blue Wave that seems set to crash down on the midterm elections.
As Politico reports, expectations are that the Republicans will mine the released texts and documents for phrases and isolated statements that they can use to “taint special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing Russia probe” and provide Trump’s base with a fresh infusion of Pizzagate, QAnon, ReleaseTheMemo, etc. to drive them to the polls in an anti-”Deep State” frenzy. The plan is to release the information in fits and starts, making sure that October headlines are filled with the latest revelations and Fox News hosts never run out of fuel for attacking Mueller, the FBI, the DOJ, and supposed connections to Democrats.
To Democrats, the situation has eerie similarities to 2016, when WikiLeaks’ slow-drip daily release of internal Clinton campaign emails hobbled Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and offered regular fodder for Republicans.
It’s obvious that the carefully curated selections they’ve requested from Carter Page’s FISA warrant are exactly those most likely to contain hints connected to the memos produced by Christopher Steele and to avoid the mountains of other evidence that went into Page’s warrant. It’s also clear that Republicans, aided by Fox News and the conspiracy theory-right, will sift the tweets from James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr not with an intent to find genuine issues, but looking for those “insurance policy” statements they can pull out to convince Trump’s fans that Democrats were trading still more child sex slaves through a network of pizza-scented tunnels.
But there’s a basic problem for the tactics of the alt-reich Fox State. The focus of the 2018 election isn’t a national effort to generate concern over Hillary Clinton’s emails. It’s Donald Trump. It’s not clear at this point that anyone other than Sean Hannity and a traveling cheering section at Trump rallies cares whether Hillary Clinton is “locked up” or even mentioned. But her emails … are not the focus of this election. Donald Trump is the focus of this election. That’s by design of both Democrats and Republicans, who have hung every ounce of their hopes on Trump’s pumpkin head.
The bigger problem for Trump is no one liked this show the first time, or the second time, and this is going way too many times to a very shallow well.
The purpose of the document release is exactly the purpose of the original release associated with Devin Nunes’s “release the memo” memo — to “prove” that the Russia investigation was started under false pretenses and is heavily dependent on the dossier prepared by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. But after weeks of hyping that effort when Trump inevitably declassified Nunes’s memo, the result was like dropping a tiny, tiny pebble down a very, very deep well. If it made a splash, it was too small to hear.
That was also the result of a second round of declassification that saw Trump personally walking Republican leaders in to view documents over the combined protests the FBI director and DOJ deputy attorney general that he appointed. That round of declassification was such a dud that Paul Ryan left early and even the most adamant Trump supporter couldn’t find a way to turn this “evidence” into evidence.
The fact that the Fox/Trump coalition is going back to this same point a third time as their big October effort mostly shows just how void of any real ideas their team is at this point. Sure, they managed to ride down Hillary Clinton—with some Russian help and decades of hammering on Hillary from the New York Times and others. But this time the great majority of Americans aren’t ready to swallow the idea that Robert Mueller is crooked, or that the FBI is riddled with traitors, or that FISA court judges are on the Democratic payroll.
As New York Magazine reports, Trump’s actions in demanding the pre-election evisceration of security standards is “an audacious exercise of Executive authority, even by Trump’s formidable standards.” Trump is both “potentially jeopardizing the security of American intelligence assets” and he’s actively interfering in an ongoing investigation. Whatever conspiracy theories are currently being brainstormed by the writers at Hannity and Fox & Friends, they’re unlikely to do more than shore up the Trumpiest of Trump’s base.
But Trump’s actions will likely provide more evidence for the bulk of voters that he’s willing to do anything to undercut the Russia investigation. They might even provide a new page in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s growing file of ways that Trump has sought to obstruct justice. Unfortunately, the one thing that is definite is that his actions will hurt the FBI and DOJ, making it more difficult to conduct future investigations.