We’ve arrived at the point where conspiracy theorism has gone from occasional impulse to reflexive assumption in conservative politics.
Now, this is not just a Republican failing. Witness, for example, the odd congeries of ill-ordered notions that clutter the cramped cranium of Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Still, it is a failing that asymmetrically afflicts the right-wing.
When uncongenial events occur or hoped-for outcomes don’t happen, conservatives habitually attribute it to deep-state deviousness or the nefarious knavery of a rigged system.
For many Republicans, that became a knee-jerk explanation for the 2020 presidential election, which was definitely lost but decidedly not stolen. And for a federal investigation that resulted in the indictment of former president Donald Trump. And for another federal probe that arrived at a no-prison plea bargain with presidential son Hunter Biden.
Advertisement
There, the right-wing talking point is that there are now two systems of justice, one for Democrats and the Bidens, and the other for Republicans.
Never mind that David Weiss, the US attorney for Delaware who agreed to the plea arrangement for Hunter Biden, was appointed by Trump.
Never mind that Biden’s Department of Justice kept Weiss in place.
Never mind that Attorney General Merrick Garland has declared that he left the resolution of the matter entirely up to Weiss.
Never mind that Weiss has confirmed that he had ultimate authority.
None of that matters to the conspiratorialists. To them, if Hunter Biden isn’t headed for the hoosegow, justice simply wasn’t done.
Now, let’s grant that Biden’s wayward son clearly wanted to cash in on his famous father’s coattails. And if the evidence produced by the House Oversight Committee is to be believed, millions of dollars in foreign payments flowed to entities tied to Hunter and his Uncle James, the president’s brother.
Advertisement
That, however, isn’t a crime in and of itself. To bolster their case that one occurred, Republicans have taken to citing an allegation from an undisclosed FBI source who claims to have heard from an executive at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma that he paid a $5 million bribe to Joe Biden. Never mind that the FBI deemed that source not to be credible.
Or that last week’s GOP charge du jour — the claim that there are tapes of that Burisma executive talking, separately, with both Joe and Hunter Biden — seems to have receded mirage-like into hazy uncertainty upon closer approach. Which means the much-mentioned evidence that supposedly supported the unconfirmed allegation that an undisclosed source purports to have heard from a energy executive may not exist.
But don’t think for a moment that that development will daunt the Republican Party’s aspiring Inspector Clouseaus.
A week or so before he went to the Senate floor to suggest that there were audiotapes which supported the bribery allegations, Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, made clear the GOP approach.
“We aren’t interested in whether or not the accusations against [then] Vice President Biden are accurate or not,” he said on Fox News. Rather, Grassley maintained, Republicans merely wanted to make sure the FBI was following up on all leads. If he had added, “and also to push wispy charges into the national spotlight,” why, then we could all credit the Iowa senator with exemplary candor.
Advertisement
Next, consider the GOP reaction to special counsel John Durham’s investigation of the federal probe into possible collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. Durham went 0 for 2 at trial. His net catch: One relatively minor, no-prison, plea bargain by an e-mail-altering analyst.
The big takeaway, then, should be that the notion that deep state plotters had committed, in Trump’s words, “the crime of the century” was arrant nonsense. Instead, the conservative politico-sphere has seized upon Durham’s report as confirmation that the FBI was indeed biased against Trump and bestowed preferential treatment on Hillary Clinton.
Now let’s see …
As we now know, during the fall of 2016, the Trump campaign was under FBI investigation for possible ties to Russia. Had word of that leaked to major news outlets, the resulting stories would probably have cost him the election, as Trump himself has acknowledged. Instead, the news that dominated the closing days of the campaign — because then-FBI director James Comey informed Congress of it — was that the bureau had reopened its probe into Clinton’s e-mails. That probe was closed again just before Election Day, with no change in the FBI’s no-prosecution recommendation. Still, the untimely revisiting of that matter probably cost Clinton the election.
On a macro level, then, the notion that the FBI treated Trump unfairly simply doesn’t scan. In the world of facts and logic, that should matter. But in the murky marsh of right-wing imaginings, it won’t. There, swamp fire rather than reason lights the way.
Advertisement
Scot Lehigh is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at scot.lehigh@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeScotLehigh.
