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The two interpretations of the feds’ raid against Trump lawyer Michael Cohen could set off another explosion along the political fault line that divides our country.
Some folks to the left of the center line in Rhode Island politics would probably like me a whole lot more if I didn’t get so heated on the subject of campaign finance reform. For much of the last two decades, that subject has been an area of rare agreement between left and right, but the more I’ve thought about it, and the more I’ve observed, the more convinced I’ve become that campaign finance reform actually does a great deal of harm to our country and that its supporters on the right have been suckered.
Among the many benefits of Scott Walker’s push against public-sector labor unions in Wisconsin may be its effect in prodding the left to start leveraging the campaign finance advantage before it was politically wise to do so on the national stage. I’m referring to the infamous “John Doe” investigations, which I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere in Rhode Island news media, other than on Anchor Rising-Ocean State Current:
In April, National Review told — for the first time — the stories of the targets of Wisconsin’s “John Doe” investigations. The accounts were harrowing. Anonymous sources told of pre-dawn raids, with police swarming into their homes, walking into sleeping children’s rooms, denying the targets immediate access to lawyers, and then imposing gag orders that prevented them from telling friends, family, and supporters about their ordeal.
These raids were not launched against hardened criminals but against conservative activists, and the “crimes” they were accused of turned out not to be crimes at all. Rather, a hyper-partisan district attorney, John Chisholm, and his special prosecutor, Francis Schmitz, launched a multi-county criminal investigation of First Amendment–protected speech. They wanted to know the extent to which conservative individuals and groups had coordinated with Scott Walker’s campaign — and the campaigns of various state senators — to advocate conservative issues.
On the surface, it sounds like a great idea to increase transparency in politics, down to the donations and spending by every candidate for every office. The problem is that insiders have all of the advantages, on that count, and ruthless people can make better use of the information than moral grassroots volunteers and candidates, whether the ruthlessness manifests as a literal government conspiracy, as in Wisconsin, or merely run-of-the-mill intimidation of donors who back the non-ruthless.
Elizabeth Price Foley is following a thread of the Democrat-driven Wisconsin invasions of conservatives’ homes that winds into the local news media, and it raises an interesting question of journalistic privileges and civic structure:
So the question remains: Who tipped off Stein (a political reporter) about the Archer raid? Stein denies that his source was a prosecutor or law enforcement officer, and it’s theoretically possible (though somewhat farfetched) that one of Archer’s groggy neighbors just happened to know Stein’s home or cell phone number and called him in the middle of the night to tip him off.
The John Doe investigation has been plagued by selective leaks all along, is an ongoing problem, and is almost invariably favorable to the prosecutors. All of this strongly indicates that the source of these leaks is an insider in the John Doe investigation. While Stein appears to claim a reporters’ privilege to protect his source regarding the Archer raid, Wisconsin does not have a reporters’ shield statute, its courts have recognized only a qualified privilege pursuant to its state constitutional equivalent of the First Amendment. So in theory, the identity of Stein’s source could be revealed under the right circumstances.
Whether there exists a legal route to address the political corruption of journalism is an important question, but those who ply the trade should also concern themselves with deeper consideration of the sources of their presumed privileges. Their support is ultimately social, and it can rapidly disappear if they’re no longer acting as a public protection against tyrannical government.
In Wisconsin, journalists appear to have been part of the overtly fascist attempts to silence and punish political opposition. In the Obama Era the news media’s sycophancy has woven from the adulation and failure to vet the unknown candidate through to the disgusting juxtaposition of an opulent White House Correspondents’ Dinner with riots in Baltimore.
It’s certainly been seeming that the news media is, on the whole, a partisan enterprise that has stoked racial and other divisions. Put plainly: If you’re not protecting the people from an overreaching government, and if you’re not fostering a society-wide mutual understanding that allows our civic society to function, you forfeit your presumption of privilege.
Increasing evidence that the federal government is using its powers to further political and ideological ends illustrates how a reasonable, civilized society sinks into totalitarianism.