Monday, August 17, 2020

For the Record: Serious Leftists and Debate-Club Rightists

 

Illustration via Joan Wong from The Atlantic, December 2018.


This thing I keep saying, but I like the form in which I said it this time:






I thought of this again when the Biden endorsements from Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis started making the rounds. They're really of the Old Left; Chomsky because that's actually how old he is, and Davis, though she's from the generation in which the New Left was born, because she was an actual Communist Party member for such a long time (yes, with all the bad things that implies as well, an adhesion to Gus Hall's foreign policy and allergy to Eurocommunism and reform, until she and her Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism broke with the party in 1991). No performativity with these guys: they vote, and endorse, for the candidate who will do something to make our lives better and more equal. Both endorsed Hillary Clinton, too, though it didn't garner quite as much publicity, and wasn't quite as sure-footed—I guess both took seriously the portrait of Clinton as imperialist warmonger, which is a shame. On Biden, Chomsky, as a general rule wouldn't lower himself to talking about the "lesser of two evils", either; he sees it unambiguously as a choice between good and evil, even if the good that's on offer is pretty modest. (I of course expect it to be surprisingly good).


Book jacket, David Horowitz Freedom Center, April 2014, via Amazon. 

Also, material from an epic troll battle with one of those "smart" wingnuts, which began on the subject of the celebrated forthcoming Investigation-of-the-Investigation report of Robert Durham and its preliminary press release on the single guilty plea it's going to yield—which ended up in territory I haven't had much to say about and didn't really know much about, Michael Flynn's "Turkish project" and its relation to his legal exposure, so it might be useful to put together what I learned.

It starts out with a strange little quarrel on legalisms: Durham's attempt to treat the whole Crossfire Hurricane FBI investigation as a criminal investigation of possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, as a way to frame it as an attack on Trump's minions, instead of what it actually was, a counterintelligence investigation trying to work out how the Russian election interference worked and how it was connected (legally or otherwise) with the Trump campaign:






Keep your eyes on the prize here.





The particular story, if you missed that, is about Kevin Clinesmith, the FBI attorney who doctored an email submitted in the third and last renewal of the FISA surveillance order on Carter Page, PhD, to make it looks as if Page had never served as an informant for the CIA (when in fact he had, and this would have weighed on his side when FISC decided whether or not to renew the order), and was singled out in Inspector General Horowitz's report on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation as the only plausibly criminal actor in the whole affair, in which Horowitz concluded that none of the FBI decision makers acted out of bias against Trump or anyone else and declined to criticize their decisions on what to pursue when. Barr and Trump didn't like the Horowitz report and commissioned Durham to do it over, and the first result Durham is reporting is that Clinesmith did indeed commit a crime and has in fact pleaded guilty for it (which suggests to me that's going to be all they get, because Horowitz was right). Why do you guys think Clinesmith was such a great guy, trolls want to know (spoiler: we don't).




A little repetition:












Bijan Kian aka Bijan Rafiekian (which I'm sorry to say I kept misspelling "Rafekian" for most of the day) was an Iranian-American businessman Michael Flynn's partner in Flynn Intel Group, the consulting company Flynn had founded after his 2014 firing from the chairmanship of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who was largely responsible for the firm's "Turkish project", working for a client called Ekim Alptekin, chairman of the Turkey-U.S. Business Council, for whom FIG found itself lobbying in Washington against a Turkish cleric resident in Pennsylvania, Fethullah Gülen, who was believed by Turkish president Erdoğan to be responsible for a 2016 coup attempt in Turkey. They worked US officials to urge extraditing Gülen to face trial in Turkey, producing a documentary film and investigative "dossier" attacking Gülen, and an op-ed which appeared under Flynn's byline in The Hill on election day, all of which the Mueller team began investigating after it formed in 2017, in the context of its investigation of Flynn and his unsavory dealings with Russia as a worker in Trump's presidential campaign. and ended up going after them all for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). 

The Mueller investigation found that Alptekin was in fact an unregistered agent of the Turkish government, which seems pretty obvious, and that Flynn and Rafiekian were unregistered agents too. Flynn, who was also charged with lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts, made a deal to cooperate with the investigation and escaped all charges in the FARA case (which included lurid details such as a plot to kidnap Gülen with the help of Mike Flynn Junior), except for a single charge of lying to investigators about his involvement, to which he pleaded guilty in December 2017 along with a count of lying to the FBI about the Russian affair, and again in December 2018. He continued to cooperate with investigators, and was expected to testify against Rafiekian in the latter's trial in July 2019. However in June 2019 Flynn suddenly up and fired his lawyers in the Covington firm, replaced them with the wingnut attorney Sydney Powell, and began suggesting that he was innocent of the crimes to which he had (twice!) pleaded guilty as well as those (the FARA violations) for which the prosecutors had agreed not to charge him.

Since Flynn would now be telling the Rafiekian trial a completely different story than the one he had sworn to in grand jury testimony and vouched for in his plea agreements, Rafiekian's prosecutors found themselves in an extremely difficult position. They decided not to call their chief witness at all. They managed to win a conviction, but it wasn't a very good case without Flynn's testimony, and the guilty verdict was reversed on appeal in September.
 












So the best defense my interlocutor can come up with is that clearly Flynn must have been lying in all his FBI interviews, case filings, grand jury testimony, and plea agreements, which shows he must have been telling the truth when he was saying the things Andrew wants to hear:








Maybe if Flynn had told a less rich, circumstantiated, and consistent story over the two-year period, or maybe if he'd tell his new story in court, I'd give it a chance. But I really don't think so.

Anyway following this evidence of my heartlessness he left me alone.


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