Off with their heads
The White House press secretary isn’t shy about using her pulpit to attack people.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders set aside some time during the daily press briefing Wednesday to declare that former FBI director James B. Comey should face criminal punishment for allowing negative information about the president to be leaked to the New York Times, and that ESPN reporter Jemele Hill should be fired for her comments about Trump and race.
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The Comey comment came in response to a question from a reporter, following up on Sanders’s comment Tuesday that Comey had broken the law in asking a friend to leak information from a memo that he’d prepared after a conversation with the president.
Sanders explained her rationale for claiming that the law had been broken: The memos Comey wrote about his interactions with the president were written on an FBI computer and “clearly followed the protocol of an official FBI document.” Leaking such a memo “violates federal laws, including the Privacy Act,” as well as employee agreements. (Those, of course, are likely moot, since Trump already fired Comey.) “I think that’s pretty clean and clear that that would be a violation,” she said.
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Asked what she thought should happen, she said it was “not up to me to decide” but that “the Department of Justice has to look into any allegations of — whether something’s illegal or not.”
There’s no evidence that the information leaked was classified and, as Sanders noted, Comey has argued that they were his personal — not professional — notes. The Times’s Peter Baker points out that no memo was leaked, just the contents of one, detailing a request Trump made of Comey to drop the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
The thing is, Trump was abusing all these rules about secrecy and not leaking and yadda yadda to try to strongarm Comey. That’s why Trump made Sessions get out when he wanted to bully Comey again, and it’s why Comey told Sessions he must never leave him alone with Trump again. It’s a bit much to expect Comey to respect the rules about secrecy after all that.
More broadly, though, it’s extremely unusual for the White House to hint that a political opponent — which Comey unquestionably is — should face a criminal inquiry. When Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump repeatedly suggested that he would have Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton prosecuted if he won the election, Fortune interviewed a slew of legal experts and former attorneys general to gauge the appropriateness of such a move.
The responses were nearly uniform: The attorney general would make the call on any prosecution (as Sanders stated) — and that it’s inappropriate for the president to push the attorney general to take such an action.
But they simply don’t care. They’re Assistants to the Narcissist in Chief, so they are not in a position to care about what’s appropriate.
A short while later, Sanders offered her thoughts on ESPN’s Hill who, on Monday, tweeted among other things that “Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists.”
Asked about the comment by The Post’s David Nakamura, Sanders replied, “I think that’s one of the more outrageous comments that anyone could make, and certainly something that I think is a fireable offense by ESPN.”
Beyond the White House suggesting that criticism of the president should result in a person losing his or her job, it’s worth remembering that Hill is a member of the media. Sanders is suggesting, then, that a journalist be fired by a media outlet for offering her opinion — a slightly more significant argument than if Hill had simply been an average citizen who said the same thing.
Plus, of course, it’s true. Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has surrounded himself with many other white supremacists.
Sanders’s suggestions — which she’ll no doubt soon emphasize were only that — were abnormal comments that echoed a common theme. Criticism of the president and drawing attention to unpopular political decisions he makes results in the White House telling reporters that they should face punishment.
To put it mildly: This isn’t usually how the presidency works.
It’s how a criminal gang works.
I’m not sure about that. It’s one thing to try to control the media but I’d find it far more insidious if the suggestion was for a member of the general public to be punished for criticising the government.
The media can protect itself and its members to a higher degree when it comes to pressure from a government than a small business owner, for example, who is more likely to buckle, especially if that owner also happens to be Republican, so a journalist should have less to fear than an employee of a small or independent business.
Is the potential of losing a free press more significant than the potential loss of individual liberty?
On the issue of leaking the memos, it seems that should be covered under the whistleblower law, anyway, but that protection has been so abused in recent decades that no one honors it anymore. Obama prosecuted a number of whistleblowers, and it has become common to not protect whistleblowers.
Still, there should be no right of secrecy in case of someone revealing an illegal act. In many states (maybe most) a psychiatrist is required to reveal information they may get in reference to laws being broken (at least in the case of potential harm). A priest isn’t. Last I heard, Comey is neither priest nor psychiatrist, and he certainly was not acting in that capacity to Trump. Therefore, I suspect he has at least a moral, if not a legal, obligation to reveal information on wrongdoing. Especially when it puts 300 million people potentially at risk.
The free press is an individual liberty.
When you get right down to it, when you post a comment on a website or on your Facebook page or whatever, you’re essentially engaging in editorial. If you post anything with the intent to inform people in that public space, there is no real difference between you doing it, and a journalist doing it. It’s still fundamentally the same thing.
Freedom of the press, is essentially the same thing as freedom of your Facebook profile. It extends beyond the traditional media, into everyone else, because there is no real way to divorce one from the other.
This is part of the problem with the ANC’s moves to restrict press freedoms in South Africa, a lot of people didn’t begin to realise what was going on right up until the Film and Publications Board started talking about requiring people to pay them to check their Facebook posts or YouTube videos.
What freedom of the press really amounts to is freedom of mass communication. It is more insidious than taking away freedom of speech on a personal level because people don’t think about it that way, and thus don’t realise what is going on right up until they’re the ones getting arrested for having insulted the president on Twitter.
[…] a comment by journalist Bruce Gorton on Off with their […]
I admit I hadn’t considered it from that perspective, Bruce, and have to agree with you (and the original argument as made) so thanks for helping clarify my thinking.