Oct.13

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Dem 53

Ties 1

GOP 46

Trump Appeasement Syndrome, Part II: Ilhan Omar and Lisa Cook

Did you think that the previous item was going to be the only "the Trump Administration is abusing its investigative powers" piece today? Ha! Not by a long shot.

The Cassidy Hutchinson investigation, and the other actions in the above item, were announced over the weekend. The big news yesterday, meanwhile, was that early in the morning, agents working for DHS searched the house of Rep. Ilhan Omar (DFL-MN).

Let us pause here to offer the obligatory acknowledgment that there might be some real cause of action behind this raid. Sometimes members of Congress are crooked—former senator Bob Menendez leaps to mind, as do many others. In fact, here is a pretty exhaustive list of federal officials convicted of crimes.

With that said, we are very skeptical that the Omar investigation is legitimate. And we have reasons for feeling that way. To wit:

• Omar has been a particular bugaboo for Trump throughout his entire time in office. She is brown, she is Muslim, she is an immigrant, she is a woman, she is liberal. That is like a "greatest hits" of things the President hates. If someone wanted to please the boss—someone like, say, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin—then Omar is the ideal target.
  
  
• The administration has been fuzzy about Omar's alleged crimes, claiming that there is unprecedented fraud going on in Minnesota (hand wave, hand wave) and that Omar is somehow part of it (hand wave, hand wave). No evidence has been offered for either claim. Heck, Team Trump hasn't even offered a compelling explanation for how all the pieces fit together.
  
  
• Since it is DHS, that means "immigration crimes." This has been a general line of attack against Omar, from the Trump administration, and also in conspiracy thinking, for years. It is hard to believe that evidence of such crimes would come to light now, especially since this hypothetical evidence is now 5-10 years more stale than it was when Omar first came under scrutiny.
  
  
• It is DoJ policy to refrain from going after officeholders 60 or fewer days before an election. It is 22 days until this year's election, which—last we checked—is fewer than 60. At very least, it suggests unethical behavior. At most, it looks like they rushed it to try to influence the outcome of (maybe) Omar's race. That said, she's in a D+32 district, and it's kind of hard to imagine anything that could derail her. More likely is that this is an attempt to influence the (much closer) Senate race in Minnesota.
  
  
• Current DoJ/DHS leadership is well aware of the 60-day policy, and they are very committed to it. Or, they were when it worked to the benefit of Trump ally and former New York City mayor Eric Adams, at least.
  
  
• This is an administration that has no issue with going after enemies on a spurious basis. It hasn't happened once, or twice, it's already happened dozens of times. At a certain point, they no longer get the benefit of the doubt.

So yeah, we're really not buying it. Here is what Omar wrote in a post made to eX-Twitter yesterday:

Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation.

I will not be silenced.

By all evidences, she has the right of it.

And there is yet another investigation commenced by the White House this weekend. This one, by an amazing coincidence, also targets a woman (and a woman of color), namely Fed Governor Lisa Cook, who has been ordered to appear at the executive mansion and testify before a "committee of inquiry." The committee's Grand Inquisitor leader will be Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett. He will be joined by Keith Sonderling, the acting director of the Office of Government Ethics and also the Secretary-of-Labor designate, and by Andrea Lucas, the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The question that the committee will be looking into is whether or not Cook committed fraud on her mortgage application. The administration has already lost in court, several times, on this very point.

Are they really deluding themselves that a hacky "blue ribbon" panel can succeed where, for example, U.S. government attorneys could not? We think the answer to that question is almost certainly "no." These various witch hunt-y investigations and prosecutions—Hutchinson, Omar, Cook—are clearly designed with certain purposes in mind. The first, as (L) notes above, is to curry favor with the Mad King. The second is to muck around in the elections as much as is possible, and maybe try to win a few more votes to the Republican banner.

And the biggest purpose, in our view, is to fire some shots across the bow, in anticipation of the next 2 years, which figure to be rocky ones for Trump and his acolytes. By going after Hutchinson, the White House makes clear that anyone who is now, or once was, a part of the administration, and who testifies before Congress, could themselves end up under investigation. Even if the person is guilty of no crimes, it still costs a lot of money to hire the lawyers needed to protect oneself against the might of Uncle Sam. By going after Omar, it sends the same basic message, except to the House members who plan to investigate Trump. Between the two women, that's the Committees AND the witnesses who might talk to them, which is the whole ball of wax.

The purpose of targeting Cook, meanwhile, is to warn anyone who works for any of the (few) remaining independent federal agencies that they are not safe, either. To be more precise, this is a message for new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, who has not yet followed the Trumpy line (i.e., reducing interest rates), and who is being told he better fall into line, pronto. Otherwise, he better hope he has no skeletons in his closet.

It is improbable that this campaign of intimidation will work. None of these people (not to mention other witnesses who might come forward, other members of Congress, and Warsh and his colleagues) seem likely to yield to something so obviously authoritarian and dictatorial. In addition, Warsh can't deliver even if he is so inclined; he may be chair, but he's also only one vote. And if the other Fed governors don't want to lower interest rates, then Warsh has no power to overrule them.

And that concludes today's American fascism update. (Z)