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Keep Your Eye on the Ball

by William Kristol

In The Bulwark’s house there are many rooms. In one of them resides the estimable Mona Charen, who a couple of weeks ago urged President Biden not to pardon his son, Hunter. In another dwells the laudable Kim Wehle, who this morning defends Biden’s pardon as judiciously as one can. For what it’s worth, I’m firmly in Mona’s wing of our (virtual) Bulwark mansion.

The president ought not to have pardoned Hunter Biden. It’s by no means clear Hunter Biden deserves a pardon on the merits. It’s altogether clear that President Biden promised not to pardon his son. And it’s unfortunately clear that this is a very bad time to indulge in a pardon that gives political ammunition to an incoming administration determined not to make exceptions to the rule of law but to shred it wholesale.

In any case, The Bulwark will survive some disagreement over the act of a man who let his love as a father overwhelm his judgment as a president. So will the nation. The question we face is how well the nation will survive the next four years of a Trump presidency, where neither love nor judgment are present, only the will to arbitrary power and the desire for personal retribution.

President Biden made a mistake. But the problem with Donald Trump and his appointees isn’t that they’ll make mistakes. It is that the whole Trump presidency is animated by a plan to create centralized, personalized, unconstrained, and unaccountable power in the president and his agents.

Trump’s announcement that he intends to make Kash Patel director of the FBI is one piece of the puzzle, but a particularly dangerous piece at that. It is emblematic of an attempt to seize full control over the power ministries of the government—including the Department of Justice and the FBI, and the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. Whether these agencies are run by true believers like Patel or Tulsi Gabbard, or weak opportunists like Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi, is less important than that they be run fully and unequivocally in accord with the wishes of Trump and his key apparatchiks in the White House—Vice President JD Vance, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and OMB Director Russell Vought.

If Trump can get Patel confirmed as FBI director, he’s obviously off to the authoritarian races. But even if Patel isn’t confirmed, or isn’t confirmed quickly, we’re on a very dangerous path. Trump will govern and seek to enable his agents to govern in what one might call the spirit of Kash Patel—a lawless and authoritarian spirit.

One way Trump will advance this plan is by appointing loyalists to serve in an “acting” capacity in key positions where the Senate hasn’t confirmed his nominees. Trump experimented with this in his first term. Indeed, he commented in January, 2019: “I like acting [appointments]. It gives me more flexibility. Do you understand that? I like acting.” Now his lawyers and operatives have had years to plan on how to systematically place loyalists as acting officials in key positions, from secretary and director on down.

All this can happen more or less legally under the Federal Vacancies Act. (Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith has a great breakdown of how this would look.) All Trump has to do is find a senior government employee already working in the agency at hand, or a Senate-confirmed official anywhere in the government who’ll do what he wants, and he’s in good shape. As Goldsmith summarizes, “The President [will have] the backup option of a loyalist atop the FBI for a long time without Senate confirmation. . . . I am confident the Trump Team has thought through the mechanism described above.”

This is true of other agencies, and not just for their top posts but for many senior posts. Combine this with the planned introduction of Schedule F to replace tens of thousands of civil servants with political employees, and you have a recipe for major erosion of the rule of law in favor of the rule of Trump and Trumpists throughout the government.

It’s important senators stop the worst appointees, like Patel. It’s important Congress use whatever other levers it has—including oversight and the power of the purse—when acting appointees are installed. But what is clear is that we’re now on track for four years of pitched political and constitutional battles. And Trump’s team, as Goldsmith says, is prepared for this.

We’re entering a four-year constitutional crisis. We could make it through this period and come out stronger afterwards. Or we could fail, and Trump could succeed, and this could be an inflection point on a path towards the further erosion of everything that has made our free and democratic government so admirable.

Biden’s unfortunate decision to pardon his son doesn’t help those of us who will argue that we must be alert to Trump’s abuse of the pardon power and in any case do what we can to preserve the rule of law. But compared to the looming crisis, the Biden pardon will likely barely warrant a footnote in the text books. The next four years of Trump in power, by contrast, will constitute an important chapter in American history, one which will put us all to the test.

What to Expect When You’re Expecting Kash

by Andrew Egger

When Donald Trump dispatches Kash Patel like a golden retriever to the FBI to fetch back the scalps of his political enemies, how broadly should we expect Patel to act?

Judging by Patel’s own words, pretty broadly.

In an interview last year, conservative radio host Glenn Beck asked Patel to give an assessment of how thoroughly the anti-Trump Deep State had permeated the federal government.

“It covers every agency and department. Everything. All of it. All the administrative places, legislative, executive, even the judiciary,” Patel replied. “I would say it takes up about 10 percent of all government bureaucracy, the deep state, the entrenched class. And that’s why I think we have the ability to remove them and secure this country and the levers of justice again for the American people.”

Ten percent! There are about 2.87 million civilian employees in the federal government. That’s a cool 287,000 people right there.

Asked by Beck to name some notable Deep Staters, Patel was ready: “Bill Barr, Mark Esper, Gina Haspel, Rod Rosenstein, Chris Wray, Merrick Garland, Lisa Monaco,” he rattled off, barely pausing for breath. “I probably have 70 others in the back of the book there. That’s just a few.”

Two months ago, in a conversation with podcaster Shawn Ryan, Patel batted around the question of whether Deep State malfeasance amounted to treason against America:

I think what so many of these guys did—whether it’s Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Barr, Haspel, Esper, what have you—I think there’s a lot of rule and lawbreaking. And I don’t know that it ever gets to the level of treason singularly with any of them, but what you have is a buildup of so many actions by the Deep State that it becomes borderline treasonous to allow those people and their activities in a collective fashion ever to be applied to the United States.

Time and again, Patel has demonstrated a totalizing belief that the line between good and evil in Washington runs between Trump and his foes, who should be crushed with any tool at hand. Anyone involved in “Russiagate,” he said in the same podcast, should lose their security clearances.

Of course, as Patel frequently notes, the Deep State wouldn’t get very far without its coconspirators in the media. He’s been very clear that, given the chance, he intends to hit journalists just as hard.

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections, we’re gonna come after you,” he told Steve Bannon last December. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”

Consider us on notice!

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PEST SECRETARY: Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick to run the Department of Defense, was already battling allegations of sexual misconduct before last weekend, when a grim character assessment surfaced from an unlikely source: his mother. In a 2018 email obtained by the New York Times, Penelope Hegseth berated her son for routinely mistreating women: “On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say . . . get some help and take an honest look at yourself.” She went on: “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”

Alas, Mrs. Hegseth said she had a change of heart after sending that email. And now, well, she hopes her prior assessment does not impede his path to becoming secretary of defense. But her initial come-to-Jesus email to her thrice-married son seems to have been a long time coming. The New Yorker reported yesterday on a few more professional maladies in Hegseth’s past, including a 2015 whistleblower report from his tenure at the nonprofit Concerned Veterans for America:

The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.”

We’re sensing a pattern here.

DEPARTMENT OF ENORMOUS SURPRISES: Clown/ex-felon/GOP intellectual Dinesh D’Souza’s 2022 film 2,000 Mules may have been obvious hokum on release, but its slickly presented claims of rampant absentee-ballot 2020 cheating quickly made it holy writ for MAGA election deniers. Donald Trump—who we should note (since the topic is in the news today) pardoned D’Souza—posted about the movie dozens of times.

Earlier this year, facing lawsuits from voters depicted in the film as traffickers of illegal ballots, Salem Media Group—the right-wing conglomerate behind the film—apologized for some of its claims and pulled the film from distribution. Now, D’Souza himself is following suit in a statement posted on his website yesterday:

I know that the film and my book create the impression that these individuals were mules that had been identified as suspected ballot harvesters based on their geotracked cell phone data. While all of these individuals’ images were blurred and unrecognizable, one of the individuals has since come forward publicly and has initiated a lawsuit over the use of his blurred image in the film and the book. I owe this individual, Mark Andrews, an apology.

Ideally, the civil courts would not be the single institution in America capable of forcing individual members of the right-wing funhouse-mirror infotainment machine to tell the truth for one minute of their lives. But at least we still have those courts—for the time being.

Not that D’Souza was particularly careful to stick to the truth even in his apology statement: “I make this apology not under the terms of a settlement agreement or other duress,” he wrote, “but because it is the right thing to do, given what we have now learned.” Sure, Jan.

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