WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK

I write these posts and tinker with them until I think they’re finished, and as soon as I publish them, I begin having second thoughts.  Here are some brief (for me) attempts to tie up a few lose ends on recent issues. 

A citizen journalist has pointed out that both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal referred to Robert Mueller’s new Washington DC grand jury as a “special grand jury.”  If those two sources are correct, and I assume they are, it’s kind of a big deal. 

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Manual (9-11-101), a regular grand jury’s job is to determine whether there is probable cause to believe that a federal crime has been committed within their jurisdiction.  Regular grand juries are impaneled for months, and review lots of different cases during their tenure.  The probable cause standard is less rigorous than “beyond a reasonable doubt.”  If the grand jury believes that probable cause exists, they issue a bill of indictment.  If they don’t find probable cause, they return a “no-bill,” and move on to the next case.  They don’t explain their decisions.  They just issue indictments or no indictments. 

A special grand jury, on the other hand, is impaneled to review a single matter.  In addition to issuing bills of indictment (or deciding not to), it is also authorized to “fashion a report, potentially for public release, concerning either organized crime conditions in the district or the non-criminal misconduct of appointed public officers or employees.”  Trump supporters will surely criticize and second guess whatever the special grand jury does, but it seems like Mueller wants to make sure that the grand jury has a chance to explain its decisions directly to the public.

Turning to another matter from last week, the unauthorized release of transcripts of Donald Trump’s conversations with the leaders of Mexico and Australia has struck a nerve in some quarters.  Jeff Sessions calls them leaks and vows to hunt down the leakers and burn them at the stake.  Or something like that.  Pundit David Frum tut-tuts that such leaks will damage international relationships, because foreign leaders can no longer depend on the confidentiality of their conversations with the American president. 

Sessions, of course, is an idiot.  The harder he cracks down, the more leaks there’ll be.  You don’t stop leaks by trying to crush the leakers.  You stop leaks by hiring good people to staff your office and then earning their respect.  Of course, that option is pretty much off the table for the Trump Administration.

I understand Frum’s concerns, but I think he and others who view the release of confidential information as inherently damaging to American interests are missing an important point.  In the case of Trump’s conversations with Mexican and Australian leaders, no national security issues were involved.  Neither foreign leader was made to look foolish.  The impact of the transcripts was to demonstrate that the current American president is a temperamental, hypocritical nitwit. 

Some of us were convinced of that already, but it’s useful to have this confirmation in the public record for Americans who try to make reality-based political decisions.  I wouldn’t call the person who released these transcripts a leaker.  I’d call him (or her) a whistleblower.  I think the distinction between those two concepts is important.

I’m not a mind reader, so I can’t be sure of the motive behind the unauthorized release of any piece of information.  For that matter, most of us rarely do anything, good or bad, for just one reason.  If I’m going to make judgments about the unauthorized release of confidential material, the most important question for me is the content of the information, not the motive behind it release.  I care about whether, on balance, the information contributes to the ability of citizens to make better political decisions – measured against, where applicable, any harm it may have done to individuals and institutions.   

If the confidential material (whether or not it has a security classification) appears to be petty and ultimately inconsequential (like John Podesta’s emails) I think of that as leak, and I assume its release was designed to embarrass a rival or sabotage someone’s career – “dirty tricks,” as this tactic was called back in the Watergate era.  If, on the other hand, the confidential material reveals a breach of public trust, such as some illegal or unethical activity, then I call it whistle blowing, and I applaud it.  

And finally, apart from the firing and pardoning issues I wrote about on Sunday, there are a couple of other matters that could cause Donald Trump some heartburn before the end of the year.  He’s obviously got to worry about remaining in Vladimir Putin’s good graces, and their relationship has turned rocky lately.  If Putin decides his “useful idiot” is more trouble than he’s worth, he’ll release the kompromat, and the game will be over.  Since I’m rooting for the game to be over, I hope that day comes soon.

As many people have pointed out, Trump’s many missteps and disasters have so far been self-inflicted.  He’s surrounded himself with the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, and they’ve bungled nearly everything. 

Sooner or later, though, a genuine crisis will land in the president’s lap, and Donald Trump and his cadre of grifters will find themselves in way over their heads.  How would those clowns respond to a serious provocation by North Korea, or a major terrorist incident on American soil, or even a natural disaster of the magnitude of Hurricane Katrina?

Let's pray that Trump is long gone before those sorts of decisions are required of the White House.