In his post at the Washington Examiner, Byron York has taken it upon himself to become the thinking man’s defender of Donald Trump on anything related to the Russia probe. During Trump’s first two years in office, there was unmistakable synchronicity between the story lines that York developed and the talking points adopted by congressional Republicans, especially in the House where Rep. Devin Nunes used his post as chairman of the Intelligence Committee to run interference for the president. Mr. York generally doesn’t make things up out of whole cloth, however, and instead carefully picks and chooses which facts to emphasize or ignore.
As the president’s problems have expanded to include massive scrutiny of criminal behavior that is unrelated to Russia or specific to the 2016 campaign, York is adapting. On Friday, he adopted the president’s term “presidential harassment,” to describe all the probes Trump is now facing. His basic thesis is that no previous president has come under a similar assault.
We can of course call to mind the Whitewater saga that dogged President Clinton and somehow morphed into an investigation of his marital fidelity. But it’s true that Trump is under siege from all corners, and this is indeed unprecedented. The real tell in York’s piece comes at the end. After going through all the inquiries, from Mueller to the SDNY to the district attorneys of Maryland, DC and Manhattan, York is willing to concede that the Democrats might have an argument that it’s not a campaign of harassment but a response to rampant criminality. But then he just says that this is not the case, and this is all being done out of pure petulance.
The point is, the scrutiny directed at the president from all sides, not oversight of his administration or even investigations into his election, so far exceeds anything in the past that it could well qualify as presidential harassment.
Democrats would no doubt respond that Trump is singularly corrupt, or that he brought it all on himself. He did not. What has happened is that Democrats, in Congress and in some key blue states, saw investigation as a way to weaken a president they never thought would be elected and want to ensure is not re-elected in 2020. And Trump, with the most extensive business history ever brought to the presidency, presented a lot of avenues of investigation. When he complains about harassment, he has a legitimate case to make.
Those three words “he did not” don’t actually do any logical work for York’s argument. The Democrats say that Trump brought these investigations on himself and that they are legitimate. Byron York says that the president did not bring these investigations on himself and they are not legitimate. The problem is, nowhere in the piece does York make any case for why he’s right and the Democrats are wrong.
But the bigger thing that’s revealed is that York simply doesn’t care whether or not the president committed crimes. He doesn’t care about campaign finance violations involving bank and wire fraud, or insurance fraud, or the dangling of pardons to protect himself and other forms of obstruction of justice. He doesn’t care about fraudulent misuse of charities or criminal misuse of inaugural money or seeming violations of the Emoluments Clause to the Constitution. These may all be accurate accusations, but for York they are only being investigated to weaken the president. All he has to say about them is that the president “present[s] a lot of avenues of investigation.”
If the president is a crook, it’s hard to see how he hasn’t brought scrutiny on himself. You can’t just say that “he did not.”
Of the many long-term maladies that York suffers from it’s his determination to always argue that the Dems must be using the Rep playbook or not: the Rep’s used Benghazi investigations until even their base was tired of it.
So surely, he thinks, the Dems must be following a Benghazi style weaken the President/candidate. And his argument might hold a teacup of brew if he bothered to make the distinction between Trump’s documented and copious acts of criminality and HRC’s role in Benghazi where no criminality was found.
But like you say, the purpose of the article is to give dialogue to the enablers, not any measure of rationality.
In the long, long tradition of Even The Serious Conservatives most frequently arguing in shameless bad faith, when Congressional Republicans began pursuing investigations of the Benghazi attack Byron York wrote that it was all a legitimate good government pursuit. Bonus points for York’s pathetic attempt in 2013 to whitewash the obvious political attack on Hillary that was the the Benghazi! investigation all along.
In way of demonstrating the utter fakery going on here, Byron tried to salvage the Select Committee on Benghazi’s 2015 attack on Hillary after Clinton gave public testimony to the Committee. Is York still trying to sell the story he tried to tell two years earlier, that this was all about President Obama, not the Secretary of State? No, he is not. You don’t have to keep your stories straight when you’re writing for a conservative audience.
Pity for 2013 Byron York that Kevin McCarthy blew the whole deal by admitting the reason for the investigations later in 2015. At least York had stopped lying by that time.
The conservative movement is led and populated by dishonest people who mean to hurt Americans they see as their opponents. York’s character fits in just fine there. BooMan gives him way too much respect here. Byron’s been a nasty worm for a long time.
No president since Richard Nixon has had so many aides indicted and convicted or resigned in disgrace or in disgust with the president. No president since Reagan has enabled corruption and disregard for the rule of law. No president ever has lied to the public so much. And no president ever has been as deliberately ignorant about his own government and too lazy to do his job much at all.
We’re not talking about “presidential harassment” here. We’re talking about ending the complete lack of accountability of Trump’s maladministration by the GOP Congress that the public clearly demanded in the 2018 midterms.
Why do we care what this right wing apologist has to say about anything? He by his own admission doesn’t care about criminal misconduct or violations of the Constitution.
He’s unAmerican.
Damn straight. And he’s worse than unAmerican, he’s a proponent of corruption, which pays pretty well these days.
And I see that Limbaugh is suggesting that New Zealand was a false-flag operation to smear the right wing. Vermin like York and Limbaugh know exactly what they are doing.
Look at it like this: He’s making the best case he can. And it’s pathetically weak.
If he could make a better case he would, but he can’t.
Your criticisms of the nature of his argument show the reason for its weakness.
This is all a reflection of reality, and not lost on the majority of Americans — who do still have some grasp of and concern about actual reality. It will not be oloswt on them that the Trumpers are in La La Land.
“He did not.”
Argument from authority. Works like a charm on the wingers.
What is sad is that it works like a charm on the media from NPR to the New York Times. It works on the democratic leadership because they make the argument that we should not impeach because we can’t win.
Clinton was impeached for a blow job – we have a criminal in the white house and we are told it is not worth it.
There’s no “strong” case to be made for most of Donald’s actions, though. GOP politicians aren’t even trying to make reasoned arguments for their cowardice anymore. And why would they? Republicans have begun losing college-educated voters, and I can’t think of a way that Byron York (or anyone else) can get them back. So “he did not” is pure CYA: if Donald doesn’t serve two full terms, York will moan about the Deep State; if he does, York will retroactively conclude that Donald committed no crimes.
“Mr. York generally doesn’t make things up out of whole cloth, however, and instead carefully picks and chooses which facts to emphasize or ignore.”
He ponders a big stinky turd, carefully neglects to mention the turd at all, then talks about the real, actual nourishing corn he finds before him, and wonders why democrats would ever see anything besides corn!