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In an essay posted on the Hannah Arendt Center website at Bard College, Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz writes, “Hannah Arendt argues that the distinction between truth and lie can be eroded, over time, by ‘continual lying.’ When political leaders, institutions, the press, and respected figures habitually and continually state alternative facts, their lies—even if they are neither intended to be believed nor are believed—attack the very foundations of what Arendt calls the common world.”
It’s worth noting one impact of the Trump administration’s cavalier disregard for truth as news broke today of an arrest in the DNC bombing case. Almost immediately, there were questions on social media: Can we believe this Justice Department? This FBI? That was a constant theme as the news broke, with many people saying outright they didn’t trust the administration, while others posted that the Biden administration sat on the case and were suspicious about that. Trump’s reckless mishandling of the truth, while sometimes used to inveigle people to fall for his lies, ensures that many people don’t believe anything anymore.
Can we believe in this indictment? Did the FBI get the right guy? The best way I know to assess that is to look at the charges, any evidence DOJ makes available that was used to substantiate them, and the proceedings that will now unfold in court.
One note of caution. Part of the early spin has been that the defendant is an anarchist. That’s said as though it’s implicit that means he’s a Democrat, and of course, it doesn’t. People who ascribe to an “anarchist ideology” believe in tearing down existing systems and chaos, which is not the agenda of the Democratic Party. We should push back strenuously against any effort to conflate the two as meritless.
Arendt wrote:
“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.”
The relentless spin from Trump’s team—they clearly identify themselves as that—on the podium, announcing the arrest of Brian Cole of Virginia, is that the investigation was somehow shelved during the Biden administration. Bondi repeatedly referred to the evidence as “collecting dust” until Trump took over, giving a nod to Kash Patel and Dan Bongino’s work as FBI leaders in getting the charges across the finish line.
The crime, of course, took place at the tail end of Trump’s first administration. The Biden administration seemed to pursue it vigorously, releasing photos of the subject. The spin we’re hearing from the administration seems designed to suggest, without coming out and saying, that the Biden administration had something to hide in connection with this crime and did not want to see it prosecuted.
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Bondi at the press conference: “Today’s arrest happened because the Trump administration made it a priority.” She says it “languished” under the Biden administration for four years, and that her team sifted through pre-existing evidence to indict it. She says there was no new tip or witness, just good teamwork.
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I tweeted this morning, when we knew little else other than that there had been an arrest, “Waiting on the identity on the charged bomber, but as an old explosives prosecutor, I’ll say that evidence of identity can come from bomb signatures recognized by investigators w/institutional knowledge, components & where they were purchased, or tips. Revisiting old evidence can be illuminating.” That seems to be the case based on what we heard at the press conference announcing the arrest, although there are no specifics yet.
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But Bondi went further. “We are working every day to restore the public’s trust,” the Attorney General said. But this is the same attorney general who installed Lindsey Halligan and Alina Habba as U.S. Attorneys, indicted James Comey and Tish James in rank displays of allegiance to the president’s revenge agenda, and has relentlessly politicized an American institution that should stand at arm’s length from the White House to the point where it appears to be merely carrying out its orders. This press conference should have been about justice, not politics. But it wasn’t. “This is what it’s like when you work for a president who tells you to go get the bad guys,” says Dan Bongino, who works for a president who has repeatedly pardoned serious criminals who’ve demonstrated more political connections than remorse, including people convicted of overrunning the Capitol on January 6, planning an insurrection, and committing everything from crypto crime, to fraud, to public corruption crimes.
The timing of the press conference is interesting. FBI Director Kash Patel has been under fire; this is a day of good publicity for him. It’s a good distraction from Hegseth and Signalgate. Also from the Epstein Files. The anti-Biden spin undoubtedly pleases the boss everyone on the stage today works for. Beyond the convenient timing, which may be convenient but not intentional when all shakes out—we will have to wait and see—is the context, the revenge prosecutions, some of which have now failed, that are a hallmark of this presidency and this Justice Department. Once offices led by Trump loyalists have demonstrably conducted revenge prosecutions, it’s hard not to have questions, even when a case appears solid on its face.
This is one of the key ways this administration has frayed democracy around the edges, casting doubt on institutions to the point where it’s hard for people to know when and whether to trust. Here, we hope the FBI has taken a dangerous person off the streets. But in this era of cynical trust and verify when it comes to our government institutions, seeing the charges—they’re apparently still sealed, which is a little odd after a press conference—it will be necessary to examine the charges and any surrounding paperwork carefully before many people are convinced. We’ll assess what DOJ has when charges are made public and carefully look at what the indictment and early proceedings look like in this case.
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We’re in this together,
Joyce