Commentary in the liberal press is so uniform that you wonder whether reporters and commentators have coordinated their coverage, down to the word and the phrase. Well, they have, of course. You remember JournoList, where, years ago, reporters would gather to coordinate their pro-Democrat, anti-Republican stories. JournoList supposedly disbanded after it came to light, but I assume it more likely just went underground.
Here we have another instance, JournoList 2. Politico reports: “Inside the Off-the-Record Calls Held by Anti-Trump Legal Pundits.”
As the Jan. 6 committee was working on its bombshell investigation into the Capitol riot and President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the last election, committee staffers took some time out of their seemingly 24-hour jobs one day in 2022 to brief a group of lawyers and legal pundits on a Zoom call.
The people on the call weren’t affiliated with the investigation or the government. But they would have been familiar to anyone who watches cable news. They were some of the country’s most well-known legal and political commentators, and they were there to get insights into the committee’s work and learn about what to look for at the hearings.
To “learn what to look for.” That is, to coordinate their news coverage. But that zoom wasn’t a one-off:
The group’s gathering was not a one-time event, but in fact an installment in an exclusive weekly digital salon, whose existence has not been previously reported, for prominent legal analysts and progressive and conservative anti-Trump lawyers and pundits. Every Friday, they meet on Zoom to hash out the latest twists and turns in the Trump legal saga — and intellectually stress-test the arguments facing Trump on his journey through the American legal system.
Politico is on their side, of course. But the repellent reality comes through:
The meetings are off the record — a chance for the group’s members, many of whom are formally or loosely affiliated with different media outlets, to grapple with a seemingly endless array of novel legal issues before they hit the airwaves or take to print or digital outlets to weigh in with their thoughts.
Right. So that they can convey a uniform anti-Trump message to their audiences.
About a dozen or more people join any given call, though no one takes attendance. Some group members wouldn’t describe themselves with any partisan or ideological lean, but most are united by their dislike of Trump.
Obviously. The participants are a left-wing rogues’ gallery:
The group’s host is Norman Eisen, a senior Obama administration official, longtime Trump critic and CNN legal analyst, who has been convening the group since 2022 as Trump’s legal woes ramped up. Eisen was also a key member of the team of lawyers assembled by House Democrats to handle Trump’s first impeachment.
The regular attendees on Eisen’s call include Bill Kristol, the longtime conservative commentator, and Laurence Tribe, the famed liberal constitutional law professor. John Dean, who was White House counsel under Richard Nixon before pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in connection with Watergate, joins the calls, as does George Conway, a conservative lawyer and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. Andrew Weissmann, a longtime federal prosecutor who served as one of the senior prosecutors on Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation and is now a legal analyst for MSNBC, is another regular on the calls. Jeffrey Toobin, a pioneer in the field of cable news legal analysis, is also a member of the crew. The rest of the group includes recognizable names from the worlds of politics, law and media.
I’m sure it does.
The Politico reporter, while sharing the group’s anti-Trump bias, understood that not everyone would see it that way:
[A]s I was reporting this story, I learned that some members of the group were understandably anxious about its publication. Trump has claimed that there is a legal conspiracy against him, and there is a risk that news of a group such as this could give Trump and his allies an attractive target.
Trump’s claims of an organized conspiracy might be bunk, but there are other potential problems with the Friday Zooms: There is a risk, for instance, that the calls could breed groupthink or perhaps help dubious information spread, where it might then reach people watching the news.
Trump’s claim obviously is not bunk, as the Politico article itself reveals. And the idea that the weekly calls could “breed groupthink” or “help dubious information spread” to “people watching the news”? That is the whole point, obviously.
This is just one more reminder that the legacy press is hopelessly corrupt and wholly unreliable. Happily, hardly anyone pays any attention to these people.
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