Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

The manipulation of publicity is lawfare by other means. President Donald Trump didn’t devise that maxim, I did. But he could have. Ever since special counsel Robert S. Mueller III sparked his investigation alive, Trump has been undermining Mueller and the FBI with taunts and insults that if put to a beat could pass for one side of a rap battle. You could call the track “Witch Hunt!”

Trump’s immediate goal, as Abigail Tracy writes for Vanity Fair, is to pollute Paul Manafort’s potential juror pool with a zigzag of nonsense and hype that will deter them from convicting him or anybody else Mueller prosecutes. (Mueller requested that the judge approve a questionnaire to screen jurors for bias, usually a move the defense would make after extensive pretrial publicity.) Secondarily, Trump wants to prejudice the American public in his favor, seeing as they would serve as the de facto jury should Congress decide on bringing articles of impeachment against him. How well is it working? Vanity Fair points to a new CNN poll that shows Mueller has lost a tiny bit of approval from respondents asked about his handling of the probe. It’s down to 41 percent from 48 percent in March (sampling error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points). Whatever Mueller’s failings, he’s murdering Manafort in most pretrial court appearances, even persuading a federal judge to send Manafort to jail while he awaits trial for defying the terms of his bail.


Compared with the armed combat of Mueller’s investigation, the fight over the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email case looks like an adolescent mudball rhubarb—lots of name calling about the FBI having been in the tank for Hillary Clinton, lots of so’s-your-mother about the New York City FBI office having pushed the election in Trump’s favor.

But fed by the inspector general’s thick-as-a-Manhattan-phonebook report on FBI conduct, the commotion has done discernible damage to the image of professionalism and circumspection the FBI has cultivated for itself. Our opportunist in chief in the White House and his Republican allies have distorted the IG report to sketch the FBI as a politicized Washington police force that opposes both his candidacy and the voters who elected him. Trump points to the anti-Trump messages written during the campaign by Peter Strzok, an FBI agent who worked on the Clinton email case. Strzok’s most notorious missive—sent to an FBI attorney (also his lover)—asserted that “we’ll stop“ Trump from getting elected. Trump has also made use of the fact that Strzok later served on Mueller’s investigative team. (He was dismissed after the IG discovered his messages.)

Clutching the IG report to his bosom, Trump has claimed it “totally exonerates” him and has “totally discredited” Mueller. The only problem with Trump’s exultations is that neither is remotely true. As for his idea that the IG report demonstrates malfeasance at the FBI, that’s bunk, too. The IG explicitly states that political bias had no bearing on the FBI’s handing of the case, no matter what sort of smack agents talked in messages to one another. As is his tendency, the president is making things up. Trump gets caught conjuring again whenever he slams Mueller’s team as being manned by “13 hardened Democrats.” It doesn’t matter how many times it’s pointed out that Mueller himself is a lifelong Republican appointed to his special counsel position by another Republican, or that Republicans and independents also work for him, Trump keeps bringing up the 13 Democrats “leading the Witch Hunt” against him. (See this Washington Post story from March for pocket biographies of Mueller’s team.)

Trump critics come to this fracas well-armed with evidence of their own of FBI prejudices, but prejudices in Trump’s favor. Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum has collected a wealth of evidence of FBI agents tilting toward Trump during the campaign: Agents tipped Rep. Devin Nunes to the existence of Anthony Weiner’s laptop loaded with Clinton emails; the IG reported that then-FBI Director James Comey reopened the Clinton email case because he feared the pro-Trump New York FBI office would leak the existence of the Weiner laptop unless he did; and just days before Comey reopened the case, Rudy Giuliani went on Fox News to promise “a surprise or two … in the next two days,” presumably gleaned from his FBI sources in New York. The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman has more on this score, reminding us that Fox News reported just days before the election that according to an FBI source, Clinton’s private server had been hacked by “five foreign intelligence agencies.” Fox later retracted the report.

This vision of two FBIs operating side-by-side, one plugging for Trump and one pulling for Clinton, suggests a film noir cesspool of intrigue, deception, backstabbing and corruption. If only Edgar G. Ulmer were alive to make the movie. Rampant and allegedly partisan FBI leaking to the press during the campaign has encouraged Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s plans to launch a future investigation into “unauthorized media contact by FBI personnel.” The IG has already discovered instances in which “FBI employees improperly received benefits from reporters, including tickets to sporting events, golf outings, drinks and meals, and admittance to nonpublic social events.” I can understand drinks, but what media organization is treating FBI agents to basketball or football games? One of the television networks? Name names, Mr. IG!

As has been noted elsewhere and deserves repetition, Trump’s mudballs aim to delegitimize any scrutiny of him as politically biased or as the work of the “deep state.” Where other politicians criticize the outcomes produced by investigators and prosecutors, Trump beelines for the investigators and prosecutors themselves. In his mind, Trump is not just above the law, he is above doubt, too, and will seek to denigrate anybody who dares question his conduct.

Michael Cohen remained the "it" girl of the investigation this week, and his recruitment of a new defense lawyer supercharged speculation that he would flip on Trump. Former Obama White House ethics czar Norm Eisen conjectured that because his new lawyer is a former prosecutor who worked for former New York U.S. Attorneys James Comey and Preet Bharara, he was the perfect man to swing a deal for Cohen. Actor Tom Arnold jumped into the mix on Friday, claiming Cohen was going to help him find incriminating tapes of Trump. He rowed that back, but went on TV to stand by his view that Cohen would “take care of his family and his country first. That’s all you need to know.”

Who will the next "it" girl be? Will it be Trump ally Roger Stone? The Washington Post reported this week that Stone did meet with a Russian during the 2016 campaign, despite his protests to the contrary, and that the topic was Hillary Clinton dirt for sale, with the price being $2 million. Stone said he passed on the offer and that he had not mentioned it in his testimony to the House Committee on Intelligence because he had forgotten it.

Or will it be WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange, who, according to the Guardian, met repeatedly with Adam Waldman, the U.S. lobbyist for sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, in Ecuador’s Embassy in London in 2017? Deripaska, you recall, once employed Manafort, and Manafort offered him confidential briefings (which never happened) in the summer of 2016 when he served as Trump’s campaign chief. What could Assange and Waldman have been chatting about? World Cup tickets for FBI agents, perhaps?

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Waldman works as Johnny Depp’s lawyer, too! See this Rolling Stone feature on Depp by Stephen Rodrick for more. Might Johnny be the next "it" girl? Send "it" girl predictions to [email protected]. My email alerts pulled for Trump. My Twitter feed was a hog of Hillary. My RSS feed voted for whatever knucklehead the Libertarian Party put on the ballot.

