Before Fox decided Trump’s messaging on the Rob Porter scandal wasn’t working, Trump lickspittles Jeanine Pirro and Sebastian Gorka got together to blame some kind of Obama-linked, "deep state" conspiracy for Trump’s woes.
As Fox & Friends hinted this morning in some not-even-thinly-veiled suggestions for Trump, the Porter scandal has been mishandled by the White House, both by seeming too sympathetic to a wife beater and not sympathetic enough to his victims. The scandal has also raised questions about the lack of security clearances for White House staffers.
But, apparently, before Fox & Friends decided to give the Trump White House its little nudge on the subject, Fox's Trump propagandists thought they’d give the old “Blame Obama and the Deep State” a try. Over the weekend, Pirro hosted “national security strategist” and Nazi-linked fugitive Gorka for some evidence-free conspiracy theorizing.
Pirro used her “Opening Statement” commentary to defend Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly. Pirro deceptively argued that Kelly fired Porter minutes after finding out about his history. In fact, Kelly and White House Counsel Don McGahn reportedly knew for months about accusations against Porter and it wasn’t until photos of an ex-wife’s black eye were published that they suddenly abandoned support for him.
But Pirro, who fashions herself as a champion of battered women, not only defended Kelly she seemed to have no problem with Trump speaking glowingly of Porter and failing to offer any sympathy for his victims. She didn’t even mention it.
“Who can we blame?” Pirro asked. “Blame the batterer. He doesn’t walk around with a scarlet letter or a sign on his forehead that says, 'I beat women.' He is cunning and clever, presenting himself as a charming individual who’s a Rhodes Scholar with a Harvard degree,” she said.
And the all-purpose Fox News scapegoat, Barack Obama. “Look at the last president,” Pirro added cryptically, suggesting we should blame him too. But she did not explain why.
It wasn’t until her later interview with Gorka that we may have gotten a clue. That’s the same Sebastian Gorka whose own security clearance was reportedly canceled when he was forced out of the White House by Kelly and which has now been called into question since the recent revelation of an outstanding 2016 arrest warrant in Hungary. Of course, none of that was mentioned, either.
But Pirro did eat up Gorka’s suggestion that Obama-era holdovers in the CIA and FBI had deliberately “slow rolled” national security clearances, which supposedly "mushroomed" under Obama, in order to sabotage the Trump administration.
GORKA: [T]he question is, who’s in control of the background investigations and the clearance process? I can tell you, I’m not gonna name names but we had some amazing candidates, one of them was supposed to come into a senior directorship position in the National Security Council and the people handling the background clearances, specifically the CIA, slow rolled it. So there’s an issue of – if they want to gum up the works, if they want to make the Trump administration’s job harder and harder, they play bureaucratic slow rolls and there may be a deliberate minefield put in place where they know somebody like this has skeletons in their closet and they slow roll everything just to make things like this explode a few months later. So the president has to assert control over the system.
[…]
[T]he bottom line is, Judge, we’ve got a million people, there are over 800,000 people with clearances. Thanks to the Obama administration, there’s been a massive mushrooming of the clearances in D.C. You should be able to get an interim clearance with a phone call to the Bureau. The Bureau checks: does this guy have a criminal record or not? And they should be able to give you an interim. A full one, a full scope clearance should not take more than two months in my opinion because it’s a matter of interviewing people and the people who know this individual. So I agree. In theory, this should be efficient but the swamp has many ways to undermine an administration.
If there was a CIA/FBI cabal slow rolling security clearances, how did he get into the White House?
Even worse than Gorka’s completely unsubstantiated conspiracy theory was his suggestion that Trump should destroy the independence of our FBI and CIA and take authoritarian “control.” The unstated suggestion was that background checks should be cursory and Trump's picks should be waved through regardless of whether they can be blackmailed or have personal conflicts.
Of course, Pirro did not utter a peep of concern about anything Gorka said.
CNN’s Oliver Darcy noted that later in the same show, Rep. Louie Gohmert told Pirro that Kelly’s “only problem was he trusted the FBI...”
Outnumbered host Harris Faulkner had a moment of hope trying to make the scandal about Obama, too, but the effort failed.
Watch Gorka and Pirro try to use the Porter scandal to advance an authoritarian agenda below, from the February 10, 2018 Justice with Judge Jeanine.
An enterprising forensic psychiatrist could make a fortune delving into the dark recesses of Pirro’s psyche. NYT best seller guaranteed.