In the last few months, we’ve seen some breathtaking displays of verbal gymnastics on the right. Some of the very people who called for Barack Obama to be led out of the White House in handcuffs are now saying that it is nothing short of treasonous to oppose Donald Trump. And many of the same people who enthusiastically yelled “Lock her up! Lock her up!” think that any attempt to hold Trump to account amounts to nothing less than an attempt to subvert the election.
One of the most blatant examples of this came on Thursday. Fittingly, it was on Fox News. One of the fair and balanced network’s weekend anchors wrung his hands at a grand jury being impaneled to investigate Russia’s hacking of the election–less than 24 hours after demanding that one be impaneled for Hillary.
On Thursday night, we were treated to a rare intermingling between the news and opinion sides of Fox News. Weekend anchor Gregg Jarrett dropped by Sean Hannity’s show hours after word got out that Robert Mueller had convened a grand jury to help him get to the bottom of the Kremlin’s interference in the presidential election.
Jarrett, who is a licensed attorney in California, claimed that there was a reason that the United States is one of only two nations that still uses a grand jury, the other being Liberia. From where he was sitting, grand juries are “an undemocratic farce.” Jarrett explained that grand juries only hear “incriminating evidence and nothing exculpatory,” without a chance for the defense to get a word in. For that reason, he claimed that grand juries were “the antithesis of justice.”
If that wasn’t enough, Jarrett claimed, any indictment returned by this grand jury wouldn’t be legitimate because it’s meeting in navy-blue Washington.
“And it’s even worse here because Robert Mueller impaneled a Washington, D.C., grand jury, where Donald Trump got a mere 11,000 votes compared to Hillary Clinton’s 260,000 votes. I daresay there is probably not a single person on that grand jury that likes Donald Trump. So it is doubly unfair.”
Jarrett doubled down on Saturday’s edition of “Fox & Friends,” while discussing Jeff Sessions’ crackdown on leakers. Watch here.
.@GreggJarrett: "Grand juries are the most undemocratic device ever created." pic.twitter.com/d1xABE1B1g
— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 5, 2017
Jarrett assailed grand juries as “completely one-sided” since there’s no role for the defense. He claimed that there are “no rules of evidence,” and many things that are inadmissible in a trial are admissible before a grand jury.
Jarrett must have been sleeping through law school. Any lawyer would know that grand juries are a normal part of any complex investigation. Indeed, the fact that Mueller has decided to call in a grand jury is a sign that this investigation is going to take a very long time. Any good federal investigation is supposed to take awhile. One would think that Jarrett, being a defense attorney, would want things to take awhile.
But Jarrett was singing a different tune on Wednesday.
New column. Time for special counsel to investigate Clinton, Comey, Lynch.https://t.co/A9a1OMxpIJ
— Gregg Jarrett (@GreggJarrett) August 2, 2017
Jarrett called for the appointment of a special counsel investigate Hillary, but also review how former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former FBI Director James Comey handled the investigation into Hillary’s email server.
“There is much to investigate. Did Comey usurp the authority of the Attorney General in terminating the Clinton email investigation? How could downloading more than a hundred classified documents onto Clinton’s private and unsecured email server not constitute crimes under the Espionage Act? Why were five people given immunity while others invoked the Fifth Amendment, yet no grand jury was empaneled?”
Jarrett was more or less parroting calls by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee in late July for such an investigation. And in case anyone thought Jarrett hadn’t made himself clear, he doubled down in an appearance with Lou Dobbs on Fox Business on Wednesday night. Watch here.
.@GreggJarrett: Hillary Clinton ought to be required to testify, under oath. There's plenty of evidence to warrant a serious investigation. pic.twitter.com/7Ltb5VnU8p
— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) August 4, 2017
Jarrett demanded that Hillary not only be compelled to testify under oath before Congress, but should also be investigated by a grand jury.
Wait a minute, Gregg. When Hillary is suspected of wrongdoing, you think a grand jury is all but a must. But now that a grand jury is looking into Russia’s hacking of the election, you think grand juries are an attack on democracy itself? Which is it?
As it turned out, Jarrett’s display of verbal gymnastics was the second time a Fox News personality took a swipe at Mueller. Earlier, Judge Jeanine Pirro warned that Trump supporters might take to the streets if the Donald and/or his family are indicted. But Jarrett is supposed to be from the news side of the operation. His screeds, and the hypocrisy represented in them, are more staggering.
There had been some hope that with Roger Ailes and Bill Shine being pushed out, Fox News would at least try to reinvent itself as an actual news organization rather than a Republican agitprop machine. But since Shine was forced out, we’ve had the Seth Rich fiasco, and now this. If Rupert Murdoch’s sons really want to clean up Fox News, they’d better be about it.
(featured image courtesy Gregg Jarrett, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
