Trump-tapped inspector general blocked probes of Lafayette Square attack, Secret Service illnesses
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A new Washington Post report provides a reminder that we still don’t know the full details of many (many, many) of the most deplorable actions of the venomous Trump administration and its assemblage of, quite literally, the least capable and most unethical Republican hacks the now-fascist party was able to provide him.
The Post was provided documents showing that the Trump-appointed Department of Homeland Security inspector general, Joseph Cuffari, rejected staff recommendations to investigate the Secret Service’s level of involvement in the tear gassing and beatings of demonstrators in the White House-adjacent Lafayette Square last year. Also canceled was a requested inquiry into whether the Secret Service’s numerous internal COVID-19 outbreaks were being caused by the service intentionally ignoring COVID-19 safety measures—for example, due to the reported unwillingness of agents to wear masks while providing security to the mask-hating Tantrum von Clownbaby.
Both refusals were part of what Post sources described as Cuffari’s fear of investigations that would land too close to Trump himself—in the case of the proposed COVID-19 probe, Cuffari instead proposed limiting the probe’s scope only to how the infections were affecting “investigative work,” not the security teams actually coming down with the disease after being jetted around the country to provide protection at Clownbaby’s pandemic-mocking rallies. (Everyone around Trump was getting sick, with multiple White House outbreaks, Mar-a-Lago outbreaks, and outbreaks among those staffing his rallies; it was a given that a probe would determine the cause of Secret Service infections to be agents’ required proximity to Typhoid Hitler. It takes some impressive faux-obtuseness to propose investigating everything except that.)
It’s the lack of investigation into the Lafayette Square gassing and forcible seizure of a nearby church to provide the Trump Team’s photo-op, however, that is especially galling. To this day, all of the relevant details about how the attack on protesters came about remain intentionally obscured. The “official” explanation is still that, as President Swamp Gas prepared to give a televised address on the protests, the U.S. Park Police coincidentally decided that they would clear the park with immediate force, resulting in an attack on protesters that boomed through the area at exactly the time designated for Rapeguy’s televised appearance, only a short time after Trump’s feverish ally William Barr was seen to be coincidentally talking to a security team, upon which Bank Defrauder coincidentally announced that he would be going for a walk through the park with whatever members of his administration felt coincidentally fascist enough to parade through the still-reeking area so that a traitor could hold up a borrowed Bible at the entrance of a church whose staff had just been coincidentally removed from the property through paramilitary force.
All of this was a grand set of coincidences, with absolutely nobody in charge and was certainly not a planned attack on peaceful American demonstrators that deprived them of all rights so that Biff Shitforbrains could occupy a private church that did not want him there. That remains the story, one of innumerable Trump administration acts to appear brazenly criminal but which were buried under the muck of Cabinet-level co-conspirators.
It is possible that the White House Crime Server, the system used by the White House legal team to improperly classify President Recalled Airbag’s ever-embarrassing conversations with foreign leaders, had its data scrubbed before Biden’s team was ever allowed in the building—we wouldn’t necessarily know. A multitude of things still remain secret from those times, and we have been getting new hints only in a trickle.
A few months into the Biden administration, we finally learn that the pipeline of key internal campaign data did indeed go from the now-pardoned Trump ally Paul Manafort to an agent of Russian intelligence to the Russian services that carried out disinformation campaigns specifically targeting the voters the Trump campaign itself would most want targeted. This smoking gun managed to evade Trump-era investigators for four years, only to reappear now, after pardons have been dispensed.
It is a near-certainty that Trump himself ordered the violent attack on Lafayette Square protesters, that William Barr used his authority to ensure it was carried out, that Secret Service agents were informed of it, that numerous Trump allies knew of it, and that a campaign of brazen bullshittery by all involved was concocted immediately afterward once stunned reporters and pundits noted, on the television screens, that it certainly looked like Trump and crew had just Done A Crime. Trump’s lust for violence on his behalf has been well-documented since his early campaign rallies, and would lead eventually to the Crepuscular Winnebago in Chief sitting ogle-eyed in front of a television screen as violent sedition played out in the U.S. Capitol while the man who had stoked it with bile and conspiracy theories refused to take action. There is no possible way these acts were not initiated by the toad always quick to offer praise for authoritarian leaders elsewhere.
There are some things investigators will still be able to tease out in the coming year, and some things that may remain hidden forever because the Republican Party is now an authoritarian-minded crime family with utter contempt for any law that might bind them, seditionists to a person, traitors to democracy who are now focused on preventing probes of a genuine (if spectacularly dimwitted) insurrection fomented entirely by their own falsehoods. If there’s to be any justice from here on out it will come only after federal criminal investigators have axed their way through every Republican-built barricade intended to keep them out.