Ah, the perils of getting what you want. I was one of the first to call for a new Church Committee in a right-of-center publication, and now it’s all over the place. It looks like Kevin McCarthy has acceded. Some of the new Trump-era advocacy organizations are out in force for the idea.
In an ideal world this is something I would like to see. But the devil is in the details. It matters a lot who leads it, what their motives are, and where they direct their efforts.
A committee like this is about more than exposing wrongdoing. It’s also about moving in your friends and moving out your enemies. I’ll let Angelo Codevilla explain:
Now you use that term “the Church Committee” in the context that it was something that was antagonistic to the intelligence business. It was not. The Church Committee was a joint operation between, let’s call it “the left” inside the intelligence community, specifically the CIA, and their friends on the Hill. The result of it was that the left component of that bureaucracy has control of the CIA now.
Today we are confronted with the prospect of a “Church-style commission” convened by a man living in Frank Luntz’s apartment who has a history of promoting Chinese-linked businessmen into political positions in the GOP. So: who are the friends likely to be moved in, and who are the enemies likely to be moved out? What are they likely to focus on, and what are they likely to avoid? Is this likely to make the problem better, or worse? If Kevin McCarthy has the speaker’s gavel, something like this probably shouldn’t happen.
The proximate cause of these new calls for a “Church-style investigation” is the Twitter files, released by Elon Musk to friendly journalists, which show the FBI, and perhaps others too, was up to its elbows in managing election-related information. Musk has agreed with these calls for an investigation himself:
It’s a relief that the libertarian notion that these are private companies entitled to do what they want, is now untenable. Twitter is not a tech company, it’s a political problem. We aren’t supposed to use this metaphor anymore because people are offended by it, but it’s too apropos: Elon Musk bought himself a tar-baby. It’s the exact same story.
Elon Musk and his unwoke Silicon Valley friends were upset with woke Twitter, it wasn’t responsive to them, like the turpentine contraption that didn’t wish Br’er Rabbit good morning. So he wants to do something about the problem, and raises a bunch of foreign capital to buy it. Meanwhile, Br’er Fox, he lay low.
Elon’s gonna keep punching and kicking it, trying to get it to behave better, but he’s just gonna get more stuck. By the time he’s done with it, the feds will be able to get him in a dozen different ways. And along comes Br’er Fox. That’s how you collar the richest man in the world. He probably knows this is happening, which is why he’s building ties with Republicans.
When foreign interests are all over Twitter running information operations too, of course the United States government is going to demand a hand in managing it. The only thing worse than having government agents all over social media is having foreign spies all over it unsupervised. None of this should be remotely surprising.
Conservatives are madder than wet hens that Twitter wouldn’t let them plaster Hunter Biden’s nudes all over the country a few days before a presidential election (they all, of course, are against the porn industry). In the interest of intellectual honesty, I feel compelled to point out that I reported on the Hunter Biden hard drive for a conservative publication, and it was not suppressed. Unlike some others, we covered his business, not his dick.
I no longer have the hard drive. I mailed my only copy to someone months ago, so this isn’t something I’m able to prove at this point. But it seems highly likely that there were different versions of the hard drive circulating. The version I was given did not contain certain files I inferred others had access to, including people outside the United States. I have doubts about the purported provenance of the so-called “laptop from hell.” I strongly suspect, if a congressional investigation pursues this line of inquiry, it isn’t going to end the way conservatives think it will.
A historical note: Frank Church was a liberal lion from the mountain West, who admired noninterventionist progressive Republican William Borah in his youth (the same political tendency Matt Gaetz’s grandfather hails from—think about who his enemies are and you’ll get the picture). Church was from Plymouth Colony stock. When he indicted the security state in the 1970s, it carried the sting of a proprietary patriot watching the country he loved become something different, something dark and sinister. The institutions whose abuses he tried, and failed, to rein in had not just betrayed the public—because Church was running it, it carried the implication that they betrayed their own nation’s history.
If you’re going to take on the deep state in a congressional committee, it would be good to find someone eligible to join the Society of Mayflower Descendants or the Jamestowne Society to lead the effort. I’m sorry if this sounds “exclusionary.” It is.
Great work!