Thursday
Now that the phrase “hiding in plain sight” is on everyone’s lips, it’s worth revisiting an old post, written 18 months ago, about Edgar Allan Poe’s “Purloined Letter.” After all, since then we’ve had confirmed one of the more spectacular instances of a letter theft committed in plain sight.
When Trump said during the campaign, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” we now know that his campaign was in contact with the Russians–and that the Russians attempted to hack Hillary Clinton’s e-mails later that day.
Trump’s brazenness helps explain how he has gotten away with it. La Rochefoucauld famously said that “hypocrisy is the homage that virtue pays to vice,” his point being that the hypocritical at least feel the need to gesture towards socially held values, even if they then disregard them. If you don’t gesture, then you appear startling in your daring. The Trump equivalent could be, “concealment is the homage that criminality pays to the rule of law and I will act as if that rule doesn’t apply to me.”
Of course, one can get away with such daring only so long as others don’t make you pay. By attempting to install his own “Roy Cohn” at the head of the Justice Department while attacking the department and the Mueller investigation, Trump seeks to avoid accountability. This too has been happening in plain sight
To be sure, Trump hasn’t been open about everything. He has denied paying hush money to keep his adulterous affairs silent, and until recently he denied attempting business deals with Russia during the campaign. He probably will deny having tried to bribe Vladimir Putin with a $50 million penthouse apartment, in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. So he is paying some homage to the law.
Nevertheless, the casual way he has committed violations testifies to his confidence that he can slide out of any predicament. In this way, as I’ve written in the past, he resembles John Gay’s Mac the Knife, although Trump lacks the highwayman’s gallantry and generosity of spirit.
Reposted from July 20, 2017
Among the most unusual aspects of Trump is the way that he openly confesses to things that virtually every politician should try to hide, such as firing FBI Director James Comey because he wouldn’t promise to ignore Trump’s interactions with Russia. This apparent openness may be no more than the arrogance of a man who thinks he can get away with anything. Nevertheless, it brought to mind Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.”
One of the most remarkable things about Donald Trump’s love affair with Vladimir Putin is how open it all has been. Granted, we don’t know the whole reason why Trump has been so accommodating. Like many people, I think there are shady money deals, which Putin knows about and Trump knows that he knows. The potential for blackmail (“kompromat,” to use the KGB word) seems substantial.
But in such situations one doesn’t usually pay off the blackmailer in public. One doesn’t ignore the entire GOP platform at convention time except for its Ukraine plank, which you rewrite in Russia’s favor. You don’t name your major Russia contact as head of the National Security Administration. You don’t offer to return Russia’s compound, seized by the U.S. to punish Russia for its election intervention, right after taking office. You don’t openly talk about lifting the oil sanctions against Russia (put in place because of the Ukraine invasion) and then choose an oil executive and opponent of the sanctions as your Secretary of State. You don’t fire the head of the FBI when he refuses to drop the Russia investigation and then openly admit that this is why you fired him. You don’t (this is the latest) spend over an hour speaking privately withPutin—no American witnesses—and take minimal efforts to hide the encounter. Every time something like this happens, commentators are both appalled and incredulous—appalled that Trump is doing it, incredulous that he’s doing it in the open.
And yet, so far, Trump seems to have gotten away with it. Maybe that’s because being brazen has always worked for him so he just keeps doing it. Why abandon your running game if it gets you 10 yards every time? Or maybe he’s learned a lesson from Edgar Allan Poe’s story.
“Purloined Letter” involves a compromising letter that has been stolen by D–. The police know the letter to be in D—‘s possession and ransack both the man and his apartment with the utmost care. In fact, they boast of their thoroughness to Dupin, the private eye who has been brought in on the case. Here’s the Prefect of Police:
“Why the fact is, we took our time, and we searched everywhere. I have had long experience in these affairs. I took the entire building, room by room; devoting the nights of a whole week to each. We examined, first, the furniture of each apartment. We opened every possible drawer; and I presume you know that, to a properly trained police agent, such a thing as a secret drawer is impossible. Any man is a dolt who permits a ‘secret’ drawer to escape him in a search of this kind. The thing is so plain. There is a certain amount of bulk–of space –to be accounted for in every cabinet. Then we have accurate rules. The fiftieth part of a line could not escape us. After the cabinets we took the chairs. The cushions we probed with the fine long needles you have seen me employ. From the tables we removed the tops.”
“Why so?”
“Sometimes the top of a table, or other similarly arranged piece offurniture, is removed by the person wishing to conceal an article; then the leg is excavated, the article deposited within the cavity, and the top replaced. The bottoms and tops of bedposts are employed in the same way.”
And:
“[W]e opened every package and parcel; we not only opened every book, but we turned over every leaf in each volume, not contenting ourselves with a mere shake, according to the fashion of some of our police officers. We also measured the thickness of every book-cover, with the most accuratead measurement, and applied to each the most jealous scrutiny of the microscope. Had any of the bindings been recently meddled with, it would have been utterly impossible that the fact should have escaped observation. Some five or six volumes, just from the hands of the binder, we carefully probed, longitudinally, with the needles.”
The letter, however, proves to be in plain sight: Dupin finds it, its exterior slightly altered, deposited in D–‘s letter rack.
D— has figured that the police will expect subtlety from him and so crosses them up with brazenness. To draw the parallel, it’s as though Trump figures that every scandal in the past (Watergate, Iran Contra, Monica Lewinsky) has been uncovered because of elaborate attempts to hide the evidence. So why not be open about it.
Just as they were with the Clinton e-mail story, the press has been like Poe’s police force. With Trump, they have tracked down every small lead and uncovered one thing after another. They even have a confession from the president’s son that he had a meeting with money launderers and Russian lawyers during the election. Drawing on past history, we would expect every new scandal will bring our D– down. Yet he continues to thumb his nose at us.
For the good of the country, not to mention truth and justice, we can only pray that we have our own Dupin in Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Trump may not be “an unprincipled man of genius,” as Dupin calls D–, but handling this scandal in the old way doesn’t look as though it will work.
Perhaps Mueller should take his cue from Dupin, who turns the tables in such a subtle way that D—doesn’t realize that he’s lost. By the time he is aware, Dupin predicts, he will have entrapped himself.