Washington Free Beacon editor Matthew Continetti on Friday called out The Washington Post for confirming there is a D.C. swamp. Jamie Gorelick, who was deputy attorney general for President Clinton, apparently made a "very bad boo-boo" by deciding to represent the president's daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Now her liberal friends have cast Gorelick out and created a "no Jamies Club."
No one raised a fuss when this paragon of virtue repped BP, the Clinton Foundation, and the student loan industry. But the Trumps are just—so—icky. Democratic consultant Hilary Rosen, for example, posted a Tweet suggesting Gorelick is "complicit" in whatever nasty things the Trump family stands accused of doing this morning. A former Clinton speechwriter tells the Post, "Representing Jared and Ivanka is a case of pushing the ethical envelope." Other "longtime friends of Gorelick contacted for this article," the Post goes on, "offered complimentary comments about her on the record, and then, after asking if they could make other remarks without attribution, bashed their colleagues to smithereens.”
Many politicos on Twitter pounced on that line, showing how two-faced many powerful people in the capital city are, and how the "news" media let the sources that they favor settle scores as anonymous-sourced cowards and schemers. Continetti mocked the hypocrisy of liberals who suddenly forgot they favored lawyers taking on unpopular clients:
....What does it say about them that Javanka's attorney is held to a different standard than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's?
Back in 2010, remember, when now-congresswoman Liz Cheney asked why the Obama Justice Department was hiring lawyers who had defended al Qaeda, this same legal and journalistic community was incensed. "This is exactly what Joe McCarthy did," a "human rights expert" for the Center for American Progress told the American Prospect. "The attacks from lowlifes like Cheney and National Review's Andrew McCarthy have been even more vile than their typical nonsense," wrote a blogger for the Washington Monthly. "The American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients is at least as old as John Adams's representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre," wrote a group of former Bush administration officials, many of whom went on to oppose Donald Trump.
Continetti concluded by saying when he reads the Post, he tries to decide who annoys him more -- Gorelick for representing Trump family members and at the same time representing liberal activists fighting the Trump administration on policy; the liberals who publicly berate Gorelick while they represent liberal bogeymen like the oil companies and authoritarian foreign governnments; or the press itself.
Then there is the media that gleefully cheers on this organic vegan food fight while playing its own double-dealing game. Note how clever [Post reporter Marc] Fisher is, finding a way to shoehorn duplicitous, not-for-public-consumption jibes into his piece while congratulating himself as the upholder of probity: "Those people will not be quoted in this article, by name or anonymously, as one tiny bulwark against outright awfulness." Except you kind of did quote them, by mentioning in the first place these craven and cynical "longtime friends of Gorelick" who say one thing on the record and another thing off the record. How many longtime friends can she have? And why mention them at all, but to position yourself as the opponent of "awfulness"?
