There are many ways for a campaign to behave when faced with ethical questions. The quagmire enveloping the Trump Administration due to its behavior during the campaign is indicative of what happens when you’re ethically challenged. But how about other examples? Lawfare‘s Quinta Jurecic, in the midst of analyzing how badly the Trump’s defensive wall is crumbling, provides this contrasing example from the Gore campaign of 2000, which I don’t recall reading about before:
How unusual is it? On September 14, 2000, former congressman Tom Downey, a close advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, received an anonymous package in the mail containing a videotape of George W. Bush practicing for the upcoming presidential debates and more than 120 pages of planned debate strategies. Downey and his lawyer contacted the FBI and handed the cache over that very day, and Gore campaign officials then immediately reached out to the Associated Press to provide a timeline of the events. The Gore campaign had no hint of who had sent the materials—nothing indicated the involvement of a foreign power; indeed, the package was eventually traced to a low-level employee at a media firm. But the materials were on their face likely provided to the Gore campaign as part of an attempt to damage Gore’s opponent, and that was enough to prompt a call to authorities.
The rightness of the Gore officials’ course of action is in no way diminished by the fact that, as suggested at the time, they were probably in part motivated by the desire to avoid the accusations of ill-gotten advantage that had rocked the Reagan administration. A couple years after the fact, it had been revealed that the Reagan campaign had obtained secret briefing materials on then-President Jimmy Carter’s debate strategy in the run-up to the 1980 election; those revelations in turn triggered long-running congressional and Justice Department investigations. Those investigations—which eventually ended in a whimper—raised questions about whether and what kind of crime had been committed, but note that the Justice Department concluded at the time that there was ”no criminal intent of any kind” and “no criminal wrongdoing” committed in connection with the transfer of the materials. This scandal too did not involve any indication of involvement by a hostile foreign power or its intelligence services.
Contrast with the most recent travails of Trump, Jr. Or, for that matter, the Bush Administration’s insistence of WMDs in Iraq – which turned out to be untrue, but permitted the execution of a War which should not have been pursued.
Steve Benen sees the continual crisis that is the Trump Administration progressing to the next step – where it’s everyone for themselves. I suppose we’ll see if he has that right over the next month or so.
