Prominent journalists, media pundits, and former Justice Department employees have purportedly been holding regular weekly meetings and receiving briefs from staffers on the January 6 Committee to plan and coordinate anti-Trump messaging.
Ankush Khardori, a former prosecutor in the Obama Justice Department, described the meetings in a piece published by Politico. In Khardori’s description of what he says constitutes more of a brainstorming exercise, some of the most prominent names in the overlapping world of journalism and legal punditry appear to conspire to guide the media narrative around former President Donald Trump.
The meetings have been held every Friday via Zoom since 2022, with Norman Eisen, former special counsel in the Obama administration, as host, per the reporting. The regular participants on the call are all influential politicos, including commentator Bill Kristol, constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe, former Nixon administration official and felon John Dean, and George Conway of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.
Jeffrey Toobin, the longtime major news legal analyst who was disgraced when he exposed himself on a different Zoom call back in 2020, also participates. Despite Khardori’s blanket assertion that participants are not affiliated with the government, another regular is Andrew Weissmann, who became famous for running and prolonging former FBI Director Robert Mueller’s investigation of alleged Trump-Russia collusion.
Trump’s attorney, Jeff Clark, took to X last week to express that the Politico article confirmed his long-standing contention that the mainstream media has been party to the legal attacks on his former boss.
“I called it! A group of leftist legal commentators has been meeting weekly for about two years to strategize about how to bring down Trump using the media,” Clark wrote. “I even coined a term for the phenomenon: ‘JournoLawfare™️’ as my followers will be well familiar with. This Politico article admits it.”
The Politico article reveals that the influential group of pundits and former DOJ officials often received briefs from the House Committee staff organized to investigate and initiate prosecution recommendations against those involved in the January 6, 2021, protests at the U.S. Capitol building. The committee, which is made up of Democrats and two anti-Trump Republicans, recommended criminal charges against Trump and one of his lawyers, John Eastman, for disputing the election results.
Though Khardori dismissed the notion that the meeting could be considered proof of an organized conspiracy against Trump, calling the idea “bunk,” he admitted that the group members would have preferred it if the meetings had not become public knowledge.
The revelation that leading news commentators and the government entities investigating the former president were coordinating their messaging lends further ammunition to those who suggest that major media and government officials are working together to suppress dissent.
The Dallas Express has extensively covered prior allegations of major media manipulating public opinion in service of the Democratic political establishment.