The unacknowledged inspiration behind the Trump White House’s expulsion of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. No, really.
Who are these people who represent President Donald Trump in court when he tries to expel reporters on the grounds that they published comments fed to them by, er, the White House’s own press office? The lead attorney is one Michael Velchik, senior counsel of the Justice department’s civil division. As I argue in my latest New Republic piece, the after-the-fact justifications for Trump’s decision to exile CNN, MS NOW, and Politico (later overturned by a district court judge) were every bit as crazy as the president who did the exiling. I am not a lawyer, but Liz Oyer, a former Justice department attorney, is a lawyer, and on Instagram she said “the brief is lunacy from a legal perspective.”
If Oyer’s name sounds familiar, that’s because she’s the civil servant Trump fired last year for refusing to recommend restoring gun rights to the actor Mel Gibson on the grounds that he had a history of domestic violence. (Earlier this month Oyer filed suit to get her old job back.) Gibson pleaded no contest in 2011 to the charge of misdemeanor battery of his former girlfriend, a Russian musician Oksana Grigorieva, who said Gibson left her with two broken teeth and a black eye. On a telephone recording Grigorieva made secretly, she was heard saying: “You were hitting a woman with a child in her hands! You! What kind of man is that? Hitting a woman when she’s got a child in her hands! Breaking her teeth twice in the face! What kind of man is that?” Gibson replied: “You fucking deserved it.” And also: “I’ll put you in a fucking rose garden, you cunt! You understand that? Because I’m capable of it.”
Later Gibson vouched for the recording’s accuracy but complained that Grigorieva’s taping him in secret him wasn’t cricket: “Who could anticipate such a personal betrayal?"
What kind of man is Mel Gibson, Gigorieva asked. The kind who, once the rule-following Oyer is out of the way, gets his right to own guns restored. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.
But we were talking about Michael Velchik. This man, Oyer pointed out, has an interesting personal history. At Harvard he wrote a paper from the perspective of Adolf Hitler. In 2013, one year after he graduated, Velchik emailed a friend: “[I]s it bad that my favorite class at harvard was nietzsche and my favorite book i’ve read this year is mein kampf?” Later Velchik wrote a book review of Mein Kampf calling it “fascinating” and saying Hitler “understands the importance of propaganda.” Still later Velchik defended in court the administration’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to withhold funds from Harvard on the grounds that Harvard was … antisemitic! (Cue rimshot.)
This week Velchik’s defended in court Trump’s attempts to curtail press freedom in the United States, just like Velchik’s favorite author. If the arguments were, as Oyer says, legal lunacy, consider the source.
You can read my New Republic piece here.