Trump is planning an October surprise — insiders say he wants to ‘redo 2016’

‘These people really want to get reelected, and they are going to come up with a bunch of lies to tell, and some of them are going to get very dramatic’

Insiders are divided about what the surprise will be — but a few have theories (REUTERS)

In defense policy circles, it’s said that an often-made mistake by both civilian and military leaders is to get caught “fighting the last war”.

The same is frequently true in politics, but it’s unclear whether Donald Trump has gotten that memo.

With fewer than eight weeks remaining until Americans go to the polls on election day — and even less time until Americans in most states can begin voting early — the President’s re-election campaign has spent countless dollars and person-hours trying to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle circumstances that handed him the presidency 1,401 days ago.

The circumstances under which Americans will choose who will lead the country for the next four years could not be more different from those under which they voted in 2016. Nearly 200,000 Americans have lost their lives to a novel virus that has frequently spread unchecked while the sitting President mocks those who take precautions advised by the government he heads. More people are out of work than at any time since Herbert Hoover ran for re-election against Franklin Roosevelt, and for the first time since the 1960’s, the civil rights of Black Americans are at the forefront of Americans’ collective consciousness. Oh, and much of America’s west coast is — wait for it — literally on fire.

Yet whether it’s through stoking racial unrest then harnessing the images of it to frighten white voters; trying to push a long-shot, third-party candidate onto the ballot to split Black voters off from the Democratic party; or trying to generate an aura of corruption around his Democratic opponent by way of innuendo about his opponent’s family, much of Trumpworld’s collective energy seems to be directed towards the nigh-impossible task of recreating the conditions of 2016.

No single component of the witches’ brew that was 2016 was more pivotal to Trump’s victory than ex-FBI Director James Comey’s October 28 letter to members of Congress advising them that the FBI was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. And no subject — other than Donald Trump’s re-election itself — is more important to the President and his supporters than discrediting the investigation into what Comey’s predecessor, ex-Special Counsel Robert Mueller, called Russia’s “sweeping and systematic” campaign of interference on Trump’s behalf.

That task has largely been assigned to Connecticut US Attorney John Durham, who since last April has been, as Trump has put it, “investigating the investigators” in an attempt to substantiate claims by the President and his supporters that the investigation Mueller led was illegitimate and that senior Obama administration officials are guilty of unspecified crimes up to and including “treason”.

And while most legal experts — and the Justice Department’s own inspector general — have vouched for the legitimacy of the probe into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia’s interference campaign, administration officials and Trumpworld figures continue to raise the stakes of Durham’s probe for their supporters.

During a Tuesday appearance on Fox Business Network, the White House Chief of Staff said that while he doesn’t have any “visibility” into Durham’s timeline, “additional documents that [he has] been able to review say that a number of the players, the Peter Strzok’s, the Andy McCabes, the James Comeys, and even others in the administration previously are in real trouble because of their willingness to participate in an unlawful act”.

“And I use the word unlawful at best. It broke all kinds of protocols and at worst people should go to jail,” Meadows added, who, as Chief of Staff in a normal White House, would not have any access to documents pertaining to an ongoing Justice Department probe.

When asked why and how Meadows had been able to view documents relevant to Durham’s investigation, a White House spokesperson said the former North Carolina representative was merely referring to documents he’d viewed in the course of his former duties as a member of Congress.

But one ex-DOJ official contacted for this article, who asked for anonymity because they still have dealings with the department in their new role, was skeptical of such an explanation.

“If you believe that, I have a skyscraper in New York to sell you,” they said. “Under [Attorney General William] Barr, the firewalls [between the White House and Justice Department] have come tumbling down.”

And with the Department of Justice under the control of an Attorney General who has largely rejected the wall of separation that has characterized the department’s relationship with every administration since that of Gerald Ford — and most of the norms to which the department has adhered for the past half-century — veteran DOJ watchers are sounding the alarm about an “October Surprise” coming from within the Robert F Kennedy building.

Donald Ayer, who preceded Barr as George H W Bush’s Deputy Attorney General from 1989 to 1990, said “we can absolutely count” on Barr to “[use] the tools available to him… to command actions to be taken” in order to “promote whatever merit of the President wants to put out there, and that could very well include actions taken by, through, and on account of the Durham investigation”.

“They're going to be opportunistic about whatever they can do to influence the election by statements, and whether that will or won't involve indictments of anybody, I think probably depends on… how unreasonable they're likely to be,” he continued. “They'll just want to create a spectacle and they’ve got to figure out what the best way to create that spectacle is, but I'm pretty sure that we haven't heard the last from Barr talking about the Durham investigation… He'll do everything he can to make it whatever kind of October surprise he can.”

Another former Trump administration official, ex-White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, said he doubts that Barr would be so bold as to try indicting anyone prominent enough to have close ties to this year’s Democratic ticket, such as ex-Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice, or even Biden or Obama himself.

Scaramucci, who graduated from Harvard Law School but has never practiced law, said such an action would be “colossal craziness” and “a full-on autocratic move,” and dismissed the notion that Trump or Barr would be so bold as “absolutely crazy”.

Talk of “trouble” for former Obama-era officials from Meadows, he said, is merely “fodder for the Fox News audience, which is this sort-of QAnon-believing conspiracy audience” and “is not really grounded on any substance”.

But Ayer, who has repeatedly warned of the danger posed by Barr’s belief in a “unitary executive” theory of presidential power, said Democrats need to keep speaking out and raising awareness of the ways in which Trump and Barr have been manipulating the Justice Department if they want to blunt the effect of any eleventh-hour moves meant to bolster Trump’s re-election bid.

“It's hard to know how to tell someone to rebut something when you don't know exactly what it is that you are rebutting,” he said, adding that “fortunately” some of that work is being done by those who have been writing about such issues.

“People who are paying any attention at all know that this administration [is] a bunch of liars, and they really want to get reelected, and they are going to come up with a bunch of lies to tell, they're already telling them in different ways, and some of them are going to get very dramatic,” he said. “And so warning the public that this is coming is, I think, pretty important.”