Accountable Only to Themselves
By 
Virginia Heffernan connects the dots:
This last year has been a crash course in startlingly brutal abuses of power. For decades, it seems, a caste of self-styled overmen has felt liberated to commit misdeeds with impunity: ethical, sexual, financial and otherwise.
There’s hardly room to name them all here, though of course icons of power-madness such as Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein are household names. In plain sight, even more or less regular schmos — including EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, disgraced carnival barker Bill O’Reilly and former New York Atty. Gen. Eric Schneiderman — seem to have fancied themselves exempt from the laws that bind the rest of us.
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Also this week, news broke that Cohen, known for servicing the hush-money-extramarital-affairs needs of Trump and Republican National Committee official Elliott Broidy, was also taking fat stacks of money from Columbus Nova, a family-investment office with ties to Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch.
(Sidebar because it’s just this insane: Was Broidy actually taking the heat for Trump when he copped to an affair and pregnancy with a skin-mag model? Did Broidy give Cohen money not to hush things up but rather as a way of currying favor with the president? Law professor Paul Campos laid out that case hypothetically but persuasively in New York magazine, also this week.)
Cohen’s office also saw big sums from blue-chip companies not known for “Sopranos”-style nonsense, specifically, Novartis and AT&T. On Friday morning, the CEOs of Novartis and AT&T apologized for getting mixed up with Cohen. AT&T’s CEO said hiring him was “a big mistake.” (I bet.)
Oh, but it doesn’t stop there. Also this week, the Observer alleged that Trump confederates hired the same gang of former Israeli intelligence officers to frame and intimidate proponents of the Iran deal that Harvey Weinstein once viciously sicced on his victims. The ex-spies, known as Black Cube, denied any connection to the administration.
It’s important to note, in a time monotonously described as intensely partisan, that the men involved in these antics come in every ideological stripe. Some are feminists. Some are libertarians. Some are climate deniers. All appear to be in chronic violation of baseline codes of conduct.
Law professor Alan Dershowitz’s new book claims that political differences have lately been criminalized in the United States. He has it wrong. Instead, the orderly enforcement of the law has, ludicrously, been framed as political.
A cottage industry of enablers has risen alongside the above-the-law caste. These are the joints like Black Cube, Cambridge Analytica and Cohen’s nutty consultancy LLC. Swank outfits that for a steep price protect the swaggering VIPs, and in some cases make problems go away.
Swashbuckling tactics at such concerns might include humiliating a client’s rivals, exes and whistleblowers; concealing his misdeeds; manipulating media and social media; and perhaps coarser services.
Everyone involved wears suits, and they operate under the rubric of “research” or “strategic communication.” Cohen said he would offer “insights” into … something for his corporate clients.
Sully was, in a sense, performing a useful service in saying the quiet parts loud — the inalienable right to be accountable only to oneself is critical to the worldview of elites in the age of Trump. This is a major test of whether the law can actually hold some of these people accountable.