So what the heck is going on, where The Bulwark can write an article that is not “thinly sourced” as Jeffries’ spokesperson’s initial denial said, yet Jeffries himself pretty much put the report’s accusation to bed in public?
I have long been critical of the Make Democrats Mad Magazines, also known as Axios and Politico, as they run on a business model dependent on Democratic rage. They are the genesis of so many stories from the classic brave anonymous Democrat saying something designed in a lab to make lefties and liberals white-hot with rage, and I don’t give much credence to their rage-bait as anything newsworthy. But The Bulwark is not Politico or Axios. It is right leaning like those two outlets, but if anything, their business model is designed around being the sole conservatives who haven’t sold their soul to Donald Trump and still have their integrity intact. The reporter who authored the story, Adrian Carrasquillo, is a well-established and respected reporter who does not participate in this cynical game to make liberals mad. This story is not classic Democratic rage-bait no matter how badly Democratic partisans wanted to paint it as such.
But still, Jeffries went on the record to effectively rebut what the report said, even after declining to do so prior to it coming out, so what the heck happened? I reached out to Jeffries’ office and asked him a simple question: why didn’t you deny this when The Bulwark initially reached out about it? Had he done so, there’s a good chance that story never gets printed given that primary sources rule the world of journalism. I changed the picture on my article yesterday from Jeffries to Whitmer solely because of Jeffries himself denying it (I didn’t change any of the text though). As of this writing, Hakeem Jeffries’ office has not responded to me, which is different from declining to comment to The Bulwark. Maybe they’re busy with more important stuff than responding to some lefty jackass on the internet. A non-response is not conclusive, but declining to respond is an acknowledgement that you had the opportunity to rebut a story, and you actively chose not to.
The cynical read, which may not be inaccurate, is that Jeffries was simply responding to the outrage and the initial report was correct, which is why his office didn’t deny it. Perhaps he underestimated the response it would lead to, and later decided that it was not worth it to have everyone on the internet calling him a craven coward unwilling to stand up for the basic concept of due process. Jeffries has never been a great communicator, and so we cannot rule out that the explanation for this saga is pretty straightforward: the report was accurate and everything that followed was ham-fisted and reactive damage control.
Another theory is that Jeffries is staying mum on El Salvador trips because Cory Booker and Rep. Adriano Espaillat are bypassing the State Department to negotiate with El Salvador’s dictator, Nayib Bukele. In The Bulwark’s report, they note that these Congresspeople want to travel to El Salvador to meet with Abrego Garcia, and so one way to read between the lines is that Jeffries does not want to disrupt those negotiations, which could be why in his “site visits outside America” quote he avoided saying El Salvador directly. I will admit I don’t quite track the logic of it, but if that is the case, it does not fall under my Vichy Democratic Party critique the way that Whitmer consistently allowing herself to be Trump’s prop does.
If this is why Jeffries was so tight-lipped about this, it’s a question of tactics more than fecklessness. Given that Bukele is untrustworthiness manifested in human form, I would guess that negotiations dragging on like this indicate that the El Salvadorian dictator wants to try to run out the clock until the Trump administration can intervene and stop this from happening. My thinking is that additional Democratic Congresspeople going down there to turn it into a media circus would place more pressure on Bukele, not less. This notion that Jeffries wants Democrats to avoid traveling to El Salvador in order to grease the wheels on negotiations relies entirely on Bukele being a good faith actor, of which there is no evidence for.
But there’s clearly something going on behind the scenes that we don’t know. The statement by his spokesperson that never directly addressed The Bulwark’s core reporting, followed by Jeffries himself pretty much repudiating it by endorsing “site visits outside America” is just strange. I am willing to admit there is something here we may not see, but given that a couple weeks ago the Vichy Democrats were arguing that Democrats should not push back on Trump’s attacks on due process because they supposedly fall under the guise of immigration–an issue the Vichy Democrats constitutionally misread–there is plenty of reason to think this was another chapter in that dispiriting saga endorsed by Democratic leadership. I am willing and would love to shift Rep. Jeffries out of the Gretchen Whitmer/Gavin Newsom/Henry Cuellar Vichy Democratic circle, and coming out in favor of standing up against a dictator clearly differentiates himself from those hopeless husks of humans, but it’s still on him going forward to prove that he is not as feckless as his fellow Democratic leadership have proven themselves to be so far.
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