Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter has added to the din of conservative voices that have seized on the notion of pardoning U.S. war criminals with an opinion column on behalf of a Navy SEAL team leader being charged with the murder of an ISIS prisoner. Hunter's column did not mention that Edward Gallagher's fellow SEALs described him as a serial killer, repeatedly targeting and murdering civilians with such chilling consistency that they went so far as to tamper with his sniper rifle in efforts to foil his aim. The Republican congressman omits all of that, instead painting Gallagher's prosecution as the actions of military prosecutors "more obsessed with career advancement" than the law.
Rep. Hunter, a former Marine, continued to defend Gallagher in a weekend town hall, admitting that he himself had, for example, violated strict rules about posing with the corpses of dead fighters during his service. It was a pitch best described as “Who among us has not committed an odd war crime or two?”
“Eddie did one bad thing that I’m guilty of, too—taking a picture of the body and saying something stupid,” Hunter said at the meeting about border issues in the Southern California town of Ramona, according to the Times of San Diego.
It has been clear for a while now that Duncan Hunter is not himself a stickler for abiding by irritating things like laws. Hunter is currently awaiting trial on federal corruption charges after he and his wife were discovered pocketing roughly a quarter million dollars of campaign funds for their own personal use; that he would have played loose with military law during his own service is not particularly surprising.
He remains unapologetic about that corruption, by the way. Instead, he has settled on the defense now being trotted out party-wide by Republicans caught violating U.S. laws, the defense peddled by everyone from an ever-enraged Donald Trump to the smalltime crackpot Dinesh D'Souza: It is all the fault of overzealous prosecutors looking for reasons to jail the movement’s ideological nobility for crimes that are actually No Big Deal, things that everybody does. The real crime is that these laws are being applied to important people—or rather, important conservative people.
These new calls for systemic pardons of the nation's war criminals fit into the movement's newly fascist re-envisioning, one in which proper violence and proper crimes must be tolerated, if not celebrated, for the greater good. But it is also a seemingly orchestrated tactic aimed at burnishing the movement's effort to nullify laws that Dear Leader and his allies have run afoul of. It suggests that even the heroes and patriots of our armed forces, flag-wrapped personifications of the national spirit, are now falling to this newly imagined epidemic of "rogue prosecutors" enforcing laws that should never have been enforced. It is an insipid, malevolent, and thoroughly intended conflation. Trump, perched on a gold toilet, is as far removed from heroism as it is possible to be; from Manafort to Kushner to the seemingly unending stream of scandal-plagued cabinet members and apparatchiks, there are few movement leaders who are not incessantly grating, unlikable figures. If the argument that the rule of law is going too far and targeting too many is to gain wider traction, more sympathetic victims of that overreach must be found. That the movement seized upon American war criminals as, literally, the new flag-bearers for that argument is … noteworthy.
But that is where we are now: In the midst of a party-wide effort to immunize "important" Republicans from prosecution for breaking U.S. laws and the subsequent decay into defending any action, and any crime, if partisan gain can be had in doing so. It is the opinion of the sitting attorney general that Donald Trump can neither be charged with obstruction for his brazen, extended efforts to thwart investigation of his campaign and allies, nor even be scrutinized by Congress for those acts or for other more pedestrian crimes. The Republican-controlled Senate has made it clear that the edicts against presidents using their office for personal and business profit no longer apply. The Hatch Act, forbidding the use of government resources to further campaign ends, is treated with contempt. "Important" movement figureheads like D'Souza and the brazenly corrupt Joe Arpaio are pardoned; Trump floats the use of the pardon to border officials acting on his behalf if the courts deem that they acted illegally in pursuit of tougher, crueler xenophobic efforts.
It was not a stretch to imagine the indicted Rep. Duncan Hunter would seize upon an accused serial killer's military trial as evidence that the rule of law has gone amok in this nation, and needs to be pruned back a bit. The man is consistent with the movement.