Robert Barnes On Sidney Powell

Within hours of last evening's announcement that Sidney Powell was no longer on the Trump legal team, Robert Barnes appeared on the Viva Frei YouTube channel to provide his insights into what happened. I've already said here that Barnes has proven one of the best analysts available in the current election cycle. He's the best of some very bad choices, but I'll go into that below.

To summarize Barnes's account, his view of Powell's professional background is that she has no experience in election law and no experience in civil law, both of which are key in the Trump effort. She does specialize in criminal appeals, which made her the best possible attorney for General Flynn, and this made her reputation. But she's completely over her head in the current cases.

He also thinks stress and fame have affected her judgment. But also, she seems to have swallowed QAnon conspiracy theories, one of which would be that Venezuela controlled the election count via the Frankfurt server. (She seems to be on the verge of alleging this outright.) In his view, she hijacked the Trump legal effort over the week of November 16, leading up to the Thursday press conference, where she took equal precedence with Giuliani and Ellis. From Barnes's viewpoint, this was a "public relations disaster".

I've also on my old blog cited a YouTuve channel called Hard Bastard as another very good source of analysis. The Hard Bastard's view tracks pretty closely with Barnes.

The overall problem we continue to have is that corporate media has been losing credibility throughout the Trump administration, in an environment where the CIA, FBI, and other formerly authoritative institutions have demonstrably acted in bad faith. Conventional wisdom had Fox News as a potential counterbalance, but recall that Fox worked against Trump in 2016 as well -- Megyn Kelly's debate performance that year destroyed her reputaion and career..

Bloggers and social media haven't filled the gap. Just since yesterday, the bloggers have mostly stayed on Powell's side, continuing to hope she'll come up with the evidence she's promised. The few sensible opinions, like Barnes and Hard Bastard, are on YouTube, where there's generally no transcript, and the discussion is by its nature desultory. Thus it's hard to quote excerpts.

In addition, there's no pattern of independent daily commentary on the news cycle. There were no intelligent, unhysterical voices as of Tuesday when Powell announced the kraken had already been released. (Commenting on last night, another blogger said the kraken died.) A Barnes might have provided a better warning at the time. The Thursday press conference salvaged Powell's credibility in my mind, for instance. Commentary by someone other than the pretty boy Carlson could have helped.

One problem is that the good independent commentators like those above aren't professional journalists. Their work appears at best every few days, and in Barnes's case, it's across a number of platforms. We need a predictable pattern of credible, pertinent comment.