Pima County Fiasco

Deep into yet another cataleptic holiday weekend, Michael Lebron, a legal analyst, sometime conspiracy theorist, and standup comic who posts as Lionel on his YouTube channel, has come up with the best summary of the so far two-week-long hysteria over Savannah Guthrie's mother's disappearance. At 15:00 in the video embedded above,

What does this sound like to you? Distraction! Distraction! Look the other way! Look over here! Hey, isn't this wild? You think you undestand? Oh, here's a new fact! That'll get you going for a week. Yeah, news. Send all your crews, all your people, over here. Yeah, don't worry about what's going on with Epstein, don't worry about Pam Bondi. . .

Over the past week, as of Wednesday,

A person was detained for questioning Tuesday in the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, hours after the FBI released surveillance videos of a masked person wearing a handgun holster outside her front door the night she vanished from her Arizona home.

News outlets later interviewed a man who said he was questioned and released. Authorities have not confirmed that the person they picked up was released.

Officers detained the person during a traffic stop south of Tucson, according to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. The department did not immediately provide details about the person or the location. The FBI referred questions to the sheriff’s office.

But the FBI did indeed release photos of a person caught in Mom Guthrie's door camera dressed like what Lionel characterizes as the Michelin Man. Over the next several days, investigators are said to have retrieved what may or may not be one or both of the gloves he appeared to be wearing. Then, Friday night,

A SWAT team from the Pima County, Arizona, Sheriff’s Department swarmed a Tucson area house Friday evening as part of the ongoing search for Nancy Guthrie, and three people were detained at two scenes, NewsNation has learned.

Authorities moved in on the home near Guthrie’s Tucson area neighborhood as part of a search warrant execution and ordered two individuals — a woman and a man, possibly a mother and son — to come out; both complied.

A third individual, a man, was simultaneously detained nearby during a traffic stop. The driver reportedly was heading to the property that was being searched.

Close to 1 a.m. EST, the Pima County Sheriff’s Office issued an update on social platform X, saying, “Law enforcement activity is underway at a residence near E Orange Grove Rd & N First Ave related to the Guthrie case. Because this is a joint investigation, at the request of the FBI – no additional information is currently available.”

But by Saturday morning, it was all a big never mind. This is nothing but a media circus, led breathlessly by none other than News Nation Senior Correspondent Brian Entin, a specialist in high-profile damsels in distress from Gabby Petito to the Idaho student murder victims, whose demeanor led me to ask Chrome AI mode, "Is Brian Entin gay?" It answered,

While he is highly active on social media and frequently engages with his audience, he maintains a strict focus on his professional work and has not publicly disclosed details regarding his personal relationships or orientation.

OK, he's gay, and News Nation hasn't put their serious crime reporter Dan Abrams on the story, which effectively says that whatever actually may have happened to Mom Guthrie, it's importance is very secondary to its publicity value for Savannah. Lionel astutely observes at 4:25 in the embedded video,

Savannah Guthrie has never, ever, ever conveyed to me legitimacy, warmth. It's phoniness. . . . my years of working in legal stuff, and prosecutors, and defense, and trial law, and judges and criminals and my fair share of crazy people, the craziest people I have ever met are in media. Television more than anything else, because television is the last vestige of this fantasy world before. Let me explain something. A lot of people today, you can take the craziest dame, the craziest guy, and once they're in their home, . . . they don't have the trappings of lunacy. Why? Because when you're in a TV set, you have hair and makeup and cars and drivers and all that stuff. You've got people and yelling at you, and you feel like, "Oh, my God." . . . People in TV think that you love them. . . . "Look at me, I'm getting my hair and makeup. Look at me, I'm wired up! Look! Here are my notes! Here's the monitor! Here's my smoothie! This is my world. Don't you wish you were me?"

On one hand, a big point is that Savannah Guthrie is influencing the investigation. She doesn't need to be whispering in the sheriff's ear, although I'm sure she's doing that as well. She's driving events simply because she's there with her car and driver and hair and makeup and smoothie. Both the sheriff and the FBI feel compelled to do things that seem important simply because that's what Savannah expected, no matter they immediately turn out to be useless diversions of resources.

On the other hand, I think Lionel is correct that this is a big distraction. He thinks it's to distract from Epstein, but at least in the US, it's down to C-listers like Kathy Ruemmler, who resigned as Goldman Sachs head counsel when flirty e-mails to Epstein surfaced. In the UK, it's a differfent matter, with Epstein causing a crisis in the government and the worst scandal for the Royals since 1936, but that's the UK.

In the US, I'd say the Mom Guthrie story completely took ICE out of the headlines, which overall isn't a bad thing. It's giving Trump cover to develop his strategies for the Jeffries shutdown and the SAVE Act talking filibuster, and it's keeping the developing situations in Iran and Cuba out of the news as well. Probably all to the good.