Reflections on the Responsibility of those who Should be Truthtellers

Rudy Bush, the editorial page editor for the Dallas Morning News, introduced the public to a new voice on the op-ed pages of the Dallas Morning News this weekend. It’s an interesting and necessary choice.

If you don’t read the paper, you missed the reveal of Matthew DeSarno, who ran the FBI’s Dallas field office. In case you’ve forgotten: in January 2022, an armed man took four hostages inside Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, and DeSarno was the one in charge of the rescue operation. After a taut twelve hours, the hostages walked out alive, and no officer was hurt. He calls it one of the finest examples of public service he witnessed in his career, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. Directing institutions through episodes of stress and trauma is no easy task. And when a man like him says the rule of law is hard to build, easy to damage, and essential to both security and freedom, I can’t argue.

A plumb line: it shows what’s straight — and what isn’t...

But I’m concerned we’re going to skate right up to the edge of naming the people most responsible — and stop there. Because the real injury isn’t that the rule of law gets argued about. It’s that the ones most culpable have quietly demoted it: from a governing principle that binds everyone, to a concept we praise, to a behavior that turns out to be optional. And the security and freedom that flow from it get demoted right along with it. Quite frankly, the current President of the United States is the one individual who is meant to promote those principles and, indeed, to be the symbol of what they stand for. It should not be simply rhetoric for any person who holds that office; he or she should be the avatar for them. I take no pleasure in saying it, and feel no need to apologize for it: the person in the Oval Office at present is not. And I wonder if DeSarno is going to have the wisdom and fortitude to point out the fact that, when it comes to not only obeying the law but the norms of official behavior, our president, Donald Trump, is woefully lacking, to say the least.

Bush comes close to expressing this when he writes that federal law enforcement has been turned inside out, that barely a week passes without a headline about an investigation or prosecution driven by political payback. Closer — but he stopped at the edge of the name, too.

So, at the risk of sounding unfriendly: where, and with whom, do we begin a conversation about the “rule of law”? How does Mr. DeSarno begin his instruction?

In my mind, the rule of law doesn’t begin with the clerk, the beat officer, or the line prosecutor. It begins with the principle that the most powerful man in the room is bound by it first. The President, before anyone else, must be seen as its enforcer — that is the heart of the oath he takes, to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Mr. DeSarno took the companion oath, the one every soldier and agent raises a hand to — to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Both oaths run to the same document. And the enemies that oath names — foreign and domestic — are not the people a president decides to count as his own.

It is not a list of those who have made jokes about the president. It’s not a list of those who laughed at the jokes. It’s not a list of those who voted against his proposals and policies, or questioned them, for whatever reason. The rule of law is meant to protect citizens from those who threaten them with real harm — physical, financial, mental, or emotional — and the disruption of their lives at any level. Is Mr. DeSarno going to talk about that?

Because if he isn’t, he’s missing the danger Trump has posed, and continues to pose, to the very psyche of our nation. When the most powerful man in the country treats the law as optional, we forfeit the right to be surprised when the rest of us do — when neighbors turn on one another not because a neighbor is a threat to their lives, but because they don’t believe what we believe, don’t think the way we think, don’t look the way we look, don’t vote the way we vote. That is the trickle-down effect of a rule of law either neglected or misappropriated. Either the rule of law is a guiding principle — or it is just an option the powerful may take or leave. It cannot be both.

That is the whole difference between a republic and a regime — between the rule of law and the rule of men. The truest measure of whether law still rules is not how it treats the weak; it is whether it reaches the strong. A fish, after all, rots from the head — and the one whose conduct is the test of the whole thing sits at the very top.

And I don’t have to speculate about what that conduct has been, because it is on the record, in the man’s own words, on his own platform.

The President of the United States publicly directed his Justice Department to prosecute people he had named, on that platform, as his adversaries — New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, and the former director of the FBI, James Comey. There it is: a list with names.

And one of those names should weigh on Mr. DeSarno more than the rest. James Comey ran the FBI. Matthew DeSarno ran its Dallas field office. When the President reached into the Bureau’s own history and pulled a former director into the dock — over evidence his own appointed prosecutor said wasn’t there — he reached into the house DeSarno gave his career to. That isn’t a story he covers from the outside. It’s his own.

So will we hear from Mr. DeSarno — the insider who understands a colleague’s dilemma — about Erik Siebert, the U.S. Attorney the President himself had appointed, a respected conservative who investigated these people at the President’s own behest, concluded the evidence wasn’t there, and was forced out for saying so? Will he tell us what it does to an institution when a prosecutor like that is replaced by Lindsey Halligan — the President’s own former personal attorney, who had never prosecuted a case — who then walked into a grand jury alone and came out with the indictments? Then a federal judge, Cameron Currie, threw those cases out entirely, finding that the prosecutor who brought them had been unlawfully installed.

Another judge described what he was watching as “indict first, investigate later.” None of this suggests that trust has grown fragile. It is a sequence of decisions, made by a person, for a stated reason. It is the erosion, in the active voice.

Because in my mind, if Mr. DeSarno isn’t going to talk — at least some — about that, then whatever he writes will drift into the “police officer is your friend” and “eat your spinach” category. There’s nothing you can say about respecting police, or about peaceful protest as opposed to anarchy, without mentioning a president who regularly calls the FBI “crooked,” or insists his pals were treated “unfairly” simply because they were arrested.

I beg you to remember how loud the howls were when President Obama said the police had “acted stupidly” over a single, lowly local arrest — the public intellectual and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., handcuffed at his own front door after a neighbor mistook him for a burglar.

That is what misplaced outrage looks like: thunder over one president’s stray word about a single arrest, and silence while another bends the law itself to his ends. Years ago, a Dallas police chief taught me how to distinguish a symptom from a cause. He sat me down with the illiteracy rates among the men in his custody and said, “Rev. Britt, that’s what you call a clue.” He was teaching me to follow the evidence back to its source — and to follow it all the way. So let me. If Mr. DeSarno is going to warn — rightly — that hate groups threaten our democracy and destabilize our common life, he cannot do it while stepping around the President’s own role in the January 6 insurrection, or while letting the fiction stand that the day was some kind of peaceful protest. He cannot honor the Capitol and city officers who were beaten defending that building, more than a hundred of them injured, and then fall silent about the man who, on his first day back in office, pardoned some fifteen hundred of the rioters — the ones who assaulted those very officers among them — and called them patriots. A president who sells himself as “law and order” set free the people who bloodied the police. If Mr. DeSarno will not name that both-sidesism — tenderness toward one kind of grievance, contempt for Black citizens who marched in peace — then whatever he writes about justice will not help us. Not at all.

My point of reference for this moment is the one I know best: a life and a ministry in the Black Church, rooted in a scripture that has never been shy about a nation’s troubles. What that tradition tells me is that every age needs its Nathans — secular as well as spiritual — willing to speak a corrective word to the age’s Davids: the powerful men who put a nation’s security at risk through reckless conduct and poor judgment, and who must be pointed at directly, without tremor, fear, or favor, and told, “Thou art the man.” Every age needs its Amoses, too — the ones who name its crass materialism and its oppression of the poor, as Amos named the houses of ivory and the men who sold the righteous for silver. The prophetic tradition has a secular dimension as well as a sacred one, and it keeps exactly one rule about audience: you start with the king. Do anything less, and we are not telling the truth. We are giving weather reports.

I don’t think for a minute that Mr. DeSarno disagrees with any of this in principle. He wrote the most important sentence of his own column himself: the oath he took was not to a president, a party, or an ideology. It was to the Constitution. That is exactly right. That is the whole thing. So let the first column that flows from that oath begin where the Constitution is under the most strain — not at the bottom, not in the comfortable middle, but at the top.

I look forward to reading Mr. DeSarno, as should all readers of our city’s paper of record. He’s someone who has spent his life learning to sort truth from politics; it’s a skill we need badly. I’ll be reading — and watching to see whether the diagnosis is thorough and complete. Someone who tells us the necessary, even the truth, about the man who should be the avatar of truth for our country.