One should hardly expect sound judgment in office from Susan Hennessey’s profile as a commentator.
CNN and Lawfare contributor Susan Hennessey has announced that she has been hired by the Biden-Harris Justice Department in the National Security Division. Personnel is policy. This is yet another illustration of what this administration really is. The theory of Joe Biden’s presidency, at least when his boosters are talking to centrists rather than to each other, is that Biden was the “reality is not Twitter” candidate who won the Democratic primary and the general election by appealing to normal people who do not marinate in the insanities of the Democrats’ activist base. The reality is that Biden has been more than happy to put such people in positions of power in his administration, and reflect their priorities in his proposals and the legislation he supports.
Of course, the wilder Democratic activists fall into three overlapping groups. One group is the economic socialists. The second group is the woke culture warriors. The third, of whom Hennessey has been a conspicuous spokeswoman, is the hard-core #Resistance types (the CNN demographic) who spent four years wallowing in conspiracy theories under which the 2016 election was stolen by Russian hacking or Russian “collusion,” Donald Trump had been on the Russian payroll since the 1980s and/or was being blackmailed by the “pee tape,” and Trump was always just a few more days from being frog-marched out of the White House, etc. How often did we hear variations on “the walls are closing in?” No matter how much legitimate ammunition existed against Trump’s character, these people always had to cut its tether to reality. In mid-2019, Hennessey was predicting a “groundswell” for impeaching Trump based on Mueller’s testimony that never materialized:
It is unsurprising that Hennessey has mass-deleted her Twitter history, learning from the lesson of Neera Tanden that being a sneering, snarking, conspiracy-addicted combatant in the Twitter wars is bad for the pretense that you are a trustworthy holder of a sober policy job. Still, there will be plenty of fodder from what people kept copies of. Back in October, I dismantled Hennessey’s shoddy argument for court-packing. Her immediate reaction to the November Senate election — a scheme to take Democratic control of the Senate without the need for elections — was likewise characteristic of her Twitter persona:
By contrast, in what looks like an epic case of projection, she totally mischaracterized how Mitch McConnell reacted to Trump’s attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 election:
