Donald Trump’s standards for acceptable behavior from government officials is alarmingly low. After all, Sean Spicer still has a job despite planting a fake news story. Sebastian Gorka still has a job despite calling a private citizen at night to shake him down. And Steve Bannon is still Trump’s eminence grise despite the litany of anecdotes proving that he is not fit to clean the White House, let alone serve in it.
But to hear Fox News Channel analyst Andrew Napolitano talk, the Donald’s standards may be even lower than we thought. Fresh off causing an international incident by falsely claiming British intelligence helped wire Trump Tower, Napolitano claims that he is in the running for a seat on the Supreme Court.
According to Politico, Napolitano told a number of friends in January that he was on Trump’s short list for the seat once occupied by Antonin Scalia–a nod that ultimately went to Neil Gorsuch. According to one source, Napolitano claimed that Trump had told him “since the transition” that he was in the running for that seat. He claimed to have submitted academic and personal resumes to Trump’s aides. It would have been the first time he had wielded a gavel since serving as a state court judge in New Jersey from 1987 to 1995.
Napolitano’s friends thought that Trump was merely trying to stroke Napolitano’s ego, but Napolitano insisted that he was in the running. As it turned out, Napolitano never appeared on any public lists for the former Scalia seat, and several people close to Trump’s thinking have knocked down any talk that Napolitano was ever being considered. That hasn’t dissuaded Napolitano, however. He maintains that Trump has all but guaranteed him the next Supreme Court vacancy if one comes open during his term.
In a sane world, Napolitano should have disqualified himself from cleaning the Supreme Court building, let alone serving on the Court, on March 16, when he claimed on “Fox & Friends” that the Government Communications Headquarters, the British counterpart of the CIA, had wiretapped Trump Tower on orders from Trump. He’d actually hinted at this two days earlier on Fox Business. Watch here.
Trump repeated the claim during his press conference with German chancellor Angela Merkel the next day. In the face of furious criticism from London, Fox News was forced to publicly disavow Napolitano’s claim.
When coverage of the Gorsuch confirmation hearings began, Napolitano was noticeably absent, even though he is Fox News’ senior judicial analyst. It later emerged that Napolitano had been taken off the air indefinitely.
It’s not because of a rare outbreak of integrity at the fair and balanced network. According to Media Matters, Napolitano’s rant potentially threatens the efforts of Fox News parent company 21st Century Fox to buy full control of the UK’s largest satellite and pay-TV company, Sky plc. Needless to say, having a top commentator at your most valuable American asset spouting off unfounded claims that the UK was involved in illegal wiretapping isn’t the best way to win favor with UK regulators.
But even before that incident, there was already a lot in Napolitano’s dossier that would have made him a filibuster waiting to happen had Trump nominated him. For years, he has given succor to 9-11 truthers, and claims that the government is hiding something about what happened when the World Trade Center was destroyed. He has also claimed that Seal Team 6 didn’t really kill Osama bin Laden.
Frankly, it says a lot about Napolitano that he can even harbor any ambitions about being on the Supreme Court, given how appalling his record was even before getting diarrhea of the mouth about the UK’s involvement in the supposed wiretapping of Trump Tower. But it says even more about Fox News that Napolitano is still on the payroll.
(featured image courtesy Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
