By Josh Marshall

Copyright talkingpointsmemo

This is kind of a secondary issue. But it’s important to focus on for a number of reasons. In the past, generally speaking, you could use formal communications and off the record briefings from federal law enforcement, within important parameters, as a guide to the state of an investigation. It’s a given that they would be sure to make you think that whoever they thought was guilty was definitely guilty. They could also be relied on to speak in the institutional interest of their department or agency. But for a general understanding of what an investigation had uncovered you could learn a lot from it, so long as these critical points of skepticism were borne in mind. Federal law enforcement, certainly off the record, could also often provide some constraint or filter on what the administration was saying. My point isn’t to romanticize the old system. But it was, from a journalistic perspective, often a key source of information.

In the current environment I think it’s fair to say there’s really no reason to believe anything we’re hearing from federal law enforcement, either formally or on background to reporters.

The top executive positions at the FBI are held by hyper-partisan podcasters. Credible reports say roughly a third of the senior career leadership has been purged. Certainly the people who remain are either politically aligned with the administration or know that any straying from the company line means immediate termination. So again, things they say could be true. There’s simply no reason to assume that or even believe it’s more likely to be true than not.

In this post however I want to focus on how extremely little we actually know.

Almost everything that is currently being treated as fact comes from the Governor of Utah, Spencer Cox. He’s earned some credibility for departing from the MAGA line of demanding vengeance against Democrats. But he’s not in charge of the FBI or even local law enforcement, which is the other primary investigative agency. I don’t know how robust a state police authority they have in Utah. But there’s really no logic to Cox being the primary source of information. All the information about leftwing ideology and Tyler Robinson’s roommate allegedly being a romantic partner and transitioning comes from him.

Most of these claims come with no specific evidence. Investigators are always going to be reluctant to share much at this stage of the investigation. But normally we’d be getting a lot more information both formally and in background briefings. Today Kash Patel announced that the FBI has physical evidence tying Robinson to the shooting and a note taking responsibility for it, which they’ve reconstructed. (It was apparently torn up.) But that’s kind of irrelevant. I don’t think anybody seriously questions that Robinson killed Kirk. The public questions are about why he did it, what his motivations were.

If you’re uncertain about what I’m saying go look at any recent write-up of the story as of early Monday evening. Basically everything is from Cox or law enforcement sources speaking to right wing publications. Bear in mind that they have complete access to his apparently cooperative MAGA family, the roommate (whatever his story is) and seemingly Robinson’s fairly extensive online activities. So they should actually know quite a lot about what he was thinking and doing and saying in the lead up to this murder, and probably going back a few years.

My best guess is that Robinson’s story doesn’t line up with the one the White House wants to tell and that’s why so little information is coming out. What we’re hearing from Cox is probably wrenching the story in as favorable a direction as possible. That’s my assumption. It could be wrong. Who knows? What’s not an assumption is how little we appear to know and how vague that quasi-public statements actually are. Even if you accept the administration’s version of what happened here, an uncritical acceptance of Cox’s basic storyline, it’s remarkable just how little it’s based on. He speaks very generally. No documents are referenced, no quotes. There’s much more of a blackout on information than press accounts would suggest.