80

Wednesday, March 31, 2021, 3:30 PM Eastern Daylight Time

The door of the VIP cell of the D.C. Central Detention Facility slid open and a thin elderly man in a mask was led by the masked guards into the two-man cell.

The similarly masked man who already occupied the cell looked down from his upper bunk, pulled his mask up over his nose and mouth, and sat up, swinging his feet down to a hanging position, and putting down the book he was reading. His eyes betrayed no hint of recognition. The guards backed out of the cell and shut the door.

The new entrant, clad in an orange jump suit identical to the one the original occupant wore, stood against the opposite wall, as if unsure where to go next.

“I’m Bill,” he finally said.

“I know,” the other prisoner said.

“Oh,” said Bill Ruppert.

***

The day had begun very strangely, as if everything in the world Bill understood had been turned completely upside down.

At 5AM there was a pounding on the door of his suburban home, his refuge after a lifetime of service, the home he shared with his wife.

“Federal marshals. We’re here for William Ruppert.”

He came in his bathrobe to the door, and opened it. He was immediately surrounded by masked men in black riot gear.

“What is it?” Alice called down to him.

“I don’t know,” Bill answered. “But I think I have to go with these people.”

She came down the stairs.

“What in the world is going on?”

“Ma’am, we have to take your husband downtown,” one of the marshals said. “He can have a few minutes to change.”

Bill went up the stairs and into the bedroom, followed by Alice.

“What’s going on, Bill?”

“I honestly have no idea. I’m sure it’s all a mistake that will be cleared up in a few hours.”

“My god, Bill… my god.”

“Don’t worry. It’ll be fine. I’ll call you when I figure out what’s going on,” Bill said. He dressed quickly and put his wallet and phone in his sport coat. He went downstairs. His wife followed. She handed him a mask.

“Stay here,” he told her, putting the mask on. “I’ll call when I know anything.”

She stayed at the door. He walked out the door, flanked by the agents. A man was standing next to the black van with tinted windows. As Bill walked up to it, he realized with a start who it was.

“Hello, Bill,” Nick Mancuso said.

The agents opened the side door of the van.

“Wait a minute,” Nick said. “Put the fucking cuffs on him.”

The agents complied.

Mancuso, unmasked, turned to Bill.

“This is payback, Ruppert, you piece of shit. Payback for pulling me out of my house at 5AM in front of my family. You lost. We won.”

Bill got into the side panel door of the van without answering. Two agents got in on either side of him.

As the van drove off, Alice looked on from the door and saw Mancuso.

Mancuso turned to her and grinned. Then he sidled off down the street.

***

“I’m Jim,” the other prisoner said after a moment. “Hasselblad. Journalism professor.”

“Oh,” Ruppert said. “Hi.”

“I guess ‘Nice to meet you’ doesn’t really apply in this circumstance,” Jim said.

“No, I guess not,” Bill said.

“Feel free to sit down,” Jim said. “I’ll distance.” He pulled his feet back up onto the upper bunk.

Bill nodded and sat down on the bunk below Jim’s.

“I assume this is a new experience for you,” Jim said, lying back on the upper bunk. Bill remained sitting, hunched forward with his hands clasped over his knees.

“You could say that,” Bill said.

“Well, I’m told this is the VIP suite,” Jim said. “Protective custody. You were a prosecutor in D.C. once, right?”

Bill cleared his throat. “A long time ago.”

The two men let that sit for a while.

“It’s funny,” Jim said. “I really want a cigarette right now. I quit thirty years ago, but I feel like it would be appropriate to this situation.”

“I never took it up,” Bill said.

“It somehow smooths social interaction.” “Ah.”

“You never even smoked in Vietnam?”

“No. Were you there?”

“No. Too young. And I probably wouldn’t have gone anyway.”

“Why?”

“I think I would have felt that it was not the right moral choice. Did you ever think about that at the time?”

Bill thought for a moment. Am I being set up here?

As if reading his thoughts, Jim said, “If I were you I guess I would assume they’re taping everything we say. Feel free to clam up. Myself, I don’t care. I’m sort of here voluntarily.”

“Voluntarily?”

“As I see it. I think right now, the only moral place for a patriotic American to be under this regime is in jail.”

Bill almost started to speak, but then was silent.

“Anyway, I hope this experience is changing your mind about some things,” Jim said.

“What things?” Bill responded.

“About your failure to save us from the worst person in America when you had the chance,” Jim said.

Bill scoffed at this. “You think it was my personal mission to save the entire country?”

Jim rolled over and looked down, straight into Bill’s eyes. “Yes,” he said simply. “Yes, I do.”

Bill took this in in silence. Jim rolled back onto his upper bunk.

“You took an oath, what, six times?”

“Eight,” Bill answered.

“‘To preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,’” Jim quoted.

Silence from Bill.

“‘Against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’” More silence.

“You had a heck of an opportunity to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution,” Jim said. “A unique opportunity, I think. I wish I’d had that opportunity. No one else in the past five years in this country has had the kind of opportunity you had. No one else had the status you had. ‘Oh, Bill Ruppert. He’s universally respected. No one has a bad thing to say about Bill Ruppert. He’s a straight arrow. He’ll do the right thing.’ Well, I have to ask you, Bill.”

Jim leaned down and looked toward Bill from the end of the bunk; Bill stared straight forward.

“How do you think you did in living up to that oath you took so many times? How’s the Constitution doing? Did you preserve it? Protect it? Defend it? How about our enemies? Particularly our domestic ones?”

Bill was silent for a moment. Then he swung his feet up onto the lower bunk and lay back.

“Are you my punishment?” he finally asked.

“Maybe,” Jim said. “I guess if I thought this crew had the mental wherewithal to concoct a torture for you, it might look a lot like this. But I don’t think they do. We’re being ruled by evil people right now, but they are also fools. Maybe it was the same in Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. Fascism, or conservative populism, or whatever you want to call this, isn’t exactly the thinking man’s philosophy. So I guess it’s no surprise that idiots rule us. But not all of us are equally culpable for that. I spoke out. I tried to stop it, in my ineffective liberal way. I thought free speech would save us. But then the Internet happened. HeadSpace. Tooter. All of it. They figured out they could just pump those channels full of lies, and the truth would not have a chance. They used ‘free speech’ to throw sand in the eyes of the American people, to call facts ‘fake news’ and propaganda ‘truth.’ Every time we thought the President had gone too far, we thought we had him. ‘This time he’s going down! Now he’s done something no other president has ever done! Everyone will see he’s got to go!’ But we were wrong. Every time he did something unprecedented, well, that was just another barrier broken down for him, so he could do something even more unprecedented and appalling next time.

“But then he fired the FBI Director, and everyone agreed that with you in charge, he was really going to be in trouble. You would get to the facts, and nothing would stop you. Well, we were wrong.”

“No, you weren’t. Nothing did stop me. I did exactly what I thought was the right thing, without fear or favor. I got to the facts.”

Jim was silent for a moment.

“Then,” he said slowly, “we really misjudged you.”

“What does that mean?”

“We thought you would preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. We were wrong. I guess you thought living up to your oath was the wrong thing to do.”

“What nonsense. I did exactly what the law demanded.”

“But not what your oath demanded.”

“They’re the same thing.”

Jim swiveled his legs over, dropped to the ground, backed away, and turned to Bill. “Do you really believe that?”

“Yes.”

“So, you think that as a result of your work, the Constitution of the United States has been preserved, protected and defended?”

Bill was silent for a moment. Jim continued.

“You think you would be more, or LESS, likely to be in here, under, in my opinion, at least, unconstitutional arrest, if you had said openly to the Congress, ‘Yes, it is my opinion that this President obstructed justice in the ten instances I have laid out for you, and if I were in Congress I would vote to impeach him for them, and if I were in the Senate I would vote to remove him from office?’ Or less likely?”

Bill remained silent.

“What if you had testified to Congress that you thought that the President would have been indicted for obstruction of justice if he had been in any other office than the one he occupied? Would the Constitution have been in better, or worse shape? Again, preserved? Protected? Defended? I think so.”

“Do you now.”

“I do. And maybe worst of all, after all the lies he told even before you started your investigation, after all the lies he and so many others told to obstruct your investigation, after first promising to be deposed and stringing you along, and then withdrawing the offer, and turning around and calling the whole thing a hoax, and you and your entire staff ‘Angry Democrats,’ you said nothing.”

“Rightly so.”

“Maybe that was the right thing to do before the end of the investigation,” Jim continued. “But afterwards? When every sentient being in the universe had to know that he was going to treat your refusal to call him what he was – a blatant criminal – as an exoneration? Use it as a positive thing for his re-election? Use your exoneration – “

“It wasn’t an exoneration, and I said it wasn’t, in public, to Congress.”

“Not loud enough. Not nearly loud enough for the American people to get the message. I bet you aren’t much for public opinion polls.”

“Not really.”

“No surprise there. Well, maybe that explains why you were so incapable of accurately gauging the deadly impact of your actions on the electorate.”

“Maybe so,” Bill said, combatively. “But maybe that wasn’t my job.”

“But it was your oath,” Jim said, equally aggressively.

“It was not,” Bill said. “I had a strictly defined role, under the terms of the Special Counsel statute. I was never to seek indictments against the President. The Department had ruled that possibility out decades ago. A sitting president cannot be indicted. Period. As I testified, it would be unconstitutional.”

“You testified wrongly,” Jim said. “Are you saying that every opinion the Department of Justice issues automatically is incorporated into the Constitution? Is the Torture Memo now a part of the Constitution?”

Bill looked up at Jim, exasperated. “I could have used you on some of my trials for cross-examination. And speaking of trials, I did get a lot of convictions against his whole crew.”

“And he’s pardoned every one of them, thanks to you! They are all out on the street now that he got re-elected, with the same corrupt help that elected him the first time! You know, his campaign manager used to be in this very cell? I asked. This one right here. Mancuso had that bunk you are sitting on. Now you are in here. You don’t think maybe you made some mistakes along the way?”

Bill was silent for a moment.

“We all make mistakes,” he finally said. “You haven’t?”

Jim considered this for a moment. He turned around and walked two steps to the opposite cell wall and put his palms on it. Then he turned around and faced Ruppert, who now lay, masked, on the bunk, staring at his hands, clasped over his drawn-up right knee.

“I’ve made plenty,” Jim said. “I’m a parent. You know that to be a father is to make mistakes and sow regrets every single day. I’ve been a newspaper columnist. To write a column twice a week, to have opinions pulled out of you on deadline, like some sort of reverse foie-gras goose, that, my friend, is a guarantee of future regret and self-recrimination. But I tried my best. I believe I saw things accurately at a big-picture level, and I tried to convey that accurate big picture to my readers. I failed to convince enough of my fellow Americans of the dangers I saw, dangers to them and to me, to all of us. Sure, I’ve made mistakes.”

Bill was looking into his eyes now.

“But,” Jim said, “I didn’t have your stature or your credibility. I thought I was playing it straight as a journalist and an opinion writer. That made me a partisan figure. When the time is out of joint, as Shakespeare put it, when politics is increasingly nuts, when one side has simply left the building as regards sanity, morality, truth – then playing it straight, being honest and sane and rational, is an increasingly extremist act. After the first election, no one was ever going to see me as any kind of honest broker. But you… you had the golden ticket. Even the President’s party was falling all over itself to say how credible and non-partisan you were.”

Bill said nothing.

“But you couched your findings in such a way that they could never, ever, penetrate the public consciousness. You wrote and said that these were serious allegations, and it wasn’t an exoneration, but no one read that, because you didn’t release it.”

“I couldn’t release it. Under the law, all I could do is give it to the Attorney General.”

“So you let the Attorney General ‘summarize’ the findings and whitewash them, and let them sit out there for a month, uncontested.”

“Twenty-seven days.”

“Fine. Twenty-seven days. Then the President got to crow about how there were no indictments, so therefore he was exonerated. ‘No collusion, no obstruction.’ For 27 days. And the AG said he had expected you to render an opinion on whether the President had broken the law! Sure, he was lying. He would have hated that. But imagine if you had issued that opinion. Would we be here now? And your whole staff tried to protest, but all you did was write a private note to the AG that he got to dismiss as, what, ‘peevish?’”

“‘Snitty.’”

“To summarize, then,” Jim said. “You came in as Special Counsel to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, and the net result was, the Constitution has been damaged more severely, perhaps, than at any time in our history.”

Bill was silent. He was staring down at his clasped hands again.

“I would take it easier on you,” Jim said, “but look where we are. You certainly would be less likely to be here if you had just told America the truth forthrightly. And so would I.”

“He would have denied everything. I don’t think it would have made a difference in the end.”

“But you could have made it harder for him to destroy the Constitution,” Jim said.

Bill raised his eyebrows and tilted his head left and right a couple of times in a gesture of apparent equivocation.

“You’ll pardon me for taking it personally,” Jim said. “I am pretty sure I would not be in here if people like you had actually lived up to their oaths.”

“What are you in here for, if I may ask?” Bill said.

“Get this,” Jim said. “I’m in here for threatening the President.”

“That has always been against the law,” Bill said.

“Sure,” Jim said. “Putting aside for the moment the fact that I did not, in fact, threaten the President at all, how often has that law been enforced against journalists or speakers blowing off steam? When Okomo was in office, you know how many people were arrested for that?”

“I could guess.”

“About five. Out of the literal tens of thousands who threatened him on line and elsewhere. And those five were heavily armed and had discussed serious plans to kill him. I wouldn’t know the front of a gun from the back. I just said something insulting about him at a university panel discussion back in January, and now here I am. I have to believe that if someone who had some credibility and power had stood up against this dictatorial nitwit, I would be at home in the bosom of my family right now. And so would you. Not in the bosom of my family,” Jim said. “In your bosom. Of your family. You know what I mean.”

Bill was smiling now, if painfully.

“I guess laughter is the best medicine,” Jim said, though neither of them had actually laughed. “I honestly don’t know what we do now to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. Maybe it’s a lost cause now. Or maybe just being here, as I said when we began here, is the most powerful thing we can do.

“Do you think,” Jim suddenly asked, “he really finally arrested ‘The Crooked One?’ I think if he’s arrested you, he’s probably arrested her. She may right now be doing the greatest service to her country that she has ever done, just by showing the entire nation what a dictator he really is. You think she’s in jail now?”

“I don’t know,” Bill said, honestly.

“I guess if he did arrest her, that would make me a footnote to a historic occasion, if being in the same cell with you hasn’t done that already,” Jim said.

There was a sudden metallic noise of the door being unlocked. Jim climbed back onto the top bunk. The door opened again, and the Attorney General could be seen standing between two guards.

“Hello, Bill,” he said.

© 2020 Nolan O’Brian