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Whether he's speaker or not, Jim Jordan is another beneficiary of the GOP disinformation machine [1]

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Date: 2023-10-17  

As he alternately cajoles and threatens his Republican colleagues in his (now likely quixotic) quest to become third in line for the U.S. presidency, the career of Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, whom Media Matters aptly characterizes as “Fox News’ Man in Congress,” represents a natural culmination of sorts. He is, in fact, a textbook beneficiary of a Republican disinformation machine that reflexively minimizes and obfuscates the often staggering moral bankruptcy of its subjects in the pursuit of raw political expedience.

The unflattering details of Jordan’s experience as an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University in the late 1980s and early ‘90s have resurfaced as his accustomed role as a petulant, perpetually wounded, grievance-spewing Republican House bomb-thrower gives way to the prospect that he might actually have a much more significant impact on the lives of ordinary Americans. But whether Jordan becomes speaker or not, he, his fellow Republicans, and the Republican media establishment who have enabled his advancement are long overdue for a full accounting and reckoning for everything they’ve been so eager to overlook.

RELATED STORY: Prominent Republicans thought Jordan was a shoo-in for speaker

Put briefly, several former wrestlers at Ohio State have publicly accused Jordan of essentially turning a blind eye to their complaints about now-deceased former “team doctor” Richard Strauss. An independent 2019 investigation by Perkins Coie LLP determined that “Doc” Strauss likely molested and fondled at least 177 students during his tenure. Strauss committed suicide in 2005, and the university initially paid out a $40.9 million settlement to 162 survivors of the alleged abuse in 2020. As explained by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, those settlement payouts have since grown to about $60 million in response to the claims of some 300 former students.

As CNN’s Curt Devine, Drew Griffin, and Majlie de Puy Kamp reported in 2020, the Perkins Coie investigation found that 22 coaches at OSU “were aware of or had heard complaints” about Strauss’ behavior. Those coaches are not named in the report, but witnesses and victims assert that Jordan was among them. As Marshall explains:

According to numerous witnesses, Strauss’s abuse was common knowledge among the wrestlers and coaches. Numerous former wrestlers not only say Jordan “must have known,” they say they discussed it with him at the time. As one wrestler identified only as John Doe in an ongoing lawsuit put it: “None of us used the words ‘sexual abuse’ when we talked about what Doc Strauss was doing to us, we just knew it was weird and Jimmy knew about it because we talked about it all the time in the locker room, at practices, everywhere.”

As this abuse scandal has metastasized over the past five years, Jordan has repeatedly denied knowing anything about Strauss’ sordid behavior (the details of the abuse are convincingly set forth in the report, for anyone who is interested). However, the evidence that he did know about it and did nothing meaningful to effectively report it or stop it is, as Marshall reports, fairly overwhelming. Jordan had already been in office for eleven years in 2018 when the extent of the scandal became public knowledge, but his fellow Republicans have (up to the present day) largely ignored the implications of his involvement. Instead, they have mostly leaped to defend Jordan. As Marshall writes:

For a few days and weeks in 2018 it really seemed like Jordan’s political career might be over. It was touch and go. Eventually Jordan weathered the storm. But it wasn’t because he made a good case, particularly. It was more that his Republican colleagues simply decided it didn’t matter. He clearly wasn’t going to resign. So whatever. It was what it was. The context is important. At the time, Jordan was just another House GOP crazy, someone most voters barely knew about it. As a matter of national politics it just didn’t matter that much. And that’s basically where the story has rested for the last five years — a punch line for Democrats on social media but not a lot more.

Marshall makes the point that Jordan’s ongoing effort to obtain the speakership—if it succeeds—will likely inspire a more fulsome examination by the media into his conduct during his experience at Ohio State, and that is certainly true. But it is also important—and perhaps just as important—to acknowledge the tactics of the right-wing media and its surrogates, as well as those of Jordan himself, to circumvent, explain away, or (worse) disparage the accusations of his involvement.

As reported by The New York Times’ Catie Edmondson in 2018, just as the nature and gravity of the scandal broke into the public sphere, Jordan himself attributed the timing of its release to an amorphous “deep state” conspiracy. For his first detailed public response to the allegations he chose, unsurprisingly, to appear on Fox News, which provided him a platform to disparage his accusers. As Edmondson reported in July 2018:

Mr. Jordan, a 54-year-old congressman in his sixth term, was defiant Friday night on Fox News, in his first extended response to the emerging charges. He disparaged some of the former college wrestlers who have come forward to say he knew of allegations that the team doctor, Richard H. Strauss, had fondled them. He said he could not explain why other more friendly wrestlers had leveled similar charges. ... When the show’s host, Bret Baier, read a quotation by a former Ohio State wrestler and Ultimate Fighting Championship star, Mark Coleman, that Mr. Jordan would have to have dementia to have forgotten what happened, the congressman offered little explanation. “I feel sorry for him,” he said of Mr. Coleman. “It’s just not accurate.” Instead, Mr. Jordan continued to fan conspiracy theories connecting the emergence of the charges to his aggressive questioning last month of Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, the man many Trump supporters hold responsible for the Russia investigation.

Following the same playbook that Donald Trump utilized to convince his adherents that an invisible liberal plot lay at the root of the accusations against him, Jordan repeatedly questioned—without evidence—the timing of the allegations, which coincided with the elevation of Jordan as one of the chief pro-Trump apparatchiks in the Republican House. In this he was aided by Trump himself, who declared at the time, as Edmondson reports, that he believed Jordan to be “100 percent” truthful. Jordan, who vociferously supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, was doubtlessly grateful for Trump’s backing. For his part, Trump rewarded Jordan’s support of those efforts with a Medal of Freedom, bestowed less than two weeks before Trump finally vacated the White House.

Likewise, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, currently under indictment in Georgia for his efforts to overturn the election, along with other Republicans in the so-called “Freedom Caucus” which Jordan chaired, had immediately rushed to Jordan’s defense when the allegations broke. As reported by Rachael Bade and John Bresnahan, writing for Politico in 2018, Meadows’ supportive language was identical to Trump’s:

“I 100 percent support Jim Jordan. He is a man of integrity and honor, and always fights for the underdog,” House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) told reporters Tuesday night. “He was an assistant coach … one of many coaches. And to suggest this was some how Jim Jordan’s fault? That’s just not accurate.”

Significantly, as a 2019 report by Edmondson for the New York Times details, Dunyasha Yetts, one of the wrestlers who had confirmed Jordan’s knowledge of Strauss’ behavior, reported incidents where Jordan (along with the former OSU wrestling head coach Russ Hellickson) had responded to his complaints by speaking with Strauss about the alleged abuse. As Edmondson notes, according to Yetts’ account, after Hellickson and Jordan had met privately with Strauss, Hellickson advised Yetts that they had “taken care of the situation.” (For his part, Hellickson denies ever talking to Jordan about Strauss’ behavior, while text messages obtained by NBC News in 2018 suggested he tried to persuade some of the witnesses to recant their statements about Jordan.) However, according to Yetts, Strauss’ sexual abuse continued unabated. A year later, after an incident in which Strauss inexplicably pulled down Yetts’ shorts (allegedly to treat a thumb injury), Yetts complained again, but his complaints were allegedly dismissed by Jordan:

“He just kind of blew it off, he was like, ‘Are you serious?’” Mr. Yetts said. “He said, ‘I would kill him if he tried to do that to me,’ and walked away.” That episode was first corroborated to NBC News, then to The New York Times by Shawn Dailey, who wrestled on the team with Mr. Yetts. A third wrestler on the team who was in the locker room during the thumb episode confirmed that Mr. Jordan dismissed Mr. Yetts’s comments.

The statements by Yetts and others suggest that Jordan knew about Strauss’ proclivities but either discounted them or (at best) didn’t take them seriously enough to do anything meaningful to hold Strauss accountable, all of which directly contradicts Jordan’s oft-repeated assertions that he knew nothing—absolutely nothing—about Strauss’ abuse.

Jordan has received substantial help in his efforts to deflect the issue from the right-wing media establishment. The primary strategy appears to have been to attack the witnesses. Edmondson’s initial report on the scandal in 2018 cites efforts by conservative media to discredit Jordan’s accusers; the right-wing Daily Caller, for example, highlighted the fact that Yetts had since been convicted of a fraud scheme. However, that conviction had no apparent connection to the allegations about Jordan’s knowledge of sexual abuse at OSU. In the same article, the Caller went after another accuser, Mike DiSabato, accusing DiSabato of past (alleged) dishonest behavior, and implying that his accusations against Jordan were also dishonest, motivated by personal animosity toward the university. The reflexive response appears to have been to find ways disbelieve or discredit the accusers, rather than examine or consider their accounts.

As Media Matters’ Matt Gertz reports, Fox News, the most visible mouthpiece for the Republican party, also lent its wholehearted efforts to neutralizing the allegations against Jordan:

Jordan found refuge from the burgeoning firestorm from his House Republican colleagues, from Trump — and from right-wing outlets like Fox. Like other scandal-plagued members of his party, he defended himself and attacked his critics through multiple interviews on the right-wing network. “Congressman Jordan, welcome to the club, if you support Donald Trump, you had to know, the lies, the smears against you are obviously a political attack,” Hannity told him during one such appearance. “I'm sorry you and your family have to go through that.”

But it is Jordan’s own efforts to insulate himself that are perhaps the most telling. His campaign hired the staunchly right-wing public relations firm Shirley and Banister, paying them about $95,000 for their efforts in 2018. Using tactics reminiscent of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ efforts to enlist witnesses to rebut allegations of his sexual harassment toward Anita Hill, the firm enlisted witnesses from OSU who declared their support for Jordan’s character. They said they were unaware of any knowledge on Jordan’s part of Strauss’ behavior, again attempting to establish Jordan’s lack of knowledge without addressing the reality that Strauss’ behavior was, by most accounts, ubiquitous.

Assuming Jordan advances to the speakership, his actions and inactions at Ohio State will almost certainly receive far closer examination than he was afforded as simply one of the more obnoxious Republicans riding Trump’s coattails into the public spotlight. But it is worth noting that even as Jordan solicited votes for the speaker’s position, his Republican supporters such as South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace blithely claimed they, much like the witnesses procured by Jordan’s P.R. allies, had no knowledge of the OSU allegations. As Marshall observes:

Needless to say it’s all going to be a lot different if and when (and it seems like definitely when) Jordan becomes Speaker. He knew about the abuse. He did nothing. But the running wound is that he’s been lying about it and obviously lying about it for five years. Everyone knows he’s lying about it. ... There’s also the very real chance news organizations will start to put real muscle behind their investigation and turn up new incriminating facts. But new facts aren’t really necessary. There are few things more debilitating than a national political leader caught in a lie about a toxic or combustible topic and repeating it over and over. It doesn’t go away. Because everyone knows the person is lying. They have to lie about it again each time they’re asked. It invites more and more digging.

Although Jordan may be a familiar face on Fox News thanks to his pursuit of unfounded, vitriolic attacks on President Biden, up to this point the majority of the American public has heard little information about what occurred at Ohio State under his watch. Jordan was able to parlay his corrosive behavior to the verge of the speakership wholly through the efforts of the Republican Party and a right-wing media apparatus that found it more expedient to unreservedly support Jordan than to acknowledge or credit the actual victims of Strauss’ heinous abuse who have called out Jordan’s callous disregard and lies. For that reason alone, Democrats should approach Jordan’s actions at Ohio State with the same degree of forbearance he and the right-wing media have displayed in attacking President Biden’s son: exactly none.

RELATED STORY: With Jordan poised to fail, more talk of increasing McHenry's temporary speaker powers

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