DOJ opens Lewandowski inquiry with a mandatory trust fall
The Justice Department will not read the referral on Trump ally Corey Lewandowski until the room names its feelings.
On Thursday a clerk spent the morning hunting a tissue box for a hallway outside the Justice Department. The Corey Lewandowski inquiry had been told to start with a check-in, and check-ins leak.
The department has recast the probe as a three-session holding circle between Justice and Homeland Security, two offices it now calls wounded partners. No one may open the referral until each person has named a feeling about power, and meant it.
Outlets including ABC News, The New York Times and Fox News have reported that the Justice Department is examining Lewandowski after Homeland Security investigators sent a criminal referral. Dr. Maren Solis, the inquiry's feelings lead, does not dispute that reporting. She disputes the speed. In her account the referral is real, the circle is the method, and method is how a department shows it has done the inner work.
"We are not declining the work," said Solis. "We are asking the work to arrive regulated, which means calm enough to listen."
Solis said the word criminal had landed in the body, her term for a hard feeling. Session one will be an apology to accountability for having rushed it. Session two will ask what the hallway needs.
Pete Okonkwo, sent over from Homeland Security, called the wait a form of care. He put it this way.
A referral is a story about harm. Stories about harm deserve a soft entry.
If he treats the circle as optional
If Lewandowski declines the circle, the lawyers will not chase him with paper. Three empty chairs will stand for his boundary. Solis will file that absence as a complete record.
An allies desk three doors down sent muffins and a warning not to center the ally. The muffins arrived warm. The warning was read aloud, then thanked.
No one in the circle has described a specific act, because naming an act would center harm over healing. The folder stays shut. A junior lawyer practiced "I feel curious" at a water cooler until it sounded like a charge.
By late afternoon the tissue box had turned up in a copy room. Someone used the first tissue on the word folder. Solis called that a breakthrough and booked a second Thursday for grief.
