The longer the Democrats obsess over the Mueller report and the possibility of obstruction, the bigger hole they dig for themselves.
The reason is simple. The average American — what Groucho Marx used to call the Barber in Peru (Indiana) — not the army of Beltway lawyers, will scratch his/her head about why someone should be charged with obstructing justice for a crime he did not commit and did not even occur (i. e. collusion with Russia).
Yes, they understand there are legal niceties, but the bottom line remains. And those same middle American “Peruvians” realize — how could they not — that Donald Trump was under unprecedented assault from the media and Democrats from well before he first sat down behind the desk in the Oval Office. They further are completely familiar with Trump’s personality, his thin skin, his outspokenness, and are able to see him as a man responding emotionally — sometimes to his own detriment — to those almost entirely unjustified accusations. Most people will sympathize or at minimum be able to understand this as a defensible human reaction rather than obstruction of justice in a legal sense.
This is why House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler and his cohorts are acting essentially as unpaid press agents for the president by keeping the Russia probe front and center and consequently paying less attention to issues that actually affect people’s lives.
Even worse, by continuing their Trump/Russia obsession Democrats will only be calling more attention to the forthcoming Inspector General’s report on the genesis of the investigation that is almost certain to point fingers in directions that will make them and their media friends uncomfortable. The potential for destroyed reputations at the least and incarcerations at the most is significant. Firings have already taken place.
Whether they know it or not, the issue of the provenance of the Russia probe has already superseded the Mueller report because, although embarrassing at times, nothing in the report appears to be particularly new given the years of cable news coverage. Besides the well-known questions surrounding the FBI’s reliance on the seditious Steele dossier and the attendant who, what, why, when and where of how the probe actually began, another problem surfaces sub rosa from the report. Just when exactly did the special counsel realize there was no collusion and why did he continue the investigation for so long after that? The probe may have gone on as many as twenty months beyond that point and its supposed purpose.
Republicans ought to put that question at the top when Mueller is brought in to testify next month. Properly formulated, such questions could be quite revealing. If it becomes clear, as seems likely, that this probe was prolonged for political purposes, that and the controversy around the Steele dossier make this whole affair the most extreme example of Department of Justice and FBI malfeasance in our history, indeed an attempted soft coup.
That you may not like Trump or his personal style is no excuse whatsoever for this behavior. Yes, he’s a hot head who insults people (sometimes with good reason). Does that exonerate in the slightest those who used high government positions to undermine, even eliminate, his presidency by illegal methods before and after he was elected? Do we live in the USSR circa 1934?
The best analysis of how this excessive and obsessive behavior developed comes not from politicians or pundits but from novelist Bret Easton Ellis in his new book. Ellis was referring to his knee-jerk Hollywood friends, but he could just as well have been talking about Peter Strzok or Andrew McCabe and a whole host of others, including slimy media lackeys who think nothing of perpetrating lies to bring down a president. Via the Washington Times:
When he [Ellis] heard people using words like “Hitlerian” and “apocalypse,” he writes, he’d “stare at them while a tiny voice in the back of my head started sighing, You are the biggest fucking baby I’ve ever fucking heard in my entire fucking life and please you’ve got to fucking calm the fuck down — I get it, I get it, you don’t like fucking Trump but for fuck’s sake enough already for fuck’s sake.”
Sounds like he’s describing Schiff and Nadler, doesn’t it?
Roger L. Simon – co-founder and CEO Emeritus of PJ Media – is an award-winning novelist and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter.
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