Lo and behold, when the Mueller report finally emerged, it completely cleared the Trump campaign of coordinating or conspiring with Russia (let’s face it, if the Mueller team couldn’t find any “collusion” after looking for about two years, there probably wasn’t any to find). That should have been the end of it, and might have been, except the Mueller report also discussed “obstruction of justice” charges. Now the facts that Mr. Mueller served his full term as Special Counsel and that his report was issued, indicates that the President did not obstruct his report. The fact that a report was issued is pretty good evidence that the subject of the report did not keep it from seeing the light of day. Mr. Mueller, for reasons that are baffling, discussed obstruction by saying that he could not make a determination as to whether the President’s conduct was obstructive; the report did not exonerate him nor did it charge him. The President’s enemies are making a big deal of the fact that the report did not “exonerate” him, but when has such a report ever “exonerated” anyone? That is not how such investigations work. Either the investigator(who had the power to indict and charge) finds enough evidence to bring a charge, or he does not. If he does find it, he makes the charge; if he doesn’t, he does not charge – but his purpose is not to “exonerate” but to investigate for the purpose of charging whatever crimes are discovered. The fact that Mr. Mueller neither charged nor indicted should be enough to convince anyone, not that Mr. Trump is “a good guy,” or “clean,” or “exonerated,” or “innocent,” but only that he was not charged. The typical language is that “there was no evidence” or “we were unable to make a charge,” not, “he is innocent.” There is a school of thought that says that Mr. Mueller was constrained by a legal opinion that a sitting president cannot be charged with obstruction of justice and therefore he explicitly left it up to Congress to do so – but we think what Mr. Mueller said was that Congress has the power to rewrite the laws to cover such a contingency that could arise in the future; not that he was kicking this specific case to Congress for it to look into the specifics of the charge against this president.
But the Democrats won’t let loose of this particular lamb chop, and now they are demanding that Don McGahn, once the President’s Counsel, testify. This the President did not allow, citing executive privilege, thus prompting more demands for his impeachment. The President is well within his rights in this instance, just as other presidents (of both parties) have invoked executive privilege concerning such communications. The fact that Mr. McGahn was interviewed by the Mueller team for about thirty hours, answering all their questions, should establish that the Democrats are not looking for facts but for embarrassment, and are not seeking truth but to weaken the President. It is noteworthy that Mr. Mueller himself does not want to testify before the House committee either, unless his testimony can be limited to his report itself.
By the same token they demand Mr. Trump’s tax returns, which he refuses to release (and has the right to refuse to release); even though he has complied with all federal financial disclosure laws, and even though the information in his financial disclosure is far more detailed and revealing that his tax return. Furthermore, we wonder why the President hasn’t pointed out that the IRS received his tax returns annually for, well, for as long as he has been an adult, and it is highly unlikely that Congress has the means to find fraud or malfeasance where the IRS found none; but they could, we suppose, find something potentially embarrassing, or hypocritical, or politically damaging.
Perhaps the best solution to this situation would be for the Republicans in Congress to note that there will likely come a time in which they have the majority but the Democrats have the Presidency (a situation that prevailed for most of the Clinton and Obama presidencies), and in that case they will then conduct an investigation into whoever that president may be at the time, and will do so with commensurate vigor and intensity and with equal disregard for the facts and for the law as the present House investigation of President Trump. That should bring this to a pretty quick halt. Another thing that might is that Attorney General Barr has authorized an investigation into the origins of the FBI investigation into “Trump and Russia” that occurred during the Obama administration. Now, THERE’S an investigation that might actually unearth some tasty tidbits. We’ll close with a quote from Carl Sandburg, and we hope the Democrats are listening for it perfectly captures their condition and state of mind: “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.” They are sure doing a lot of pounding and yelling, aren’t they?