Elizabeth Drew, a journalist who covered Watergate, recently wrote a sleep-inducing New York Times lecture on her moral superiority over a president too boorish to be allowed to complete his constitutional term. It’s representative of what we’ve heard for two years from those who couldn’t abide the results of the 2016 election.
“The president and his allies argue that the country is ‘tired’ of investigations,” Drew sniffed, dismissing those arguments as “sounding very much like Nixon…as if that were the definitive criterion for deciding whether to proceed with a constitutional responsibility” and “Some Democrats continue to fear Mr. Trump…that his skill at…assigning humiliating nicknames…could end in their failure to win an impeachment fight. Some also doubt, with reason, their party’s capacity for handling the matter skillfully.”
Just in case you missed it, Drew placed scare quotes around “tired” to reinforce her disdain for anyone claiming fatigue from two years of fruitless investigations into the president. For a Trump administration that has attempted to prove the president’s innocence by producing more than 1 million pages of documents and partially waiving executive privilege to allow the special counsel broad access to the president’s most privileged conversations, enough is enough.
The president’s openness was rewarded by a steady drip, drip, drip of leaks of information entrusted to the special counsel ending up twisted into the mainstream media’s relentless public relations assault on the president. This is made worse by the fact that Robert Mueller team promptly contradicted a few of the most outrageous lies against the president, leaving an implied endorsement of all the rest.
For nearly two years, we’ve suffered elitist fools cheerleading Mueller’s lawless assault on the rule of law. And for so many months, the president was cautioned that he must endure the unendurable lest the Democrats impeach him (here, here, here, here, here, and here).
As reported by Newsweek, the White House counsel’s decision to allow the special counsel unprecedented access to privileged communication “came with the approval of Trump, whose legal team advised him to go with ‘an open-book strategy’ as the president insisted he had nothing to hide. They reportedly believed this would be the fastest way to wrap up the investigation.”
Only a guilty man would object to an investigation, right? Tell that to Roger Stone, George Papadopoulos, and Michael Flynn, men guilty of nothing until the Mueller process crime machine caught them in its gears.
One commentator claimed that the Trump legal team negotiated a conditional waiver of executive privilege in exchange for giving Mueller access to White House counsel Don McGahn. The deal was that Mueller could talk to McGahn, but the contents would never leave the executive branch, meaning it would not be introduced into Mueller’s final report.
If true, Mueller violated the agreement by including the testimony in the report. But it wouldn’t have mattered, because people familiar with McGahn’s testimony destroyed any chance of preserving any promised confidentiality back in January 2018 by leaking to The New York Times.
Something happened after Mueller report. Warnings of impeachment have lost their power. The president said what millions of Americans were thinking: “Enough!” Cue thunderous applause of Americans in living rooms across America.
“It’s enough…we’re fighting all the subpoenas,” of House Democrats in their investigations, Trump said. “Look, these aren’t like impartial people…They’re trying to win 2020 and the only way they think they can luck-out is by relentlessly attacking me.” But, but, Mr. President, the Democrats might impeach you!
The Democrats have the House. Passing articles of impeachment requires a simple majority, which Democrats can easily muster without a single Republican vote. There’s no burden of proof, and they can do so with a nakedly partisan show of force.
We can be spared further debate in the media whether the Mueller report shows obstruction of justice (it doesn’t). Democrats have the support of 66 percent of their electorate, who ferociously demand that the president be impeached.
So do it. Impeach or shut up. Investigation time is over. We’ve heard all of that talk about the president “obstructing justice,” emoluments, refusing to turn over his tax returns, and now an outright refusal to cooperate in future investigations. There’s no need for further investigation.
Drew said as much, amazingly telling Democrats not to worry about the absence of proof of actual crimes, writing, “It’s of course politically easier to go after a president for having committed a crime — for example, perjury, for which President Bill Clinton was ostensibly impeached.” As I’ve written so frequently before, we’ve all learned the only rule of Trump-era law is that if it helps get Trump, then it must be legal.
Well, Drew, better tell the House Democrats to hurry. Primary season starts in January. After that, voters will have the opportunity to decide whether to first nominate Donald Trump, and then whether to reelect him. If Democrats don’t impeach before then, he will have a mandate to mock and block these investigations.
But there won’t be a trial in the Senate. The Get Trump crowd can’t win a fair fight. They can’t put up the goods when called upon to do so. Proof: how many criminal trials resulted from the army of prosecutors and investigators Mueller deployed? Answer: Just one, for Paul Manafort. And it wasn’t pretty.
Line federal prosecutors who do their talking in the courtroom convict at about a 90 percent rate in trials before a jury. In contrast, the Mueller political hit squad fumbled their only evidentiary trial in front of a sympathetic DC-area jury.
The jury was confused. The prosecutors had a chart that kept track of how their hundreds of exhibits matched to the charges. But the bumbling political hacks forgot to introduce this essential tool to the jury during the trial. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on 10 of the 18 charges prosecutors piled onto Manafort.
By the way, none of the charges had anything to do with President Trump. Unlimited budgets and unlimited manpower cannot overcome the incompetence that attends unlimited ego.
Democrats won’t impeach Trump because then the president would get his day in court in the form of a trial in the Senate, and he would easily win it. So when they threaten to impeach, call the bluff. Here is what you say to anyone berating, bemoaning, or rehashing all of that monotonous carping about why he should be impeached: “Fine, do it. Put up or shut up.”
