I assume you've heard about or even actually heard the statement this morning by retiring special counsel Robert Mueller. If not, here's a transcript of it and here's what seems to me like a pretty fair analysis of it by Andrew Prokop.
Mr. Mueller clearly wants his report to be his final word on the matter and to not testify or participate in any way in whatever results from that report. The problems of course are…
- Much in the report has been redacted by an Attorney General who behaves like he wouldn't act if Trump really did shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. Also, the A.G. controls access to the supporting evidence that Mueller's team amassed. So Congress is expected to act on the report without all of the report.
- We live in an era of Total Spin; where Mueller can write that his report "does not exonerate" Trump and then Trump and his aides can say, "See? He exonerated Trump" and then Trump's supporters, including the Republican Senate, can proceed as if that's what it said and insist the matter is over.
So what's going to happen here? It feels like the Democrats need to launch an impeachment inquiry and hold hearings…but not actually get to the point of voting to impeach and hand it over to the Senate for a trial. Mitch McConnell has pretty much said that if they got such a vote at 2 PM, at 2:01, no matter what was in it, they'd vote "Not Guilty" and rush to the microphones to declare that now that that nonsense is over, there can be no further investigations or prosecutions over anything the Trump Administration does.
Is Trump going to be the first sitting U.S. President to run for re-election while he is the subject of a Congressional Impeachment Inquiry? That would be fun.
And isn't it just what ol' Mitch would have done if they could have with Obama? Kevin Drum wrote a good piece on McConnell. Here's an excerpt…
McConnell has practically built his entire career on hypocrisy, and he's never really tried to hide it. He just shrugs, says what he needs to say, and moves on. I don't think he really expects or cares if anyone takes him seriously, but treats public explanations as mere tedious parts of his job. In reality, he believes that whoever's in power should do whatever they can to get their way, and it's naive to think there are any other considerations. He doesn't need anyone's defense on this score.
So here's my question: A key point of the Mueller Report is that he and his team concluded that they could not charge a sitting President with a crime. There are experts who disagree but that's what Mueller concluded. It is not so much a formal law and it is a Justice Department policy.
But didn't Leon Jaworski name sitting president Richard Nixon an "unindicted co-conspirator" in some of the crimes of Watergate? And when Ken Starr filed his report on sitting president Bill Clinton, didn't he go a lot farther than just saying "We're not allowed to decide"? Do these guidelines say they only apply to Republican sitting presidents?