Finding our spines
by Tom Sullivan
After a long Friday evening of waiting for Robert Mueller to drop his anticipated sentencing memo on Paul Manafort, even the estimable Marcy Wheeler threw in the towel.
GNight folks. I have a meeting in the AM.
We know Paulie is a very bad dude. Don't need a memo for that.— emptywheel (@emptywheel) February 23, 2019
We have spent 21 months anticipating release of the Mueller Investigation’s findings, still due to drop. Some of that waiting is strategic. Needing a Democratic majority in the U.S. House to wield investigative powers, for example. Or to maximize the chances of ending this administration at one term, waiting to act until we see the whites of his eye sockets.
Dahlia Lithwick highlights the failure inherent in our “waiting for Mueller” before taking action to stop the sitting president. Indeed, we have seen a string of former administration officials content to enable this administration while working for the White House suddenly grow spines once it is time to write tell-all books and hit the talk-show circuit.
“The prevailing ethos seems to be that so long as there is somebody else out there who is capable of Doing Something, the rest of us are free to desist,” Lithwick writes. “And for the most part, the person deemed to be Doing Something is Robert Mueller.”
Diagram: Andrew Witherspoon/Axios.
It is not as if Mueller is going to tell us (in general terms anyway) something we do not already know about Donald Trump and his 40 Thieves. This is an administration awash in scandal and led by a crime family. In addition to the guilty pleas and indictments Mueller has already secured, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. are at risk of indictment. The Trump Organization itself is under investigation by the state of New York and federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York.
Sure, we anticipate reading all the gory details that still remain hidden. But, Lithwick cautions, what has enabled the Trump administration to remain operating at “levels of corruption, conflict of interest, and untruth” without parallel, and at peril to the republic, is our sense that so long as Mueller is doing his part, we do not have to do ours:
This very human hope that Mueller will package up the case for legal action is perhaps most troubling because Mueller’s report won’t be an action plan; it will be a set of facts that then need to be acted upon. But as the series of lawsuits filed to question the constitutionality of the president’s patently pretextual declaration of a national emergency at the border make clear, each of the two remaining branches of government with constitutional obligations to act as checks on an out-of-control president may themselves continue to follow the script they’ve relied on throughout this presidency—and instead opt to avail themselves of their constitutional prerogative to do absolutely nothing. A Republican-controlled Senate may remain supine. A Supreme Court may issue abstract rulings about executive power.
We want Mueller to be both the guy who knows everything and the guy who does everything. It obviates anyone else from needing to know what we already know and do what needs doing. But going into the next few fateful days, my sense is that we might want to stop investing too much hope in great men, and superheroes, and saviors. Instead, we should remember that it is our job to insist that we, and our public officials, must be the Muellers we hope to see in the world.
To paraphrase Marcy, we know Donny is a very bad dude. Don’t need a report for that. We just need spines for doing something about it.