It’s all one scandal
by digby
Will Bunch has a great column today discussing the FOA document dump that Buzzfeed and CNN obtained over the week-end filling out some of the details underlying the Mueller Report. And, as those of you who read my stuff already know, I agree with this conclusion:
The disclosures also bring into much sharper focus something that’s critical for understanding America’s current plight: The so-called Trump-Russia scandal — in which the president falsely claimed “total exoneration” after Mueller’s muddled two-year probe — and the so-called Ukraine scandal which now imperils the White House is really just one giant scandal. It’s a power-hungry demagogue seeking the ego boost and the enriching “brand-building” potential of the American presidency having no moral qualms about trying to work with criminals (2016) or abusing the power of his office (2019) to get what he wanted, even relying on the same shady cast of characters in both occasions.
Saturday’s news about the Mueller memos didn’t cause a huge stir — most on social media were more taken by the schadenfreude of seeing Trump’s narcissistic 2019 World Approval-Seeking Tour draw more boos in Madison Square Garden — yet it tells us three very important things. First — and not to be forgotten — is the role of BuzzFeed journalist Jason Leopold as well as CNN in relentlessly pushing to gain this information through our Freedom of Information laws. In a time when the White House has proclaimed journalists as “the enemy of the people,” Leopold and CNN remind us that the First Amendment is more vital and important than ever.
But here’s a more discouraging takeaway — the powerful suggestion that the Mueller investigation that dominated the news for the better part of two years was never what the millions of Americans who believed in the battle-tested former FBI chief, a functioning justice system, and the truth actually thought it was. Saturday’s revealing memos were just the latest and strongest hint that an investigation upon which too many pinned too much hope — from “Mueller Time” T-shirts to that “Hon, Mueller’s got this. Come to bed” cartoon in the New Yorker — was in fact the gaslighting of America on a massive scale, even for the Trump era.
Sorry, hon — Mueller didn’t get this.
It’s hard to know how much of this is the fault of Mueller, the taciturn Vietnam War hero who may not have temperamentally been up to the job of grasping such a vast threat to American democracy under the best of circumstances. And these clearly were not the best of circumstances. When Mueller finally testified in public before Congress and appeared hesitant and hazy about his own investigation, it seemed clear that a probe conducted strictly behind closed doors for two years may not have been what people thought it was.
There were, in hindsight, early clues. Why were Trump figures — including Gates, Flynn and others — given relatively sweet deals to plead guilty and provide information, when that information didn’t bring consequences for the president and other higher-ups around him? A warning flag was Team Mueller’s surprisingly public denial of a BuzzFeed article about Trump pressure on Cohen to mislead Congress, when Saturday’s memos suggest there was Trump pressure on Cohen to mislead Congress? Why was Mueller so willing to punt the substantial evidence on obstruction of justice to Congress, ducking any forceful recommendation on what to do with it?
Maybe that’s because, in the end, a probe that was 50 percent about obstruction of justice was thwarted by … obstruction of justice. Some of that likely was the collective impact of the 10 documented efforts to obstruct justice that are outlined in the Mueller report — from the firing of FBI chief James Comey to attempts to oust Mueller himself and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was later removed. We don’t yet know how these reflect other closed-door pressures placed upon the Mueller probe.
But there is no doubt that the knobs of gaslighting were switched to “high” when new Attorney General William Barr — also known as Trump’s Roy Cohn — arrived at the Justice Department in February. Under Barr’s thumb, Mueller appeared newly pressed to quickly wrap things up. The end of his investigation came with a weeks-long delay before his actual report — a vacuum that was filled with Barr’s Trump-serving four-page memo with his own conclusions that there was no obstruction of justice and no collusion with Russia. Barr even staged a press conference hours ahead of the actual report with misleading spin on what was in it.
In the end — as the memos dropped on Saturday reveal — the Mueller report was not the definitive word on what happened with Trump, Russia and the tainted 2016 election. Rather, it was a series of not-always-great prosecutorial decisions about what to leave in and what to leave out, and what conclusions to make of it all — reached by an iconic-but-fading prosecutor no longer on top of his game, under relentless pressure from a justice apparatus that has been politicized and warped by the president and his Cohn-like hatchet man.
What’s telling is that Mueller’s impotent testimony before Congress came just one day before Trump’s extortionist phone call with Ukraine’s Zelensky — suggesting the presidential beatdown on the Mueller probe had inspired the delusion that he was now untouchable. The next few months on Capitol Hill will prove whether Trump was actually right — and if he was right, you can kiss goodbye to the United States of America.
Interestingly, the new Mueller info came just a day after an interview in which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seemed to confound expectations that she plans to limit the Trump impeachment probe to Ukraine and nothing more.
“What we’re talking about now is taking us into a whole other class of objection to what the president has done. And there may be other — there were 11 obstruction of justice provisions in the Mueller report. Perhaps some of them will be part of this,” Pelosi told Bloomberg Television. “But again, that will be part of the inquiry, to see where we go.”
This is a tough call, because every day that Donald Trump remains in the Oval Office is a danger to America and the world. But it’s increasingly clear that the speediest narrow impeachment — one confined solely to his Ukraine dealings while ignoring the naked corruption of obstructing the Mueller probe and his efforts to become president through lawbreaking, either through stolen emails or hush money, and then use his office to line his own pockets — would be a terrible mistake.
That’s because — as noted earlier — the real scandal of Trump’s presidency is his amoral and narcissistic willingness to do any and all things that are terrible for the country but are good for his own personal power and ambition. The symptoms of that corrupt disease played out on a global canvas from Kyiv to Trump’s golf resort in Scotland to the corridors of the Justice Department. If we don’t make it clear that no president is above the law — all of the laws, including obstruction of justice and the Emoluments Clause — then we will only be setting the stage for a future president who will be even more dangerous than Donald Trump.
This is one scandal. It’s about Trump’s overwhelming self-dealing and corruption as a candidate and president. This is clearly how he operates.
The polls show that plenty of people think this is a waste of time because we have an election coming. It is not. There is a chance that Trump can be re-elected. It is vitally important that the Democrats do everything in their power to show the American people what a criminal he is before that happens. They must take his criminality seriously and try to expose it and convince the public of its importance. The Republicans are probably going to do everything they can to protect him. Thay too must be revealed to the public.
.