Mueller Time Again

When Attorney General William Barr - whom everybody keeps calling "Bob Barr," confusing him with Bob Mueller and ironically naming a former Republican congressman from Georgia who supported the impeachment of Bill Clinton - released the Mueller report (with redactions) on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, we found out some interesting facts.  First Trump campaign officials made overtures to Russian nationals, some of whom were believed to be Americans because they contacted them through the Internet. (The Russians pretending to be Americans were sending out anti-Hillary propaganda and operating out of building in  St. Petersburg - St. Petersburg, Russia, not St., Petersburg, Florida.)  Robert Mueller's report offers a caveat that, while there were many contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians while the Kremlin was hacking computers, including that infamous June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump, Jr. and Russians operatives over possible "dirt" on the opposition, there was no agreement of collusion between the two parties.  There was no collusion . . . but only because there's no evidence that Paul Manafort and a Putin operative met at a hotel in Prague or Bratislava or wherever and hashed out a plan to sabotage Hillary Clinton.

"While the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign," Mueller wrote, "the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges. Among other things, the evidence was not sufficient to charge any Campaign official as an unregistered agent of the Russian government or other Russian principal. And our evidence about the June 9, 2016 meeting and WikiLeaks' release of hacked materials was not sufficient to charge a criminal campaign-finance violation."

Trump also tried to have Mueller fired or at least reined in, and he even asked then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to withdraw his recusal.  Sessions may be a bigot, but he's not dishonorable; he refused to listen to Trump.  ("Death before dishonor," as they say down in Sessions' native South.)  Many more White House officials stopped Trump from committing any act that could be perceived as a crime; in instances when they failed to do so, Trump himself didn't commit a criminal act only because he didn't know what the hell he was doing.  Because justice was not obstructed - mainly because Trump himself never actually tried to stop Mueller, preferring that someone stop Mueller for him - Mueller decided there wasn't enough evidence to accuse Trump of obstructing justice, but because of all the obvious examples of how Trump wished to impeded the investigation, that was why he could not exonerate Trump either.

Barr has since declared that Trump has been cleared, twisting the facts to suit Trump's argument while leaving out all of the evidence and the charges pointing in a different direction.  Trump, in fact, figured that the jig was up when Trump, upon hearing the Mueller would investigate Russian interference in the election, said, "Oh, my God.  This is terrible.  This is the end of my Presidency.  I'm f--ked."

This is all bad news . . . for the Democrats.

What???  The intent of the Mueller report is to avoid the issue of accusing Trump of any wrongdoing; rather, it is meant to provide Congress a guide for how to proceed.  He wrote that there should be a process where the evidence is weighed, the charges are made through Congress rather than through an indictment (you apparently can't indict a sitting President), and the accused defends himself.  But with enough cherry-picked conclusions to allow Trump, his supporters, and the whole goddamned Republican Party (one honorable exception: Mitt Romney) to claim exoneration at a time when most Americans don't have the stomach for a Watergate-type investigation, the Democrats have two choices, and either way they could give Trump an advantage in the 2020 elections.  If they investigate Trump in the House and possibly vote on impeachment, it will anger the Republican base and turn off swing voters more interested in health care and living-wage jobs than shenanigans in the White House.  If they don't investigate, they let Trump get away with everything he's done up to now . . . and will do later.

I've been told that the Democrats can focus on the issues for 2020 and still investigate Trump - "walk and chew gum at the same time" - but this is a party that famously blows it when faced with dealing with Republican scandals.  The Iran-contra affair should have been a boon for Democrats in the 1988 presidential election, but it was their third straight loss despite Vice President Bush, who won the Presidency over Michael Dukakis, having had more to do with that scandal than he was willing to admit.  How far back do you want to go?  The Teapot Dome oil scandal that occurred under President Harding and was uncovered after Harding's death in office in 1923 put Republicans in an embarrassing position going into 1924, but they kept the Presidency after the Democrats took 103 ballots at their convention to nominate one John W. Davis, an esteemed diplomat, to oppose President Coolidge, who won a full term.  (To be fair, Coolidge had nothing to do with the Teapot Dome.)  And those scandals were nothing compared to the Trump White House, a scandal in and of itself; the Teapot Dome scandal involved illegal profiteering on government oilfields and Iran-contra was an earnest attempt by President Reagan at détente with the Ayatollah Khomeini gone awry when renegades in his own National Security Council hijacked it to benefit right-wing mercenaries in Central America.

What we have going on now is even more serious than Watergate.  If the Democrats can't figure out how to capitalize on this level of corruption while still promoting a positive agenda for 2020, then they're finished as a party.

Less mentioned but just as important is the finding that the Russians tried (successfully, alas) to sow division, influence voters, and promote chaos and discord in the 2016 presidential election, interfering in what Mueller called a "sweeping and systematic fashion."  Even if Trump had lost, as was expected, Russia would have still divided people enough to make a Hillary Clinton Presidency a nightmare for Hillary herself.  Maybe the Russians weren't involved with WikiLeaks as much or as closely as suspected, and maybe the Democratic National Committee should have gotten a better firewall for their servers,  but even the most die-hard Julian Assange fan or the most ardent Jill Stein voter (again, I voted for Dr. Stein out of a personal dislike for Hillary that goes back long before Russian interference in our elections was an issue) has to admit that Vladimir Putin was up to something.  After all the evidence of Russian malfeasance not involving collusion or obstruction of justice, there's no other conclusion anyone can come to.  

As I believe I said once before on this blog, the twenty-teens have been a disastrous decade for the nation.  It began with Citizens United and is ending with citizens divided, with all sorts of social, political and cultural failures in between.  And no one has been able to get away with so much and profit over the polarization of Americans than Donald J. Trump.  How his Presidency unfolds and what ultimately happens with it could tear this country up eve n more.  Or it could be a catharsis preceding a rebirth and renewal of America.  On this Holy Saturday, I'm not optimistic of the latter possible outcome coming to pass.