• After Mueller, Trump Critics Worry: Maybe There's No Scandal

    From Leroy N. Soetoro@21:1/5 to All on Mon May 22 17:38:53 2017
    XPost: alt.california, alt.politics.org.fbi, sac.politics
    XPost: alt.politics.obama, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh

    https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/05/18/after-mueller-trump- critics-worry-maybe-theres-no-scandal/

    Eli Lake is right: The DOJ’s appointment of widely-respected former
    prosecutor Robert Mueller to lead the special inquiry into the Trump
    campaign’s potential collusion with Russia is a reprieve for a Trump Administration in crisis—a reprieve that it will almost certainly
    squander, but a reprieve nonetheless.

    How do we know? Because the responses from Trump’s most dogged critics on
    the Russia question betray a kind of anxiety about the Mueller
    appointment—an anxiety that the no-nonsense law enforcement wise man will
    lower the temperature in Washington without actually uncovering enough
    damaging material to bring down the President.

    Take, for example, Josh Marshall declaring that while he has confidence in Mueller to identify and expose any criminal activities undertaken by Trump
    or his associates, he won’t be able to prosecute the real Trump-Russia wrongdoing: a labyrinthian “conspiracy” which may not even involve any
    illegal behavior.

    It is critical to understand that the most important details we need to
    know about the Russian disruption campaign and the Trump campaign’s
    possible collusion with it may not be crimes. Indeed, I would say that the crimes we’re likely to discover will likely be incidental or secondary to
    the broader actions and activities we’re trying to uncover. Just hypothetically, what if Russia had a disruption campaign, Trump campaign officials gave winks and nods to nudge it forward but violated no laws?

    That’s hard to figure but by no means impossible. (Our criminal laws are
    not really designed for this set of facts.) The simple point is that the
    most important ‘bad acts’ may well not be crimes. That means not only is
    no one punished but far, far more important, we would never know what
    happened.

    And here’s David Frum in the Atlantic making a similar objection:

    The special counsel will investigate whether people in the Trump campaign violated any laws when they gleefully leveraged the fruits of Russian
    espionage to advance their campaign.

    By contrast, what happened in plain sight—cheering rather than condemning
    a Russian attack on American democracy—will be treated as a non-issue,
    because it was not criminal, merely anti-democratic and disloyal.

    Since the summer before the election, Trump’s critics have been suggesting
    or sometimes stating outright that Russia is involved with a criminal conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of Trump’s inner circle. But
    now that an unimpeachable bulldog prosecutor has been named to probe these
    very allegations, the critics seem to be trying to move the goalposts,
    saying that the real problem isn’t criminality, but the sleaze and
    outlandish behavior of the Trump campaign more generally—behavior that was already obvious to voters when they went to the polls in 2016, and will be
    even more obvious when they go to the polls in 2018.

    Trump’s outrageous and indefensible conduct around the Russia
    investigation—his firing of Comey to attempt to quash the inquiry, along
    with the subsequent allegations that he demanded Comey’s loyalty early on
    and leaned on him to drop the investigation of Mike Flynn—cries out for a special counsel, and Mueller, by all accounts, is a consummate choice. Any wrongdoing related to the Trump campaign, from the President himself to bottom-feeders like Carter Page, should be prosecuted to the fullest
    extent of the law.

    But the Trump-Russia hounds now seem to be realizing the limits of the
    scandal they have been pursuing—yes, maybe someone like Manafort will go
    down for money-laundering, and yes, Trump had shady deals with Russian
    banks as a real estate tycoon in the 1990s. But this is simply not as big
    of a scandal as they would like it to be.

    Mueller seems well-equipped to do what the country sorely needs right now: Determine if there was criminal collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and hold any wrongdoers accountable. He is not, however, equipped
    to do what Trump’s most relentless critics seem to want: Launch a wide-
    ranging and essentially political investigation into Donald Trump and his associates with the aim not of bringing the matter to a resolution, but of creating a steady stream of media frenzies that paralyzes an
    administration they loathe.


    --
    Donald J. Trump, 304 electoral votes to 227, defeated compulsive liar in
    denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
    parade of the democrat party has run out of gas.

    Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for ending the disaster of the Obama presidency.

    Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
    The World According To Garp.

    ObamaCare is a total 100% failure and no lie that can be put forth by its supporters can dispute that.

    Obama jobs, the result of ObamaCare. 12-15 working hours a week at minimum wage, no benefits and the primary revenue stream for ObamaCare. It can't
    be funded with money people don't have, yet liberals lie about how great
    it is.

    Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in the eight
    years he was in office, and sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood queer
    liberal democrat donors.

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