And so, no more than ten minutes after I finally publish my first political post on the ol' Patio Boat since Nov. 3, 2017, Bob Mueller hands in his report as Special Counsel and brings his investigation to a close, thus ensuring that nobody will ever read my incredibly long rundown of the 29 or so Democratic Presidential candidates. I reckon that makes this a good time to instead check in on the decline and fall of American democracy with a mind-blowing second blog post in less than a week, this time with a bit of useless speculation about the Mueller Report.
Why the long interregnum since my last political post here? Two reasons really. First, I had a few personal things going on that took my focus away from writing much of anything at all. I may or may not blog about them here some other time, but for a variety of reasons the last year and a half or so left me too tuckered to type.
But the other reason is that we've been through a long, long, long stretch of ... well, much sound and fury, but nothing much that has genuinely advanced the story, such that it is. It isn't that there's been no action at all: there have been plenty of indictments, guilty pleas, convictions, etc. But it's been rather like a long second act in an overstuffed action movie in which you have to wade through an hour of frantic motions and noises on screen before you find out how it's all going to end.
No, I don't yet know how it's all going to end. But we are a good deal closer now than when I last posted about the Trumpocalypse, when Bob Mueller had just delivered his first indictments in the Russian probe. At the time, I thought we were headed inevitably to impeachment. Here's what I thought would happen next:
If I had to bet on the mechanics (that bring us to an impeachment hearing) I'd bet that Sessions gets forced out for repeatedly perjuring himself. That gives Trump an opportunity to appoint a new Attorney General who doesn't have to recuse himself on the Russian issue. The job interview will consist of one question, "Will you fire Bob Mueller?" The first person willing to answer "Yes" to Trump in private and "No" to the Senate confirmation hearing will get the job and pull the trigger. By then the 2018 midterms will be looming and even the shameless Congressional GOP will have to convene impeachment hearings.
--Patio Boat Blog, Nov. 3, 2017, From the Joy of #IndictmentDay to Dr. Hans Zarkov Shouting a Warning over the Rocket Engines
I'd say I was right about some stuff, and wrong about some other stuff.
What I got right: Sessions was forced out and replaced by William Barr, an Attorney General whose job application literally consisted of writing a memo to the Justice Department saying that the President couldn't be investigated for obstruction of justice. Barr's most noteworthy action in his previous stint as Attorney General under George H.W. Bush was to approve the pardon of six individuals under investigation for the Iran-Contra Affair, an investigation that potentially threatened to involve Bush as well.
What I got wrong: even as late as November 2017 it seems terribly naive of me to think that the GOP would ever be shamed into investigating or impeaching Donald J. Trump. The Republican Party has chosen to ride into history as the party of Trumpism. That decision has thus far delivered an election defeat in the 2018 mid-terms that returned the US House to Democratic Party control. We shall see what it brings in 2020.
What did Mueller do? Here's the short version: As @danpfeiffer tweeted Friday: "Trump’s campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, foreign policy advisor, fixer, political strategist and national security advisor have been indicted, convicted, or plead guilty of serious crimes." You can add a dozen or so Russian intelligence agents to that tally, too. On Friday Mueller issued his final report to William Barr, who then issued a letter summarizing the report and saying that the President couldn't be prosecuted for obstruction of justice. That letter also included this quote from the report: "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it does not exonerate him.”
Trump then tweeted that he'd been completely exonerated.
Where are we now? That's where we stand, in the midst of a vast media frenzy of speculation about what it all means and what's in the Mueller Report with Trump and the GOP claiming victory while the Democrats demand the release of the report itself. Meanwhile, outside the Mueller investigation literally dozens of investigations of Trump and his associates proceed, some of them in state court where Trump's ability to issue pardons doesn't apply.
What next? Here's what my half-baked crystal ball sees.
- The Mueller Report will come out, either in pieces or as a wholesale leak or as part of a US House investigation. After it gets out to the public, the same people trying to spin the Barr memo will continue the same spin about what is in the report itself, counting on the repeatedly demonstrated amnesia of the news media to help.
- The facts that do come out will be ghastly. We've all become enured to ghastly facts in the 26 months that Trump has been in office.
- My guess that the the Dems in the US House do not open an impeachment hearing, but for the next 22 months we see a half-dozen ongoing hearings into what Mueller found, as well as the rest of the Trump mess of corruption leavened with incompetence. Now that we're more than halfway to the next election, it begins to make more and more sense to let the voters clean this up.
- And oh yes, the voters will need to clean this up in November 2020.
In the meantime, go find Democratic candidates that you like and support them. Bob Mueller couldn't cure this disaster. It'll be up to all of you reading this to cure it with your votes.
