Like it or not, Donald Trump is the president of the United States. That doesn’t put him above the law but it does give him the right to do some pretty appalling things. Among them is the right to ask for an inquiry into how his 2016 campaign came to be the subject of a counterintelligence investigation. If conducted correctly, there isn’t anything illegal about doing this. It’s not unreasonable to look at Ukraine either, as they had the same incentive to see Trump defeated as Russia had to see him elected.
In this limited respect, I understand what Lindsey Graham is arguing when he defends Attorney General William Barr’s requests that foreign powers assist him in investigating how the counterintelligence investigation began.
The direct involvement of the nation’s top law enforcement official shows the priority Barr places on the investigation being conducted by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, who has been assigned the sensitive task of reviewing U.S. intelligence work surrounding the 2016 election and its aftermath.
The problem here is less that William Barr is asking for help with John Durham’s investigation than that the whole exercise is a sham intended to rewrite history and rehabilitate both Trump’s election and Russia’s reputation in America. Because the facts are not on their side, there is more going on than simple requests for cooperation. We have people like Rudy Giuliani and Joe DiGenova running around trying to feed false information to Durham so that he can file the kind of report he was hired to produce.
Insofar as Barr is a witting participant in this process, he’s committing unethical acts and even possible crimes, like suborning perjury or interfering in a federal investigation. It’s not the investigation itself that is criminal, but the investigation has never had an honest and legitimate purpose. It has become part of a criminal enterprise. For this reason, Durham should shut up his shop and resign.
Still, the Democrats need to tread carefully around this issue because the Republicans will never agree that simply investigating the origins of the counterintelligence investigation could constitute a crime or an impeachable offense. Pursuing this line too aggressively will be counterproductive. Instead, they need to stay focused on how misinformation was solicited and disseminated rather than get tangled up in right-wing fantasies.
Suborning perjury? Surely you jest! Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Just as that picture was fading on the site you just had to go and resurrect it.
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We can’t be naive about this, trusting in past practices of the American judicial system to operate fairly and with due process. Totalitarian show trials (both Soviet and Nazi) used corrupt courts and Ministers of Justice to create forged documents, suborn perjury and coerce confessions to prove the guilt of the (pre-selected) “traitors”. With Chief Minister Barr knowing that this “deep state counterintelligence” show trial is Der Trumper’s highest priority and (likely) his only hope of repeating his anti-democratic “victory”, Barr will use any illegitimate means at his disposal (and the heads of state sympathetic to Trumper such as Putin) to get National Trumpalist prosecutor Durham the faked intelligence “evidence” he needs.
The idea that the State prosecutor isn’t going to be bringing some charges as a result of Barr’s “investigation”, or won’t be able to produce a rewrite of history, is wishful thinking. Indeed, we may see some of the first US government use of phony virtual videos and other fake digitized evidence here. The National Trumpalist Ministry of Justice will do this because the Glorious Leader expects them to produce a show trial, and if Barr and Durham had any actual integrity they already would have resigned. Instead, they apparently are working away (on something) and telling “conservative” media it’s gonna be a blockbuster. Since they are not incompetent–only corrupt–the forces of resistance would do well to anticipate a massive explosion of lies and deception, at a strategically opportune time.
This investigation won’t be wrapped up quietly and feebly. Der Trumper is already expecting it to “save” him, and therefore one can expect his committed courtiers to “work towards the Fuhrer”…
Make no mistake, this will be what their defense of Trump will be during the trial. I knew that they would try to plant evidence to reverse engineer their conspiracy as part of a pay back (QPQ, if I say so myself) to Russia as part of the original conspiracy. I just didn’t think the Senators would implicate themselves in the same planting of the evidence. Maybe the broader conspiracy goes even deeper.
Investigating the origins of an investigation whose origins are already known isn’t really investigating. It’s asking the AG to compile a collection of lies the president can use. And that is illegal.
The issue isn’t the use of foreign resources (Democrats do that too). The issue is using the powers of the Presidency against political opponents. In particular, a quid pro quo of taxpayer dollars for investigations, and using State Department resources which implies a quid pro quo where the quid is a public asset and the quo is a private benefit.