With two months to go in office, retiring senator Jeff Flake is going for broke to get a floor vote on his bill to protect special counsel Robert Mueller’s election meddling investigation from White House tampering. If Republican leadership doesn’t permit a vote, Flake, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, says he will vote to block the advancement through committee of any and all Trump judicial nominees for the remainder of his term.
GOP leadership has responded that there is no need to vote on the Mueller bill, since President Trump wouldn’t be stupid enough to interfere with the Mueller investigation.
“I think it’s in no danger, so I don’t think any legislation is necessary,” majority leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday.
So who are you going to believe, America: Mitch McConnell or your lying eyes?
At this point, it feels almost stupid to point out that President Trump has been chafing for months at the ongoing Mueller investigation, which is looking Russian interference in the 2016 election, including whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian agents and whether the White House later deliberately worked to obstruct that investigation. But it takes a special level of willful blindness not to see that Trump’s attacks against Mueller and his investigation have grown more erratic and intense since last week’s midterm elections, when Democrats retook control of the House of Representatives.
Here, for example, are a few of the smears Trump tweeted against Mueller just this morning:
The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want. They are a disgrace to our Nation and don’t…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2018
….care how many lives the ruin. These are Angry People, including the highly conflicted Bob Mueller, who worked for Obama for 8 years. They won’t even look at all of the bad acts and crimes on the other side. A TOTAL WITCH HUNT LIKE NO OTHER IN AMERICAN HISTORY!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2018
Universities will someday study what highly conflicted (and NOT Senate approved) Bob Mueller and his gang of Democrat thugs have done to destroy people. Why is he protecting Crooked Hillary, Comey, McCabe, Lisa Page & her lover, Peter S, and all of his friends on the other side?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2018
That many of these accusations are utterly, entirely invented is beside the point. But just for the record: There is no evidence whatsoever that “the inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess,” or that investigators “have gone absolutely nuts.” Nor should we marvel that Mueller, appointed to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” hasn’t opted instead to spend his time going after “all the bad acts and crimes on the other side.”
Perhaps Senate Republicans are so accustomed by now to these periodic presidential twitter meltdowns that they’re happier just pretending they don’t exist The move, apparently, is to take such outbursts neither literally nor seriously.
But Trump’s Mueller-averse behavior isn’t just confined to Twitter. How else can a person possibly interpret his decision to force out attorney general Jeff Sessions, against whom Trump held a grudge for not “protecting” him from Mueller, and replace him temporarily with Matthew Whitaker, a trusted ally who has publicly called the Mueller investigation a “lynch mob” and mused that an acting attorney general could, rather than firing the special counsel, simply “reduce his budget to so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt”?
Surely if Trump believes, as GOP leadership insists he does, that tampering with Mueller would be extremely foolish, and if he chose to appoint Whitaker for unrelated reasons, he could—for a start—say so himself? Last Friday, a reporter asked Trump this very question: “Do you want [Whitaker] to rein in Robert Mueller?” What a golden opportunity to set the record straight! “What a stupid question that is,” Trump responded. “What a stupid question. But I watch you a lot. You ask a lot of stupid questions.”
And maybe it was a stupid question: Why do we need Trump to tell us again, with the dawn of each new day, that he wants Mueller off his back? He’s hardly stopped saying so for more than a year.
So here’s where we stand: Maybe, as GOP leadership assures us, Trump won’t be dumb enough to tamper with Mueller. Or maybe, as Trump seems determined to show us, he’s already begun to do so.
So maybe, as Flake says, we could go ahead and take a look at his bill. Just in case.
