When the Mueller report was released Thursday, New York Times Never Trumper David Brooks wrote, “The Mueller report indicates that Trump was not colluding with Russia.” Brooks then wrote: “But it also shows that working relationships were beginning to be built, through networkers like Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Roger Stone. More important, it shows that many of the Trumpists, the Russians and the WikiLeaks crowd all understood that they were somehow adjacent actors in the same project.”
In other words, Trump might not have been guilty of the very thing most Democrats and the media insisted he was for two years, but his camp was still up to no good, and that’s what matters most.
“No exoneration” is now the Left and media’s rallying cry.
We’ve seen this kind of obfuscation before.
Leftist journalist and Russia collusion skeptic Glenn Greenwald tweeted the two sentences from Brooks’ column featured above, adding, “‘Our investigation indicated Saddam in fact had no WMDs, but we succeeded in removing a brutal dictator.’”
“Yes, the part that comes after the ‘but’ is true & perhaps even important,” Greenwald commented, “but it doesn’t mitigate how earth-shattering the part before the ‘but’ is.”
“Our investigation indicated Saddam in fact had no WMDs, but we succeeded in removing a brutal dictator.” Yes, the part that comes after the “but” is true & perhaps even important, but it doesn’t mitigate how earth-shattering the part before the “but” is https://t.co/CwW4vGXS5G pic.twitter.com/IZmqWRQxoz
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 19, 2019
Greenwald is right. The entire reason the U.S. went to war in Iraq was to find and eliminate an Iraqi dictator’s weapons of mass destruction. When none were found, many establishment defenders of the George W. Bush administration dismissed that glaring fact by saying the war was a good idea anyway for a host of reasons, Saddam Hussein being deposed among them.
But the war’s most popular defense came in 2007 with the simple phrase: “The surge worked.”
The “surge” was a troop increase that year by the Bush administration, intended to turn the tide in the war and help the Iraqi government become more stable. At the time, the surge appeared to at least temporarily achieve its goals, though it’s been debated since how successful it actually was.
I was working in talk radio at the time as an anti-war libertarian-conservative in the red state of South Carolina. When I would try to argue that the Iraq War was a mistake, pro-Bush callers would often say three words, “The surge worked.”
I would reply that whether it did or didn’t, it still didn’t change the fact that, in retrospect, the entire war had been a debacle.
“The surge worked, Jack,” I would hear time and again. It was their defense for everything.
But these people ultimately weren’t just talking about that particular troop push. “The surge worked” was shorthand for: “The Iraq War was right. George W. Bush was right. Anyone who says otherwise is wrong!” This sentiment was parroted throughout conservative media at the time and probably still lingers today.
“The surge worked” really meant, “We were right” about Iraq.
“No exoneration” right now is similar. It really means that despite the Mueller report finding no collusion or evidence enough to suggest a crime, Trump is still guilty somehow, and those who invested in this conspiracy theory are vindicated.
Like “the surge worked,” “no exoneration” is about saving face.
The Mueller investigation couldn’t have been more thorough, and still, the collusion crowd came up empty-handed. That has to hurt. Greenwald writes (emphasis added):
The result of all of that was that not a single American — whether with the Trump campaign or otherwise — was charged or indicted on the core question of whether there was any conspiracy or coordination with Russia over the election. No Americans were charged or even accused of being controlled by or working at the behest of the Russian government. None of the key White House aides at the center of the controversy who testified for hours and hours — including Donald Trump, Jr. or Jared Kushner — were charged with any crimes of any kind, not even perjury, obstruction of justice or lying to Congress.
Can “Collusion Truthers” still find criminal activity by Trump? Somehow? “Anything is possible,” Greenwald notes. “It’s inherently possible that anyone is guilty of any crime but that the evidence just cannot be found to prove it. One cannot prove a negative.”
“But the only way to rationally assess what happened is by looking at the evidence that is available, and that’s what Mueller did,” he adds.
And there’s where we are. There was no collusion. No obstruction. No indictments.
Saying “no exoneration” over and over again will not change these facts. Collusion conspiracy theory holdouts, which is the majority of the Left and the press right now, can continue to flail all they like.
Their surge will not work.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.
