The Mueller report was never going to be enough for those who want to see President Trump in jail. For many Democrats, anything less than that is seen as evidence of a cover-up.
Long before the redacted report was even released, Rolling Stone asked, “Could Trump go to prison?”
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., speculated that President Trump may “face the real prospect of jail time,” and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said Trump “may not be a free person” by the 2020 election. The New York Times boldly proclaimed that President Trump “might well be a criminal.”
These are clearly the rantings of the unhinged leaders of the #Resistance movement against Trump. Their teeth-gnashing won’t subside now that the redacted Mueller report has been released. They’re only going to get more hysterical based on their raw hatred of Trump.
The only option Mueller had in the eyes of Democrats, after all, was to throw a duly elected president behind bars — anything less would be dereliction of duty.
They wouldn’t even take the word of Attorney General William Barr when he delivered news that contradicted their expectations. When Barr released his summary of Mueller’s findings last month, leading Democrats rejected it outright, implying that Barr was covering for the president.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., even stated flat-out that “I don’t trust Barr; I trust Mueller.”
When Barr subsequently stated the basic fact that “spying did occur” targeting the Trump campaign in 2016, Democrats became deliriously defensive and ramped up their attacks on the attorney general.
Pelosi declared that Barr was “going off the rails,” Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin argued that Barr should be “impeached,” and CNN labeled the attorney general as a conspiracy theorist and a “flunky.”
At the same time, though, some Democrats seemed prepared for the Mueller report to completely debunk the collusion hoax. Just days before the release of the full report, freshman socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., began laying the groundwork for her party’s post-Mueller strategy, downplaying the significance of the collusion investigation and arguing that President Trump should be impeached for other, equally unfounded reasons.
Former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., on the other hand, suggested a more humble approach, saying that those who were prosecuted for “obstructing” an investigation into a nonexistent crime should be set free.
“If there is a man or woman who was convicted and sentenced for not telling the truth about a collusion that never happened, I’d like them to be pardoned,” Kerrey told the Washington Times in an interview.
If that ever happens, though, Kerrey’s fellow Democrats will no doubt howl in outrage and try to revive their claims that Trump somehow obstructed justice by exercising his lawful presidential authority — just as they did when he fired former FBI Director James Comey for his grossly unprofessional conduct.
The Democrats have long taken it as a matter of faith that Mueller would find something they could use to send President Trump to jail, or at least impeach him. Mueller couldn’t provide them with evidence of crimes that were never committed, but even that won’t be enough to make them admit that they were wrong from the very beginning.
Jenna Ellis (@realJennaEllis) is a member of the Trump 2020 Advisory Board. She is a constitutional law attorney, radio host, and the author of The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution.
