The liberal commentariat has an ax to grind with the media’s morose coverage of Wednesday’s House Intelligence and Judiciary committee hearings with former special counsel Robert Mueller.
Agreed.
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) July 24, 2019
When it comes to policy, the media has undoubtedly made a mockery of themselves in their coverage, taking $93 trillion Green New Deals seriously while ignoring our $22 trillion national debt, favoring showhorses over workhorses in Congress, and ultimately allowing the public to believe that the laundry list of socialist fantasies the Democratic presidential field desires contains any fiscally workable policies.
But the substance of the special counsel’s findings, all 448 pages, have been public knowledge for months. If the Mueller report had dropped in a vacuum, surely it’d prove damning to President Trump, but after two years of promises that he directly conspired to collude with the Russian government, a report that couldn’t even prove probable cause of obstruction of justice charges was bound to be a dud.
Mueller punted the only question that still mattered, obstruction, to Attorney General William Barr, and the Department of Justice declined to press charges. So now House Democrats have hundreds of pages of evidence that they can decide to use for impeachment proceedings if they believe they can make the case that Trump committed obstruction to the level that qualifies as a high crime and misdemeanor.
That’s a political calculation, not a prosecutorial one, and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler and Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff made a massive political miscalculation. Mueller made it abundantly clear for months that he’s done with the investigation and will not have any further say in its analysis or implications. All Nadler and Schiff could have angled for were optical wins and sound bites.
And they lost. They bet on their ability to best Mueller into revealing his true feelings about the obstruction question, and lo and behold, the consummate career prosecutor won out in the end. For all that Democrats may lament Mueller’s seeming senility in tone and tenor, he clearly intended on remaining tight-lipped. He succeeded.
So yes, House Democrats deserve to get raked over the coals, not by self-interested conservatives but by rightfully livid liberals who just watched leadership flush the last of whatever seeds may have remained from impeachment fervor.
Democrats had one job: to put on a show that convinced the public to revisit supporting impeaching a sitting president. They failed. Move on.
