All Democrats could do during the final days of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation was moan about its process. Yet it’s apparently a problem that House Republicans are critical of the goofy process of impeachment currently underway.
Democrats first complained that the final Mueller report was released in summary rather than in full. Then they whined that there were redactions in the full report (required by law) of grand jury information. Then they moaned that Attorney General William Barr himself wouldn’t go to a judge and request that some redactions be removed, a measure that any Democratic member of Congress could have taken upon his or her own. Then, in the end, they whimpered that despite Mueller’s massive time and budget, he couldn’t quite do the job right because his hands were tied.
Every one of those complaints was about “process,” and I don’t recall anyone in the national media breathing fire about how they should shut up about process and instead focus on substance.
That’s all we hear, though, now that Republicans are fighting to prevent Trump’s impeachment. The stakes right now are just a little bit higher, and at least Republicans aren’t waiting until their dying breaths to point out that Democrats were holding closed-door hearings, leaking out-of-context testimony and refusing to go on the record as supporting an impeachment procedure.
Yet CNN’s Don Lemon hosted a panel Wednesday night wherein everyone involved attacked Republicans for raising concerns about the process — even as they themselves complained in the same sitting about the process behind the publication of Mueller’s report.
Matthew Rosenberg, CNN national security analyst: “At some point, you know, the people defending [Trump] are going to have to decide, are you okay with [his actions] or not? And they’re going to have to defend it on its merits … At some point, you can’t go after the process.”
Ryan Lizza, Politico reporter: “Well, [with] the Mueller report, I think, partially was the way it was presented in this very dense long document that was then spun by the attorney general and that he got the first bite out of the apple and it really left Democrats having a difficult time explaining what the alleged crimes were in the report.”
This would be funny if it weren’t so depressing.
If there’s any difference at all between Republicans complaining about process and Democrats doing it, it’s that Democrats do it even when they have the advantage. The Mueller investigation was aggressively hostile in its opposition to Trump and his associates. It resulted in prison sentences for some of them, although for reasons unrelated to Trump and his campaign. Nobody can seriously say that the process was unfair to Trump’s political opposition.
Republicans, on the other hand, are powerless in their objections to an impeachment effort that is, like Mueller, aggressively hostile in its opposition to Trump and his associates.
Democrats aren’t the only party that gets to complain about process. They’re just the only party that can do it with the full backing of the media.
