Dionne: House Democrats can't ignore what Mueller revealed
By E.J. Dionne
The Washington Post
It may not have been his intention, but special counsel Robert Mueller has forced a momentous choice on the Democrats who control the House of Representatives. How they navigate the next several months will matter not only to politics but, more importantly, to whether the rule of law prevails.
If we lived in a normal time with a normal president, a normal Republican Party and a normal attorney general, none of this would be so difficult. Mueller’s report is devastating. It portrays a lying, lawless president who pressured aides to obstruct the probe and was happy — “Russia, if you’re listening … ” — to win office with the help of a hostile foreign power. It also, by the way, shows him to be weak and hapless. His aides ignored his orders, and he regularly pandered to a Russian dictator.
Mueller’s catalogue of infamy might have led Republicans of another day to say: Enough. But the GOP’s new standard seems to be that a president is great as long as he’s unindicted.
And never mind that the failure to charge Donald Trump stemmed not from his innocence but from a Justice Department legal opinion saying that a sitting president can’t be indicted. Mueller explained he had “fairness concerns” — a truly charming qualm in light of the thuggishness described in the rest of the report — because the no-indictment rule meant there could be no trial. The president would lack an “adversarial opportunity for public name-clearing before an impartial adjudicator.”
And perhaps Mueller did not reckon with an attorney general so eager to become the president’s personal lawyer and chief propagandist. William Barr sat on the document for 27 days and mischaracterized it in his March 24 letter. He mischaracterized it again just an hour before it was released.
This leaves Democrats furious; and on their own. Unfortunately, it is not news that this party has a nasty habit of dividing into hostile camps. On the one side, the cautious; on the other side, the aggressive. The prudent ones say that members of the hit-for-the-fences crowd don’t understand the political constraints. The pugnacious ones say their circumspect colleagues are timid sellouts.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/dionne-house-democrats-cant-ignore-what-mueller-revealed/
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We must do this for our country.
