Byron York says what I have also been thinking: Mueller's failure to find a single plausible Russian agent, or even coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, largely puts paid to this saga. Most of the convictions were guilty pleas that weren't court-tested; many of them were for process crimes, that is, crimes that didn't exist until the investigation itself created them.
The "obstruction!" talk is an attempt at another process crime. There's no underlying crime whose investigation could be obstructed (to say nothing of the glaring absence of formal and even legal modes of obstruction, such as the exercise of executive privilege vs. Mueller). Impeachment is a political process, and you can in a sense impeach for anything you want, but it makes no sense to impeach a President over allegations of a process crime.
I am beginning to think that the Republican congressman who joined calls for impeachment is really working for Trump. It'll be even harder to ignore calls from the hard left base with a Republican siding them, but on the House side where his apparent defection doesn't change the math. Either the Democrats give in and spend the 2020 election season failing to remove the President in the Senate trial, or they refuse and demoralize/split their base going into the 2020 election cycle. Either way, Trump comes out ahead.
They should bury this and "Move On" as quickly as possible. But maybe they can't, with the flipside investigations into how the investigation came to be coming due.
Conservative Treehouse and others have been all over why Amash did this. He's not working for Trump. He's pro-Palestinian verging on Omar-level antisemitism, and has family and personal business interests impacted by the trade war with China.
ReplyDeleteAs a number of lawyers have pointed out, there doesn't need to be an underlying crime in order for there to be the crime (not process crime) of obstruction. For one thing, the investigation itself may be instrumental in preventing the crime from occurring. That the obstruction would have been unsuccessful in blocking the investigation in that eventuality is neither here nor there.
ReplyDeleteRegarding Amash, I don't think he's smart enough to be that Machiavellian on his own, and I don't think anyone in the White House staff is foolish enough to use such a one. Amash is, though, a grown man, fully capable of being foolish all by himself. I suspect that he, like John Kasich before him, just had his feelings hurt by one or more of Trump's ruder remarks (and not necessarily even directed toward him), and he's unable to get over it.
On the matter of "obstruction" as supposedly identified in Mueller's report, the ten or so instances identified read more to me like a man venting, and his staff knowing the difference between a vent and an order and so choosing not to act. McGahn's supposed offer to resign over one of the supposed orders--of which we have only Mueller's description--strikes me as his own venting; those meetings could get uncomfortable.
They seem like venting to me because I've worked for such bosses, including a BG in the USAF, and my wife has had similar bosses. We've seen the behavior first hand.
It's interesting to me that folks decry Trump along all sorts of dimensions, but they can't understand that a bad boss might just be loudly angry sometimes. It's interesting, too, and highly instructive, that no one is willing to accord more sense to the White House staff than a certain person had regarding a king's vent over a troublesome priest.
Eric Hines
As a number of lawyers have pointed out, there doesn't need to be an underlying crime in order for there to be the crime (not process crime) of obstruction. For one thing, the investigation itself may be instrumental in preventing the crime from occurring. That the obstruction would have been unsuccessful in blocking the investigation in that eventuality is neither here nor there.
ReplyDeleteI suppose you could define a specific set of circumstances in which this would be true. I'm not a lawyer, and don't know all the ins and outs of how obstruction is charged. Your hypothetical, however, supposes that the crime and investigation are going on somewhat contemporaneously in order for it to be disrupted. That obviously didn't apply to the Mueller investigation as the election was long over before Mueller got to work, so there was nothing for his investigation to disrupt. The other thing that I feel defeats the claim that a crime isn't necessary in Trump's specific case is that without a crime charged one can not determine if otherwise legal actions would rise to level of obstruction. Firing Comey was well with in Trump's powers, as would have been replacing Mueller. The degree to which those actions would rise to obstruction versus removing biased actors would largely hinge what Trump hoped to accomplish by those actions. Somebody guilty of a crime is mostly interested in getting the investigators to go away before they discover evidence of wrong-doing, an innocent person is not concerned about the evidence being uncovered as much as making sure the people making decisions about it are unbiased.
It’s a process crime in my book if the crime only comes to exist because of the investigation. So “dangling a pardon” only could be obstruction if there’s an investigation that would make it so. (Those people arguing that Trump is only not being indicted because he’s president crack me up. Most of the things they’re suggesting are obstruction could only be done by a President).
ReplyDeleteConservative Treehouse may be good at digging up dirt on their Islamic or Leftist enemies, but their analysis level is sub par.
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