Which is weird, because they’re really not denying what happened. At the time of this writing, the White House has yet to comply, or release tapes or transcripts of the phone call in question, thus openly flouting the law. I say “inexplicably,” but the explanation was self-evident: with cover from the AG and the DFKNAJ, the acting DNI Joseph Maguire declined to obey the whistleblower law and forward the IG complaint to the House Intelligence Committee. The administration inexplicably involved Attorney General Bill Barr and the Department Formerly Known as Justice, now more correctly described as Trump’s personal law firm and private police force.
Let me be the millionth person to note that it would be hard to imagine a more outrageous abuse of presidential power than blackmailing an ally by withholding taxpayer dollars specifically allocated by Congress in an effort to force that ally to provide (or manufacture, if necessary) kompromat on a political opponent. The outlines of this new scandal are by now well known. 38 special with a glowing orange muzzle spewing smoke like a Bob Marley joint. If Mueller was looking for a smoking gun and failed to find it, Donald Trump just showed up holding a. This of course is the classic evolution of a Trumpian self-defense:ġ) I didn’t do it, and how dare you even ask!Ģ) Well, maybe I did do it, but I never said I didn’t, and anyway it’s not a crime,Īnd now, this past week, an even more explosive story broke exposing precisely that same behavior in plain sight. Then Trump volunteered to ABC News that, irrespective of the outcome of the Russia investigation, he saw no problem with that sort of behavior. So to recap: after two years of work, Bob Mueller and the Angry Democrats (one of my favorite rockabilly bands) declined to indict Trump for conspiring with a foreign power, not because he didn’t or there was no evidence-he did and there was-but only because of legal technicalities and the special counsel’s meticulous and narrow interpretation of his remit. It’s no wonder Emmet Flood wouldn’t let this guy sit down with Bob Mueller. That happened, right? I didn’t dream it, did I?Īll that only for Trump to go on national television with George Stephanopolous last week and volunteer that, sure, he’d do that, and what’s more, he didn’t see anything wrong with it. Uh, didn’t we just spend two excruciating years trying to determine whether Donald Trump, wittingly or otherwise, conspired with a foreign government to help vault him into the White House? And didn’t Donald Trump over the course of those two years swear up and down nearly every waking minute that he never did any such thing, that the mere allegation was a dirty lie by sore losers trying to delegitimize his presidency? And even now does he not continue to howl that there was “No collusion! no collusion! no collusion!”?
This past June I published an essay here titled The End of Outrage in which I wrote the following: I had a couple of things I intended to write about this week, but then-as has happened repeatedly during the End Times that are the Trump presidency-something absolutely mindboggling happened that blew it all away and could not be ignored.
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