This week, we learned that special counsel Robert Mueller has expanded the scope of his probe, bringing President Donald Trump personally under investigation for attempting to obstruct justice.
The president responded to the news in his typically restrained, understated fashion, proclaiming himself the victim of the greatest witch hunt in American political history. Others picked up the theme. As the dependably fawning Newt Gingrich put it, Mueller’s decision “tells you how arrogant the deep state is and how confident it is it can get away with anything.”
Credit: James Berglie
Credit: James Berglie
The problem with such claims is, well, reality. The reality is that any prosecutor — local, state or federal — who stumbled across evidence of possible obstruction would have done exactly the same thing that Mueller has done. Given the obvious evidence of obstruction — much of it public and provided by Trump himself — he or she would have no choice.
Let’s review:
- Trump repeatedly, insistently ranted on Twitter and elsewhere that the investigation into possible collusion with Russia must be stopped immediately. Even if nothing else had happened, that alone would have been problematic. It's pretty basic: A sitting U.S. president should never attempt to undermine an ongoing federal investigation. That is especially true when the investigation involves his own associates.
- On multiple occasions, Trump also secretly pressured the director of the FBI to stop the investigation, at one point intervening with the director to try to halt a criminal probe of a close Trump associate. (The FBI director documented these efforts extensively, at the time they happened, and shared the content of the conversations with his FBI colleagues, also at the time they happened. That makes them extremely difficult to refute.)
- When the FBI director did not stop the investigation, Trump fired him. He also ordered subordinates to concoct an obviously false cover story for the firing. (Seriously: Can anyone argue with a straight face that Trump fired Jim Comey because Comey had been unfair to Hillary Clinton during the campaign? Even Attorney General Jeff Sessions has balked at doing so.)
- The president then publicly attempted to bully and intimidate the former FBI director into silence, suggesting that tapes of their private conversations might contradict his version of events. However, when challenged to produce these alleged tapes, Trump retreated, and still pettily refuses to confirm or deny their existence.
- Finally — and this is the really stupid part — Trump told an interviewer on national TV that he had decided to fire the FBI director because he wouldn't end the Russian investigation. ("When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.")
- To compound the stupidity, Trump also invited the Russian ambassador and foreign minister to the Oval Office the day after the firing, where he also confessed his motivation. ("I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That's taken off.")
In short, Trump has clearly, repeatedly attempted to obstruct justice. And the same basic lack of self-control that caused him to commit that act in plain sight also led to his public confessions to doing so. So Gingrich aside, if any “deep state” put Trump in this predicament, it has been his own deep state of entitlement.
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