The Mueller report has arrived and is eliciting the predictable blather, argument, and partisan vitriol and distortion. This will go on for the next 19 months or, if Trump is re-elected, until the end of time.
For those not willing to take the word of Fox News, MSNBC, the president and his apologists, including William Barr, or their Democratic detractors, the 400-plus pages of the “lightly redacted”document itself are available in a variety of versions.
For as little as $1.49 and up to about $7.99 you can get it on your iPad or Kindle today, from Amazon. If you want a paperback to put on the shelf next to your 9/11 Report, Starr Report, and Watergate Report, you’ll have to wait until about April 29 and pony up from $7.50 to $11.00 depending on whether you want it straight or accompanied by comment or exegesis from Washington Post reporters or Alan Dershowitz.
Several things were immediately apparent from the moment of the Attorney General’s press conference — and the fact that he had been briefing Trump and his attorney’s for a week or more in advance of the release to Congress and the public. Barr is not an impartial representative of the people of the United States, but a tool of Trump. The president has finally got his Roy Cohn.
Interestingly, this appears to be not so much because Barr is a Republican partisan or a Trump toady, though he obviously is both, but because of ideology which can justify anything. Like Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia before him, he is a member of the cult of constitutional interpretation described as originalism or textualism. This lets zealots misread the Constitution when it suits them by claiming they are doing what the founders intended. It’s a kind of legal seance.
Barr is especially wedded to the unitary executive theory which says that since Article Two vests executive power in one man — the president —his power to control everything lodged under the executive is essentially absolute. So, John Yoo argued for the Bush administration that the president could prosecute an extralegal war on terror, torture enemies, and conduct mass surveillance of the American people without legislative or judicial input.
Similarly Barr, in the audition letter that got him the appointed Attorney General, expressed the unitary executive view that independent agencies and counsels, such as Robert Mueller, are unconstitutional. Thus, when Trump went around ordering various underlings to fire Mueller, he wasn’t trying to obstruct justice but to exercise the powers of the unitary executive. “L’état, c’est Trump!”
Clearly this kind of thinking was all the rage about 350 years ago under absolute monarchs like the Sun King, but by the time American revolutionaries were telling George III where to get off and the French were sending their absolute monarch to the guillotine it had lost its savor.
For those not wedded to nostalgia for the days of the High Toryism or the Ancien Régime, the Mueller Report is filled with outrageous examples of imperial overreach by an autocratic wannabe who does not understand and believe in the rule of law, and the balance of powers. At great expense and effort, Mueller’s work demonstrates what those with eyes to see have known all along.
Russian state villains tried to steal the 2016 election from Clinton and for Trump and succeeded. They did so because they thought he would be a useful idiot who would advance their interests. Trump and his minions may not have committed prosecutable crimes, but they were also far from acting as patriots. They willingly accepted help from Putin’s cybertrolls, the weasel of Wikileaks, and other rogues, thieves and crooks.
Trump made it obvious his presidency would look with favor on enemies of the state. He surrounded himself with people willing to commit campaign infractions, to lie to prosecutors, to cover up their activities, to mislead the public, and to use any means to reach their ends. Politics may not be beanbag, but in a constitutional democracy it is also not supposed to be a sleazy cesspool of corruption, characterized by mobster morality and autocratic entitlement.
Don’t take my word for it. Get the report and read every word of it. The picture is damning and ought to make a normal person feel unclean. Then take a long, hot shower with antiseptic soap and ask how our country has sunk this low. What kind of despair or blindness allowed 60 million people to ignore the facts staring them in the face?
That Trump is a shameless crook, conman, egomaniac, cheat, coward, bully, braggart and fool. He has always been a monument to crude self-interest, and to have entrusted a great country to him was an historic folly. We can only hope the system he is trying so hard to subvert and dismantle is strong enough to survive his depredations. The Mueller Report is a useful reminder of exactly what kind of creature we are dealing with. Will the warning be heeded?
Despite all the democratic malpractice Mueller details, some people may still be happy with the political equivalent of a WWF wrestling villain as president, but even ideologues who prefer a supposedly capitalist Trump to some scary socialist Democrat might want to listen to Adam Smith, the father of free market economics, who warned of the danger of allowing businessmen to become rulers. Why? Because you can’t trust them. They are “an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.” Voters: Caveat emptor.