RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/robert-muellers-testimony-will-it-make-difference/

Plenty of Democrats, and more than a few Republicans, would like to see Robert Mueller testify before Congress despite the special counsel’s reluctance to appear. Each party has its reasons. Democrats want to score political points by re-litigating Mueller’s report on national television. Republicans want to ask him about when, exactly, he knew there was no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, and about the origins of the investigation itself.

Some liberals go further. They say Mueller’s testimony might have a galvanizing effect on public opinion, and help convince voters that President Trump should be impeached. “If history is any guide,” writes Steve Benen at MSNBC, “the more Americans are confronted with damaging details about the president’s alleged misdeeds, the more the polls are likely to shift.”

Count me skeptical. While there have been slight ups and downs, for the most part polling on impeachment has been stable. The public continues to oppose it.

For example: In the November CNN exit poll, 40 percent of voters were for impeachment. After the release of the Mueller report, the debate over its findings, and Mueller’s press conference last week, CNN’s most recent poll of adults has support for impeachment at . . . 41 percent.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/9-times-the-obama-administration-fought-subpoenas-or-blocked-officials-from-testifying-before-congress/

After the long and thorough, and, of course, incredibly expensive Mueller investigation, Democrats were left distraught over a lack of any crime to justify going forward with impeachment. In the wake of the Mueller Report, they’ve since promised new investigations in the hopes of finding some crime to justify putting the country through a process that most don’t want us to go through just because Democrats haven’t gotten over the 2016 election. In recent weeks, stories about subpoenas being challenged and Trump officials being instructed not testify have been saturating the news and being presented as evidence of further obstruction. Most notably, Attorney General Barr faces a forthcoming vote of contempt in the House for not wanting to be a part of the Democrats’ witch hunt.

It seems as good a time as any to remind Democrats that we know their outrage is phony and that we know this is just pandering to their base who wants to see them “resist, resist, resist” at all costs. So, I’ve compiled nine examples of fights over subpoenas or testimony during the Obama years. The point here is that fights between the executive branch and the legislative branch over executive privilege are nothing new. Despite the rhetoric that the Trump administration’s fighting back against Democrat witchhunts being unprecedented, Barack Obama spent eight years fighting with Congress over their exercising their rights to oversight.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/05/muellers_sinking_reputation_140493.html

Now that Robert Mueller has closed up shop as special counsel and shot off fireworks at his final press conference, the country can step back and assess the job he did. The results are decidedly mixed.

Mueller made two vital contributions. The first was an in-depth investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. He concluded it was systematic and favored Donald Trump. The second was an intensive examination of possible coordination between the Russians and the Trump campaign. He concluded that no charges were warranted against any Americans.

The country needed those investigations and Mueller deserves praise for conducting them. More ambiguous was his non-finding of obstruction against the president, which, predictably, has been subject to deep partisan divisions.

Mueller’s two-volume report leaves several big, unanswered questions, though Democrats and Republicans differ on what they are. Democrats, focusing on the second volume, firmly believe Trump interfered with Mueller’s probe. All want further investigations; some want impeachment. Since the Senate is unlikely to convict — the evidence is too thin to win a two-thirds majority — the Democrats’ practical goal is to damage Trump’s chances in 2020. Their political problem, well understood by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is that a doomed effort will hurt the Democrats even more.

Republicans reject the obstruction claims, noting that Trump provided millions of documents and gave Mueller unprecedented access to White House staff. Even if Mueller believed he could not indict a sitting president, he could have said the evidence justified it. He made no such statement, though he did list some instances that might be considered obstruction.

Republicans add three more serious charges against Mueller. First, his team was packed with partisan Democrats, many closely affiliated with Hillary Clinton and strongly biased against Trump. Second, the report itself was shoddy and unfair, they say. It relied heavily on news articles, omitted exculpatory evidence, failed to investigate the infamous “Steele dossier,” and never asked why, if Russians were trying to penetrate the Trump campaign, the candidate himself was not told by the FBI. Another serious charge — deliberate distortion of evidence — comes from president’s former attorney, John Dowd. He has shown the Mueller report edited one of his phone calls to change its meaning. Dowd is apoplectic, calling the report a “fraud.” Others will join him if additional distortions, misrepresentations, and omissions are found.