Death of the Impeachment Dream The Mueller hearings confirm that voters will decide when Trump leaves office. By James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/death-of-the-impeachment-dream-11563999203?mod=cx_picks&cx_navSource=cx_picks&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_artPos=1#cxrecs_s
House Democrats hoped that Wednesday’s hearings would allow them to highlight their favorite portions of the Mueller report for people who haven’t read it. Democrats didn’t expect this segment of Americans to include the author.
Largely unwilling to promote, defend or elaborate on a document with which he seemed strangely unfamiliar, former Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller let stand the report’s finding of no Trump-Russia collusion and, intentionally or not, ensured that his work will not be used to drive a duly-elected President from office.
By late morning it was clear that the Democratic effort to coax a dramatic reading of the Mueller report from its ostensible author was failing. Eliana Johnson wrote in Politico:
“So far, so good,” a senior White House official said in a text message when lawmakers took a brief break about 90 minutes into the Judiciary Committee hearing. Another Trump ally described the mood in the White House simply as “euphoria.”
The president himself, who said Monday he was unlikely to tune into the hearings, has been gleefully telling people he thinks Mueller’s testimony will stop any momentum toward impeachment, according to a source familiar with the conversations.
The impeachment dream is dead, and nobody has more explaining to do at the next meeting of the House Democratic caucus than Judiciary committee Chairman Jerry Nadler of New York. In 2017 he asked his colleagues to entrust him with one job. As this column has noted, after former Rep. John Conyers Jr. resigned amid numerous allegations of harassing women, the New York Times described the Nadler argument for replacing him:
Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York has a bold pitch to take over the top Democratic spot on the House Judiciary Committee — that he is best positioned to lead impeachment proceedings against President Trump.
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