Obstructing in plain sight

For the past two years, we have watched Donald Trump attempt to interfere with, derail, degrade, demean and destroy Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible connections between his administration and Russia to sway the 2016 election.

He has done it in plain sight of Mueller and the entire world through his speeches, his rallies, his tweets, his rants in the White House driveway and in television interviews where he has admitted to firing FBI Director James Comey to make “that Russia thing” go away, among other things.

All along, he has threatened potential witnesses, called those who have cooperated with Mueller “rats,” used his house media outlet Fox News to paint Mueller and his team as “17 angry Democrats” out to tarnish his sterling reputation and sent out lawyers like Rudy Giuliani to tell us they would write their own report to counter whatever Mueller said in his.

   

In other words, we have watched the president obstruct justice on multiple occasions in real time and in full view of anyone with a television set, an iPhone or any other device capable of receiving Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media while waiting hopefully for the Mueller report to fix everything and send our first crime boss president to prison for the rest of his life.

And now we know it’s probably not going to happen.

I said some time ago, most likely in this blog but at least to my wife and friends, that I wouldn’t be surprised if Mueller could not find evidence of collusion beyond a reasonable doubt, noting that when you go up against the president of the United States—when you aim that high—you had better not shoot and miss.

But I also said this: Wouldn’t it be ironic if Mueller didn’t find evidence of collusion, but did find Trump guilty of obstructing an investigation that would have cleared him if he had only kept his mouth shut and waited for the result. That’s what I thought was going to happen when the report came out with no further indictments, but sadly I was wrong.

I also said that if Mueller’s team could not see evidence of obstruction, they weren’t looking very hard. In fact, their report did not say Trump was exonerated of obstruction charges, but handing the report over to his hand-picked attorney general to tell us what they found is the next best thing. I hope that eventually, we’ll get to the truth somehow.

           

I don’t have any Washington sources or inside information so obviously I don’t know what’s going to happen next, and I suspect we’re going to hear a lot more about Trump’s obstruction when Democrats in Congress start dragging witnesses in to answer tough questions in committee hearings. I’m pretty sure, however, that Trump will never be formally charged with obstruction of justice and will never be impeached by a Congress that generally has neither a backbone nor a set of balls.

And that’s too bad, because the crimes we watched Trump commit against the United States of America are monumentally worse than anything Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton did, and both of those men had impeachment charges drafted against them. Now I’m not defending either one of them for what they did, but Nixon’s motivation was just to get himself re-elected, not to drag the country into authoritarian rule, while Clinton was motivated to protect his reputation by lying about sex in the Oval Office. For those misdeeds, Clinton actually was impeached and Nixon would have been had he not resigned.

Looking back now, I’d have gladly taken four more years of Tricky Dick Nixon and a hundred more White House escapades by Clinton and his interns as far more acceptable than living through two or maybe six more years of governance by a man who lacks every identifiable quality we expect in our president, a man who doesn’t care about anybody but himself and believes down deep inside that he should be anointed “President for Life” before handing the job over to a daughter or a son.

We as a nation recovered fairly quickly from the Nixon years and the Clinton scandal, and America kept rolling along. I’m afraid it will take decades to recover from the damage Trump is doing to America—if we ever do—and that I won’t live long enough to see it.

And the worst part is…it’s all happening to us before our very eyes. Our country is being destroyed a little bit at a time, and it’s happening in plain sight.