We begin today’s roundup with Dana Milbank’s analysis of former White House counsel John Dean’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee:
The current situation is worse than Watergate — not necessarily in the illegality (history will judge that), but in the way the political system handles the investigation.
During Dean’s first go-round, serious legislators put country before party and launched honest and sober investigations of Nixon’s misbehavior. But now, Republican lawmakers reflexively defend Trump’s impropriety and support his refusal to allow aides to testify before congressional inquiries.
Meanwhile, many Democrats, rather than following the Watergate model of lengthy investigation before impeachment, are clamoring for immediate impeachment proceedings. And then there’s Trump. Nixon, for all his faults, never declared that John Dean was a “sleazebag,” “loser” and a “rat.”
At The Atlantic, Russell Berman explains why the hearing didn’t have the effect Democrats thought it would:
If [the] hearing was a first step toward impeachment, it was a most tentative tiptoe. It was less a prelude to a constitutional confrontation than a law-school seminar, and an opportunity for Democrats to get a panel of expert witnesses to say what Mueller would not: that Trump’s conduct as described in the special counsel’s 448-page opus constituted obstruction of justice, and amounted to a crime. [...]
For Democrats, the best news of the day came not while Dean was testifying but hours earlier, when Nadler announced that he had secured an agreement with the Justice Department to obtain “important files” from Mueller’s investigation, fulfilling at least part of his request for the underlying evidence that the special counsel used to formulate his conclusions. As part of the deal, Nadler said he would put on hold future action to enforce a contempt citation against Attorney General William Barr for withholding the unredacted report.
That cache of files could prove useful for the increasing number of House Democrats who are looking to build an impeachment case against Trump—more useful, certainly, than today’s Judiciary Committee hearing.
Former deputy attorney general Donald Ayer says it’s time Congress codified norms into law:
It is not easy for me to acknowledge that we are witnessing a slow-motion unraveling of the bedrock belief that no one is above the law, not even the president. This unraveling is aided and abetted by a chief law enforcement officer who first articulated his extreme view of executive power more than 30 years ago: William Barr believes the attorney general is “the president’s lawyer.” He is acting like it today, breaking norms that protect the integrity of the justice system no matter who is in the White House. That is why former special counsel Robert Mueller must resist his own instincts to return to private life, and Congress must insist that the truth be told and that norms threatened today be codified into law.
Matt Lewis calls the Trump administration a “black hole” of corruption:
Not that long ago, a film called Wag the Dog suggested that a president could cover up a scandal by launching a military strike. For example, in order to divert attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal, it is theorized that Bill Clinton bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.
The reason we remember the incident is because it looked so bad and out of context. But what if something like that happened every day? What if the tail wagged the dog on a daily basis? Could we process the absurdity—the surreal nature of it all?
Meanwhile, Eugene Robinson calls on Democratic presidential candidates to consider Senate runs:
Dear Democratic presidential candidates: I know all 23 of you want to run against President Trump, but only one will get that opportunity. If you truly believe your own righteous rhetoric, some of you ought to be spending your time and energy in another vital pursuit — winning control of the Senate.
On a final note, the USA Today editorial board calls for a climate change debate:
Disappointingly, the Democratic National Committee has scheduled up to 12 debates and refuses to devote even one solely to climate change. Given the importance of the issue, this is a mistake.
Nonetheless, the contrast between Democratic proposals to address climate change and cricket-chirping silence from the Republican Party is breathtaking. Trump remains willfully, and at times incoherently, ignorant about the threat.