It is literally impossible to overstate the importance of Robert Mueller’s decision to release the memo detailing the scope of his investigation. While it was in response to Paul Manafort’s bleating and screeting that Mueller had no right to rack him up for financial crimes unrelated to Russia, Mueller was also delivering a message to the American people.
As I noted at Liberal America, for all intents and purposes, Mueller—with the blessing of Rod Rosenstein—was telling the nation that he has reason to believe the operating head of a major-party presidential campaign colluded with a hostile foreign government. If this is true, then whatever legitimacy Trump may have had will go out the window, and we should freaking demand that he resign. After all, at the very least, he would have fostered an environment where outrageous and potentially treasonous behavior was acceptable.
One other movement’s legitimacy may be on life support as well—the religious right. For some time, they have insisted that if anyone hacked the election for Trump, it was God. Take this post-mortem from Franklin Graham, for instance.
There were already a lot of reasons why this sentiment looked really, really awkward. After all, in order to believe God hacked the election for Trump, you’d have to believe that God was so determined to end abortion and marriage equality that he put his thumb on the scale in favor of a guy who plastered a private cell phone number on social media, mocked the disabled, condoned violence at his rallies, and reveled in degrading women. We’d also have to believe that God has his hand on a guy who has no qualms about firing off hateful, violent, and degrading memes and tweets at his foes.
Moreover, we’d also have to believe that God was so determined to get Trump in the White House that he inspired FBI agents to engage in behavior that was unprofessional at best and criminal at worst. After all, the run-up to the Comey letter was shot through with questionable and potentially illegal conduct by FBI agents investigating Anthony Weiner and Hillary’s email server.
And now, if this is accurate, we’d have to believe that God was so determined to make sure Hillary lost that he inspired Manafort to collude with Russia. We already had reason to suspect that this was the case, considering that intelligence intercepts show Manafort asking Russians for dirt on Hillary.
As a charismatic/Pentecostal Christian, I believe God uses people whom conventional wisdom suggests shouldn’t be used. But come on, let’s have some discernment already.
The nation’s so-called moral guardians have already been exposed by continuing to stand by Trump. But they will deserve to go down—hard—if more evidence comes to light that Manafort colluded with Russia.