Mitch McConnell is the man who declared, before President Obama even took office, that Republicans should not cooperate with him on any bill or any topic. The same guy who in 2010 told Republicans that their only priority in Congress was to prevent Obama from gaining a second term. The man who has spent a decade trying to take away health care from millions for political gain. The man who spectacularly broke with every rule and tradition to steal a Supreme Court seat from a sitting president. And the man who has consistently blocked bill after bill that definitely would have passed the Senate from even reaching the floor.
So, naturally, Mitch McConnell has something to say about the Mueller report. And what he’s going to say is just as “nonpartisan” as everything he has said before.
According to Politico, McConnell will declare today that when it comes to Russian interference in the 2016 election, it’s now “case closed.” McConnell will, as might be expected, follow the version of events outlined by Attorney General William Barr, overlooking 90% of the contents of the actual special counsel report to put forward the “no collusion, no obstruction” mantra. Like every other Republican who has spoken about the report, McConnell will cite the statistics about the time, money, and number of interviews conducted. At the same time, he’ll skip over the results—including the 10 detailed instances of Donald Trump personally committing obstruction and the hundreds of instances in which the Trump campaign had contact with Russian operatives.
McConnell will call any effort to call Mueller to testify or conduct any additional investigation “unhinged partisanship.” In doing so, he’ll provide cover to Lindsey Graham in efforts to block any further discussion before the Judiciary Committee and he’ll hand Richard Burr an excuse to wind down the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation without ever coming to any messy conclusions.
And McConnell will showcase the next iteration of the Republican argument: Talking about the Mueller report “is doing Putin’s job for him.” Which is like saying that looking at the results of a murder investigation is somehow helping the murderer.
McConnell has a singular role in American history: He’s the man who discovered that a Senate leader willing to ignore every rule, tradition, and expectation of that role had the power to utterly break government in a fundamental way. He has taken partisanship to a level where even the term seems utterly inadequate. But he’ll trot out the turtle tears on Tuesday morning … and pretend that he cares.
Why is McConnell doing this? Because the longer people talk about the actual Mueller report, the more that people are forced to testify about the report, the less value the cover story created by Barr provides. Republicans want this thing ended now, before their narrative becomes even more tattered. And they definitely, definitely don’t want Mueller to speak.