www.politico.com/…
To many (including myself), the Mueller Investigation’s most glaring failure was the fact that it did not investigate Trump’s obvious, brazen financial crimes related to Russia. It definitely could have done this under the rubric of “motive”—a huge part of the reason Putin was likely helping Trump in the first place was that they were deeply in bed together with financial pursuits. Trump almost certainly had been laundering money for Russian oligarchs close to Putin for years and years, and the smoking gun of this criminality was almost surely to be found either in the records of Deutsche Bank or on that server in Pennsylvania whose pings were almost all from Trump, Russia or Erik Prince. Or both. Probably both.
But Mueller decided to ignore all of these things and only focus on the extremely narrow case for a direct, explicitly proven quid pro quo between Russian operators and a completely 100% aware Donald Trump. And Democrats limited their media focus to virtually nothing other than “Russian collusion, stolen election, Hillary was robbed, Putin diabolically tricked the f*cking Bernie Bros into voting for Stein.” They didn’t give a reason for the media to talk about any of the other stuff. So the result was that the only sticking point was the 10 obstruction charges, instead of a sizzling hot fajita platter of direct and obvious crimes. We see every day what Trump’s approach to crime is. “I’m just being a smart businessman, and so if I make money, that must mean it wasn’t illegal, just a good deal, and you’re all a bunch of jealous losers.” There is NO DOUBT that Trump committed crimes with absolute impunity as regards his relationship to Russia—heck, he surely did so without even knowing that they were crimes (aren’t crimes those things that are committed by Democrats and Black and Brown people?), but no one decided to look into them. So he got off scot-free, like always.
nymag.com/…
The Kavanaugh investigation’s most glaring failure was OBVIOUSLY using too narrow a scope, just like with the Mueller Report. The FBI didn’t even investigate other claims of sexual misconduct beyond Ford’s. In this case, of course, it wasn’t the Democrats’ fault—they had no control over the FBI. But Schumer and others (as shown by the article I link) did attempt to get Democrats to stop fighting Kavanaugh, instead urging “let’s not rile up Republicans and make Kavanaugh look like a victim.” Kavanaugh lied over and over again on the stand—including things not even related to Ford’s accusation. But Democrats almost completely focused on that one narrow aspect of the story, and did not make a larger case against Kavanaugh’s general fitness for the position. Lying outright, under oath, was once supposed to be a crime, no? Instead of hammering the clearly provable perjury, they focused on a conflicting he-said-she-said story from 35 years ago, with no witnesses interested in coming forward.
Meanwhile, Republicans do not do “narrow,” they do “as broad as possible,” and it works wonders for them. Ken Starr looked into Bill Clinton over Whitewater. He found no wrongdoing. But he did eventually discover that Clinton was having an affair and lying about it. So eh, shrug, Republicans decided to impeach him over that instead. Whitewater (an incident which itself had taken place decades earlier) was not even in the news anymore in 1998 when Clinton was brought up on impeachment charges. Yet Republicans got a giant series of victories out of simply digging until they found pay dirt. George W. Bush almost certainly got elected because 600+ elderly people in Florida believed that he’d “restore honor and integrity to the White House” after the sordidness of the Clinton Administration. For that matter, some amount of people surely “eww, didn’t want Bill back in the White House in 2017, because….you know…..eww,” and directed this sentiment toward the campaign of Mr. Clinton’s wife. So the Clinton impeachment probably stole TWO presidencies for the Republicans.
It also made Democrats forever terrified of going into all-out war with any future Republican president, even an orange clown that literally admits his crimes on national TV. People literally still argue that because Clinton, whose party LOST the next election, became personally more popular (the electorate obviously didn’t find consensual oral sex and a coverup to be an impeachable offense), the Democrats shouldn’t pursue impeachment of one of the most guilty public figures of all time, someone who is utterly despised by virtually everyone who isn’t already committed to voting for him.
Not convinced that Bill Clinton’s impeachment led to Trump? Perhaps instead you may be convinced that Hillary’s e-mail server did. (Point of order: I think that Hillary’s terrible campaign strategy, message, tactics, attitude, policy preferences and a profound lack of charisma, vision, understanding of the sentiment in the country, and interest in courting half of her base all led to her loss, but it was surely a whole bunch of things and one of them was probably her e-mails). How did this alleged scandal come into the light? 9 Benghazi hearings. Hillary was found to have committed no wrongdoing there either (just like Whitewater), but one detail led us all down a flight of stairs to her defeat.
Broad works, narrow doesn’t. This is politics, it’s not law.
So why are Democrats attempting to narrow the focus of their impeachment investigation? The article I cite at the top has a lot of information in it, including the fact that some committees will continue to do investigative work, and eventually they might add impeachment articles in other areas if and when they do actually impeach. But the focus is still going to be extremely narrow. This means “no focus on the obstruction of justice” (where they already have obvious evidence of crimes), “no focus on the hush money payments” (again, Trump is already an un-indicted co-conspirator), and STILL no look into Trump’s financial crimes. Or even his TAX RETURNS!!!
What is the reason for this? Because the average voter is going to care so much more about a phone call they cannot hear, to a foreign leader nobody has ever heard of, to discuss a favor related obliquely to Hunter Biden (who people also barely know), than they care about obvious corruption and massive abuse of power? Is it because Democrats are once again more interested in pleasing Beltway media legal scholars and Never Trumpers (who are going to vote for them anyway) than in inspiring voters to turn out?
Or could it possibly be (speculation here only) that they think that a serious discussion of Trump’s financial criminality could rankle some of their own members, or their donors?
It is beyond a horrible strategy to once again walk down only the narrowest possible path of the orchard when the entire 30-mile wide orchard is filled with low-hanging fruit. It almost makes it look like impeachment is a nuisance, and they want to wrap it up and fail at it really quickly, so that they can shrug and move on to an all “Fix the ACA and offer nothing but thoughts and prayers to shooting victims” diet.
Is this really going to be the plan? Focus on the one aspect of Trump’s endless monstrosities that may happen to make a Democrat look bad (Biden, because of his son’s actions), while at the same time rallying the Establishment of the party around Biden to be the nominee, so that he can face a Donald Trump that is going to tell him that “even the Democrats didn’t think I did anything wrong other than one phone call, but your son did a lot worse than that”?