Democrats had a plan or at least a direction: Investigate, hold hearings, don't call it impeachment, but uncover the facts for the public to see and let the chips fall where they may.
"If that’s the place the facts take us, that’s the place we have to go," Speaker Nancy Pelosi said of impeachment early last week, following release of the special counsel's redacted report. It was already an evolution from her impeachment's 'off the table' position even before Attorney General William Barr sent Congress his cover-up summary. But after watching Barr obfuscate under oath in front the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday, Pelosi told reporters she had "lost sleep" over the display.
"The attorney general of the United States of America was not telling the truth to the Congress of the United States. That's a crime," Pelosi said Thursday, referring to Barr's statements during earlier testimony that he had no earthly idea whether Robert Mueller was displeased with his public roll out of the two-year-long investigation. Quite honestly, Pelosi looked gaunt, almost haunted by the aberration she had witnessed given Mueller's repeated efforts to get Barr to release the report's executive summaries. Mueller’s bid to clear up the "public confusion" Barr had manufactured with his summarization of the probe’s findings had fallen flat.
Pelosi isn't barreling toward impeachment yet, but the Democratic caucus appears to be inching that way as Donald Trump continues to block every single congressional effort to investigate wrongdoing by him and his administration. This week alone, Barr refused to appear before the House Judiciary Committee while defying the panel's subpoena for the full Mueller report. A White House letter also surfaced skewering Mueller's report as a travesty and reserving the right to assert executive privilege over nearly aspect of the report, witnesses and underlying evidence alike. In the meantime, Trump continues to run interference on congressional efforts to obtain his taxes as well as financial records from an accounting firm and his financial institution of choice, Deutsche Bank. But all of these obstructive efforts to block "all the subpoenas" as Trump put it are serving to unify Democrats, according to California Rep. Ted Lieu, and they will ultimately provide Democrats with political cover should they launch an impeachment inquiry.
"If the Trump administration wants impeachment, they're doing a good job of pushing the Democrats there," Lieu told CNN's Manu Raju. "It's unifying the caucus, so whether you're a liberal, moderate, conservative member of the Democratic caucus, you understand that you cannot have the executive branch blowing off Congress, ignoring Congress."
As presidential historian Michael Beschloss noted this week, the nation is now revisiting a moment 45 years ago when the lawyer for then-President Richard Nixon's told House Judiciary Chair Peter Rodino they were done complying with the committee's subpoenas.
In particular, Nixon was trying block lawmakers from getting the tapes that would ultimately produce the smoking gun forcing Nixon's resignation—him instructing the CIA to tell the FBI to back off the Watergate investigation. Nixon knew the revelations would sink him, and they ultimately did after the Supreme Court ordered their release.
The repeat performance by Trump half a century later prompted Beschloss to wonder why he's so insistent on blocking witness testimony, document production, and disclosure of anything related to his financial records. "Why is Donald Trump so eager to cut off this investigation?" Beschloss posed on MSNBC.
That brought to mind a certain stanza from Mueller's report.
The evidence does indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the President personally that the President could have understood to be crimes or that would give rise to personal and political concerns.
Trump's total obstruction is perhaps the biggest political tell of his presidency. He's running scared. And while he might be able to delay the disclosure of some information for a time, no legal expert around believes he can prevail on everything or even most things. House Democrats can still build the public record they need to in order to move public opinion in the direction of impeachment, much like the Watergate hearings did.
Getting the unredacted Mueller report may eat up some time in court, but Trump has no legal leg to stand on in terms of preventing testimony from pivotal witnesses like Mueller, White House counsel Don McGahn, his chief of staff and consummate scribe Annie Donaldson, and others. And somewhere in there lies a damning piece of evidence that Trump is doing everything in his power to suppress.