Perhaps soon, untruths will finally have consequences
Barrage of facts from Mueller probe would be Trump’s ultimate challenge
Nothing lifts my spirits more than an indictment from Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
I’m not talking about the guilty pleasure (no pun intended) of watching one Trump associate after another go down for criminal misdeeds, or seeing the Russian scheme to put a thumb on the election scales for him gradually exposed.
No, it’s the triumph of truth — and facts. It’s the kind of victory that has been in short supply lately, what with falsehoods and slinging of “Fake News” accusations running rampant. But Mueller has given me confidence that if our president is a crook — a word that comes to mind today on the 44th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation — we’ll know it.
The sheer detail and breadth of the indictments is a sight to behold. Take last month’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. It was 29 pages of fact, brutally powerful in its volume and precision.
Mueller’s team penetrated the GRU (formerly the KGB) to out a dozen agents, identifying their email accounts, their spearfishing techniques used to obtain passwords, even the types of malware and what key terms they used while rifling through computers.
Although those agents assuredly will never be extradited to stand trial, the indictment packed so much punch that when, just three days later, Trump threw America under the bus by taking Vladimir Putin’s word over his own intelligence services regarding whether the Russians were behind the hack, even many Republicans criticized him. Trump retreated.
Yes, truth can still prevail. But we’ll need lots of it, because the mountain of lies has overwhelmed us into exhaustion. The Washington Post has counted over 4,200 false or misleading claims since he took office, an average of 7.6 per day. Those who argue there has ever been any U.S. president comparable to Trump should be reminded of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s words:
‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.’
Among the most egregious, dishonest attacks came Sunday, when Trump escalated his Stalinist “enemy of the people” and “fake news” attacks against the media to a new level, saying, “They can also cause War!” His followers would argue he was telling the truth, but Trump himself has said otherwise. We know what he really believes from a November 2016 interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl. He told her he attacks the media “to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”
Although there is no evidence that the June attack on the Capital Gazette in Annapolis (Md.) that killed five was politically motivated, words can, in fact, incite. A Trump-following caller from Pennsylvania made a death threat on C-SPAN on Friday, threatening to shoot CNN hosts Don Lemon and Brian Stelter.
Trump supporters claim such words have no real-world consequences. Nothing could be further from the truth (pun intended). We know that from the case of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was just banned from YouTube, Apple and Facebook for his conspiracy-laden lies on his Infowars broadcast.
Perhaps you don’t know the names of Veronique De La Rosa and Leonard Pozner, but you do know of them. Their son, Noah, 6, was among 20 children and staff members killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting. They are suing Jones, who railed that Sandy Hook was a hoax perpetrated by actors. The couple has been forced to move seven times due to the resulting death threats and online harassment and now live hundreds of miles from Newtown, Connecticut.
“I would love to go see my son’s grave, and I don’t get to do that,” De La Rosa said.
Notably, Trump said that immigrant family separation was the result of existing laws when, in reality, he was the one to start it and, it turned out, the one who stopped it. More than 570 children remain separated from parents because of his policy, perhaps orphaned forever — a permanent stain on America.
The shame is that Trump has duped right-wing America into believing he is an essentially honest guy who’s on their side. But his lies are for an audience of one: himself. He’s the one who dictated a statement about the infamous Trump Tower meeting — attended by Don Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner and ex-campaign chairman Paul Manafort — saying it was about Russian adoptions. He’s the one who has tweeted 24 times in the last four months that there was “no collusion” between his campaign and the Russians.
Yet there he was on Sunday, admitting on Twitter to attempted collusion: “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics — and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!”
Mostly, he has lied about the Russia probe, calling it a “witch hunt” to try to destroy the Mueller investigation’s credibility.
There’s only one president to compare Trump to in American history: Richard Nixon. Take it from former Nixon Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus. In what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, Ruckelshaus and his boss, Elliot Richardson, both resigned rather than obey Nixon’s order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox.
“In some ways, Trump is conducting himself more frantically than Nixon, all the while protesting his innocence,” Ruckelshaus wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post on Tuesday. “Nixon fought to the end because he knew that what was on the tape recordings that the prosecutor wanted would incriminate him. We don’t know what Trump is hiding, if anything. But if he is innocent of any wrongdoing, why not let Robert S. Mueller III do his job and prove it? …
“The vehemence and irresponsibility of the rhetoric attacking the Mueller investigation tear at the very structure of our governance. Men who have sworn to use and protect our institutions of justice are steadily weakening them. … We need leaders who tell the truth. This is not now happening.”
We don’t know what Mueller will find regarding collusion and obstruction (I’d be surprised if Trump fires him if he hasn’t by now). But if Mueller recommends impeachment, I have to believe the case will be bulletproof and that any objective reading of the evidence will wash over America like a tidal wave of truth.
It’s likely, even then, that Republicans will continue to protect Trump from impeachment and removal. But they’ll know they sold their souls.
More importantly, so will their ultimate bosses — the voters.
