That isn’t what we are called to do. Our voters expect us to have our own views, as a coequal branch of government. The separation of powers requires us to think seriously about our duties. Fence-sitting and cowardice are often dressed up as prudence and judicious respect for due process. This passive-aggressive approach to opposing Trump and his populist voters permeates the conservative movement, or at least the Republican Party.
What began during the election with the misguided Twitter hashtag #NeverTrump, used by Republicans who thought they could somehow pressure their party into picking a different standard-bearer, later became a lasting mini-movement of obsolete yet influential “Never Trump” Republicans who would continue to praise Mueller, posture as champions of the rule of law, and find ever-new excuses to fawn over Democrats until Mueller finally delivered his mild, confused, and anti-climactic report.
The #NeverTrumpers promoted their hashtag much as they had promoted the Iraq War and its chaotic aftermath: by repeatedly lying and demonizing anyone who disagreed. If they had their way, we’d be in dozens of wars right now. The faction’s ringleaders included former Bush administration officials William Kristol and David Frum, hated for years by Democrats for defending George W. Bush but now lionized as the “conscience” of the Republican Party. George F. Will, once considered the “dean” of American conservative journalists, also threw in his lot with these unemployed Bush-era holdovers.
While the Trumps had promised we’d get sick of winning, the #NeverTrumpers never tired of losing. I once heard Ivanka Trump share her perspective on this sad batch of loser Republicans. We were riding with her father and brother in the presidential limousine, the famous “Beast.” “They either lose elections, are totally forgotten, or they get a job on CNN/MSNBC,” she dispassionately observed.
Some were still in Congress, though, hiding in plain sight behind the speaker’s rostrum.
With Mueller as a malleable masthead, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused from everything save his own dithering weakness, and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein a secret member of the Resistance, the special counsel’s team of partisans effectively had unbridled power. They used their nascent evidentiary foundation for maximum political effect.
They indicted never-to-be-seen-or-heard-from Russians, harassed innocent members of the First Family, busted Roger Stone for accidentally guessing right about WikiLeaks disclosures, drove up massive legal bills for administration officials, and found out that Paul Manafort was up to no good back in the ’80’s. Not exactly a bargain at roughly $40 million for a taxpayer-funded coup attempt.
Rather than punish these rogue agents, the media empowered them, touting their mendacious books, and even going so far as to promote their crowdfunded legal expenses. Former CIA director John Brennan was allowed to bloviate about the Trump/Russia nonsense nightly on CNN.
Of course, we now know that Brennan said one thing on television and another under oath. TV-Brennan declared Trump “treasonous” and “in the pocket of Putin.” Sworn witness-Brennan sheepishly admitted that there was no basis to allege criminal conspiracy.
Obama-era DNI James Clapper was no better. On CNN, Clapper accused Trump of “essentially aiding and abetting the Russians.” But under oath in 2017, he admitted he “never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”
Whether Brennan, Clinton, or Obama should be considered the real instigator of all this is debatable. But Joe Biden at least acknowledges he was in the room while Obama was discussing how to hand off the Trump investigation to FBI Director Comey after the administration exited. So even sleepy Joe can’t be let off the hook (assuming he remembers he even worked in the White House).
In truth, Biden was one of some dozen Obama officials who were in on the decision to “unmask” surveilled Trump campaign figures—naming them in shared transcripts regardless of whether warrants or charges were being pursued and in the process gaining useful partisan intel on Trump’s allies. All regarded Trump as a dangerous interloper to be stopped by any means necessary.
You get a sense of this urgency in the 2017 film The Final Year. The film chronicles the final moments of the Obama administration when the us-versus-them attitude of the globalist administration is laid bare. The unseen enemy is all those nations who just won’t go along with the optimistic, neoliberal worldview the Obama foreign policy team chants as a mantra. The chief foe for them is Russia—ironic, considering their assiduous efforts to “reset” U.S.-Russian relations.
“The Russian Federation doesn’t care about atrocities committed against people…. When Putin wakes up in the morning, he doesn’t think, ‘How can I prevent mass atrocities today?’ ” said former Obama official (and bestselling author) Samantha Power. Power would later lie to Congress about how often she had unmasked Americans named in foreign intelligence reports, including, of course, Michael Flynn. “Are you truly incapable of shame?” Power asked of Russia before the UN General Assembly. “Is there literally nothing that can shame you?” We should ask her—and her publisher—the same question.
Watching The Final Year, it’s easy to see why so many of the Obama staff worked so hard to preserve the gains they thought they had made. “Putin doesn’t pursue Russia’s interests,” said Ben Rhodes. “He pursues Putin’s interests.” It would similarly be in the interests of the Obama regime to do all they could to oppose Trumpism, especially if (unable to understand him any other way) they thought of Trump as just another self-serving autocrat. “Any thought that any of us might have had that we could go gently into the night, that thought has been vanquished,” Power said. “So we’re in this for the long, long haul.”
To some of us in that fateful spring of 2017, it looked as if the Republicans weren’t even going to fight back. For too long, they seemed content to let the Mueller investigation take its course without turning the magnifying glass back on the investigators themselves, and the cozy network of politicians and intelligence/DOJ
