President Trump’s obstruction of injustice
Published 7:18 pm Tuesday, April 23, 2019
By Michael Reagan
No wonder Donald Trump was so angry.
No wonder he wanted to stop the Mueller investigation.
He didn’t collude with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
He knew he was innocent.
And almost three years ago he foresaw that a biased fishing expedition by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his liberal lawyers would undermine his ability to govern and provide Democrats and the liberal media with an endless supply of damaging political ammo.
Now that Attorney General William Barr released the redacted Mueller report, the whole world knows that Mueller completely exonerated Trump of collusion with Russia.
Mueller was unable to decide whether the president was guilty of obstruction of justice. But the desperate Democrats in the House and the disappointed fake journalists over at CNN don’t care that Mueller found Trump guilty of no crime.
They’ll spend the next 20 months parsing the Mueller report’s footnotes and milking the unanswered question of obstruction for every possible drop of political poison they can find.
By noon on Thursday CNN’s all-liberal panel of eight Trump-hating pundits and legal experts like Jeffrey Toobin already were back to their usual tricks.
They spent half the morning spinning the importance of the inconclusive “obstruction” part of Mueller’s report and trashing Attorney General Barr as a shill for the president.
Dana Bash and crew showed no sympathy for the unfair, incorrect and deranged assault they and their soulmates at MSNBC, the New York Times and elsewhere have subjected Trump to for three years.
You’d think Toobin and a few of the others would have been pleased to find out that the president of the United States did not collude or conspire with the Russians to fix the 2016 election.
Instead, ignoring how wrong they were about everything, they were excitedly talking about how the Mueller report’s examples of presidential obstruction attempts could serve as a handy road map to impeachment for House Democrats.
Some CNN panel members, to their shame, were visibly disappointed that Trump was saved by several staffers who had the good sense and ethics to refuse to do what he asked of them.
According to the Mueller report, there were ten examples of Trump trying to get control of the Russia investigation.
They included firing FBI Director James Comey, urging Trump’s useless Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “re-recuse” himself and trying to get various staffers to lie or not cooperate with Mueller.
The facts surrounding those presidential attempts to interfere are not in dispute.
But the president never fired anyone, even though he had the Constitutional power to do it, and he never obstructed Mueller from doing his work.
The White House even turned over millions of documents and the president waived his right to use executive privilege.
If any of his White House staff had followed the president’s requests concerning the Mueller investigation there might have been a legitimate case for obstruction.
But they ignored him. And they did exactly what they are supposed to do — they kept the boss from making a serious mistake.
I say bravo to the president’s staff for saving his butt. They did their job. They protected President Trump from himself.
As the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani said Thursday, the president reacted to the Russia collusion charges the way any innocent man would react to a frame up.
President Trump had every right to be outraged and frustrated by Mueller’s investigation, which he always knew was a Democratic witch hunt.
If he never colluded with anyone in the first place, as Mueller has proved to the satisfaction of everyone except maybe Rachel Maddow and Adam Schiff, it’s hard to see how the president could be guilty of the crime of obstruction.
If anything, the only thing President Trump was guilty of was trying to obstruct injustice.
MICHAEL REAGAN is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.