America Is Heading for an Unprecedented Constitutional Crisis
The Republican Party is ready to serve as an accomplice to obstruction of justice.
BY MAX BOOT | DECEMBER 11, 2017
White House lawyer Ty Cobb has been attempting to keep the First Client in check by telling him that Robert Mueller’s investigation will soon be over and result in his exoneration. Back in August, Cobb was confident that it would all be over by Thanksgiving. When that didn’t happen, Cobb, like a millenarian cultist adjusting the date of doomsday, claimed that it would end by Christmas. Now Christmas is almost upon us, and no light is visible at the end of the tunnel. Far from it. The investigation, which has already resulted in two indictments and two guilty pleas of Trump advisors, appears to be accelerating and drawing ever closer to the Oval Office.
What will Trump’s reaction be when he figures out he’s been duped — and that the Mueller probe, far from a “nothing burger,” is a carafe of strychnine that poses an existential threat to his presidency? The likely result is that Trump will either pardon everyone involved or try to fire the special counsel, or both. And then the nation will be plunged into a constitutional crisis the likes of which we have not seen since Watergate. The storm is not yet upon us, but the dark clouds are already visible on the horizon. Ever since the guilty plea from former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn on Dec. 1, Trump and his enablers have been throwing a hissy-fit at the FBI, the “Justice” Department (the sarcastic quote marks are the president’s own), and the special counsel’s office by seizing on “evidence” that all three are biased against him.
Mueller inadvertently fanned the flames by quietly relieving a senior FBI agent, Peter Strzok, for sending disparaging texts about Trump to an FBI lawyer with whom he was romantically entangled. You would think that this would be evidence of Mueller’s determination to avoid any taint of bias, even though FBI agents, like other federal employees, are allowed to express political views without fear of retribution. But no. Trump has cynically twisted Mueller’s action to suggest that the removal of an anti-Trump agent is somehow evidence of … anti-Trump bias. Strzok, a widely respected special agent, has now been elevated by the far-right media machine into an archfiend who unfairly exonerated Hillary Clinton and framed Trump.
Trump & Co. are also in a froth about another Mueller subordinate, attorney Andrew Weissmann. His crimes? He apparently attended Hillary Clinton’s election night party and sent an email to acting Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates saying he was “proud” of her for refusing to enforce Trump’s initial ban on Muslim visitors to the United States — the very ban that was subsequently deemed unconstitutional by numerous courts and totally rewritten by the administration in order to pass legal muster.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/12/11/america-is-heading-for-an-unprecedented-constitutional-crisis/
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