By Deroy Murdock | Fox News
Notwithstanding the catastrophic congressional appearances by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s nervousness about impeachment, 118 die-hard Democrats (plus renegade former Republican Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan), are hell-bent on prying President Trump from the White House, long before Election Day 2020. But for what?
“Trump-Russia collusion” turned out to be a bad acid trip, although the attendant hallucinations still reverberate among fervent Democrats. As for obstruction of justice, there was none. Somebody should explain this to these Trump haters — perhaps with crayons and butcher paper.
Here’s what impeachment-grade obstruction looks like.
On June 17, 1972, the so-called White House “plumbers” illegally broke into the Democratic National Committee’s Washington, D.C., headquarters in the Watergate office complex to spy on President Richard Milhous Nixon’s opponents.
Nixon and his top aides unlawfully funneled “hush money” to these criminals, in cash, so they would clam up rather than sing. Nixon and his top aides also pressured the CIA to tell the FBI, in Nixon’s words: “Stay the hell out of this.”
Nixon six times asserted his presidential right to executive privilege and hid incriminating materials from scrutiny (not least Oval Office audiotapes of Nixon conspiring with his henchmen). This cover-up prompted Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974.
In contrast, Russiagate involved no underlying crime. According to Mueller’s report: “The Special Counsel confirmed that the Russian government sponsored efforts to illegally interfere with the 2016 presidential election but did not find that the Trump campaign or other Americans colluded in those schemes.”
Furthermore, Trump waived executive privilege. Consequently, “approximately 1.4 million pages of documents were provided to” Mueller, wrote Emmett Flood, then-special counsel to the president, to Attorney General William Barr on April 19.
Trump, Flood added, “encouraged every White House staffer to cooperate fully with the SCO [Special Counsel’s Office] and, so far as we are aware, all have done so.” Among many others, these “voluntary interviewees” included senior adviser Jared Kushner, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, and former aides.
