Disaster struck the Democratic Party this week after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report debunked the left’s Trump-Russia collusion narrative.
Hoping to salvage her party’s rapidly deteriorating reputation, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is calling her caucus together so that Democrats can lick their wounds and formulate a plan to weaponize Mueller’s report and once again target President Trump with a crackpot conspiracy theory.
Moving the goalposts
In a “Dear Colleague” letter to fellow Democrats, Pelosi promised that the caucus would convene on Monday to discuss the “alarming findings” in the Mueller report. The House majority leader promised to take action against Trump “as soon as our analysis and this Holy Season’s religious traditions allow.”
“As we continue to review this document, we will have more to report and will update you on the next steps that must be taken,” Pelosi wrote. “The Caucus is scheduling a conference call for Monday to discuss this grave matter.”
The special counsel’s findings, summarized last month by Attorney General William Barr, concluded that no one from the Trump campaign “conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” Not only was there no collusion, but Mueller was forced to acknowledge that members of the Trump campaign even turned down “multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals” to provide assistance against the Hillary Clinton campaign.
After receiving Mueller’s report in March, Barr publicly released the 448-page tome to Congress just a month later, allowing enough time for Justice Department lawyers to redact confidential grand jury testimony and matters pertaining to national security. For this, Pelosi denounced Barr’s work, calling the final product a “disrespectfully late and selectively redacted version of Special Counsel Mueller’s report.”
“In his summary letter and press conference, Attorney General Barr presented a conclusion that the President did not obstruct justice,” Pelosi insisted. “The Mueller report appears to directly undercut that claim.”
Defending Barr
Many legal experts disagree with Pelosi’s analysis of Barr’s summary, however. Writing for National Review, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy called accusations that Barr misrepresented Mueller’s report “slanderously false.”
“Democrats and their media partners owe Bill Barr an apology,” he wrote. “He simply communicated Mueller’s bottom line — yes, Russia meddled; no, Trump was not complicit in a criminal conspiracy; and hand-wringing on obstruction, leaving it to Barr to make the final call.”
New York Times contributor Christopher Buskirk agreed. Addressing public figures and journalists who participated in the collusion delusion, he wrote: “Barr is right about everything. Admit you were wrong.”
Don’t expect Pelosi to do anything of the sort. Addressing her colleagues, the House speaker seized on irrelevant facts presented by the Mueller report to suggest that Democrats aren’t finished with Trump:
This report includes several alarming findings, including that ‘the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.’ It also explicitly states that the President’s campaign took actions with an expectation that ‘it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.’
Collusion delusion
Some of Pelosi’s co-conspirators are even more delusional. CNN National Security analyst Lt. Gen. James Clapper, the former director of National Intelligence who has made a career out of hawking conspiracies about the Trump administration, recently admitted that Mueller couldn’t prove “active collusion,” but insisted that “what we have here is a case of passive collusion.”
Despite the president’s exoneration, Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler (NY) believes “[t]here could be grounds for impeachment, there could be grounds for other actions, there could be things the American people ought to know.” Although Mueller made no determination of potential obstruction charges against Trump, deferring to Barr, Nadler called the former H.W. Bush-era attorney general a “biased person.”
The bottom line: Pelosi and her cohorts plan to beat this dead horse into oblivion. Shortly after the 2018 midterms, Democrats announced plans to initiate some 85 separate House investigations targeting the president — and they don’t plan on backing down just because of a pesky special counsel report that exonerates Trump. For shame.
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