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Hoover fellows Richard Epstein and Adam White discuss the decline of Congress as a constitutional institution, as exemplified by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing with Attorney General Barr—and the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing without him.
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It’s interesting that Professor Epstein has come to see the appointment of Jeff Sessions as AG as the root of this particular poison tree. This was, of course, a political payoff for Sessions’ early support of Trump’s candidacy. Back then, who could have predicted that Sessions would be such a weakling.
If a professional like Barr had been in there from the start, he suggests, somebody other than the conflicted Mueller would have been appointed, and would have been ordered to investigate foreign influence on both campaigns, not just the Republicans.
I am sorry.
The idea that we should for the good of the country stand by and allow people who conducted a soft coup against democracy should be allowed to get away with it, is nonsense.
These people broke the law, and the moral law. They need to be driven out of office, have there pensions taken away from them and put in prison.
Its not just the President. Hes a big boy. Other people have had their reputations destroyed, losts hundreds of thousands of dollars and in the place of a War Hero general faced prosecution based on nothing.
If you let these people get away with it, they will do it again.
I am fairly certain that Andrew McCarthy would have gladly served on the Mueller team. I am sure there are plenty of Republican Lawyers who would have gladly served on such a team, because they would think it was there patriotic duty to do so, damn the consequences to there career.
I would expect a lawyer to respect the rule of law enough to demand its enforcement.
You may not be a politician sir, but you mince mealy with your words like one.
Adam J. White makes the bizarre suggestion that it makes no difference that Mueller put together an investigative team made up entirely of Democrats, because no Republican would have joined the investigation anyway! Epstein was taken aback by this preposterous notion.
Perhaps I should explain that White is what we might call a Bulwark “conservative“. Some of these people argue, sincerely or not, that we need total Democrat domination of the government so that the Republican Party can purify itself in exile. (This reminds me of the arguments over whether Robert Oppenheimer was a Soviet agent or not. Given that he behaved like one, it hardly matters what his motives were.)
Contrary to Epstein,White thinks it’s right that the investigation looked only at the Trump campaign and not the Clinton campaign. He describes it as the administration investigating itself — as if Mueller were part of the administration in any but a technical sense. He goes even further, deploring the belated investigation of misconduct and foreign involvement in the Clinton campaign that Barr has promised. (But that I will believe when I see it!)
Not only were they all Democrats, but they also seem to have all been partisan Democrats (or dominated by them). Alan Dershowitz, not a conservative, not a Trump supporter, would have been unlikely to sign off on the Obstruction of Justice charges.
Even given their biases, they were in fact unable to sign off on the obstruction of justice charges, ending up with the absurd formulation, “unable to exonerate“.