Nadler announces sweeping document request in Trump obstruction probe
House Democrats are expanding the Russia probe to investigate potential criminal actions by the president; Kevin Corke has the details from the White House.
With widespread expectations that the Special Counsel investigation will end within a matter of weeks, Democrats have already shifted gears. After two years of unhinged – and overwhelmingly without evidence – accusations of “Russian collusion” against President Trump, the left’s favorite talking point could soon disappear.
But Democrats aren’t going to change their methods or underlying opinions on anything. While “collusion” is fading away, the Democrats are ready to deploy “obstruction” and “tax returns” in its place as their anti-Trump mantra.
This is Congressional Democrats showing us what their true motive has been all along: Get Trump in any way, at any cost.
DOUG SCHOEN: MY ADVICE TO DEMOCRATS AS THEY MARCH TOWARD IMPEACHMENT (FROM SOMEONE WHO'S BEEN THERE)
For many months, it has been clear that neither Mueller nor the anti-Trump mainstream media would find Trump-Russia collusion. Proving the existence of a myth is hard. The infamous DNC-funded dossier has been exposed as a sham. Many Obama-era senior government officials, notably at the FBI and CIA, have shown themselves to be anti-Trump zealots. Some may be criminally charged for their conduct. In a saner political environment, the Mueller probe would have ended long ago.
Democrats, however, don’t seem particularly bothered that Mueller’s machinery of retribution for the 2016 election is winding down. That’s because, at its core, the Russia collusion narrative was always most valuable to the Democrats as an ongoing mechanism to grind down Trump and his agenda.
In that, they have largely succeeded. It fed anti-Trump (often fake) news stories. It imposed massive legal costs, ruined reputations, and imprisonment for process crimes on those in Trump’s circle. That the Trump-Russia collusion has not been – and almost certainly won't’ be – proven, erases none of these damages.
Until recently, the left routinely claimed Mueller was essential to the survival of our democracy. Now they seem prepared to skip right past his final conclusions. Instead of a Special Counsel to hound Trump and his inner circle, it will be the House of Representatives leveraging the law for a campaign of endless harassment.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., along with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and many others are readying a bureaucratic blitzkrieg against the White House. They want to hold hearings on “obstruction.” They are planning to demand 10 years of Trump’s tax returns, reportedly using an obscure law from 1924. No doubt, they will scrutinize Trump’s business dealings as a private citizen stretching back for decades, in the hopes of at least finding embarrassment if not wrongdoing.
For Democrats, this is all the straightforward application of an underhanded strategy that has guided their actions all along: the process is the punishment.
The same left-wing Democrats who have chanted about the need to “protect our institutions” to shout down any criticism of Mueller, the DOJ or the FBI are now harnessing Congressional subpoenas to indulge their political vendetta against Trump. That this will make a mockery of Congress’s Constitutional oversight functions and further pollute any sense of good faith in our government’s activities, is of no consequence to Speaker Pelosi or her party.
The good news is President Trump possesses almost superhuman qualities of political endurance. The left has thrown everything they can and more against this administration and Trump keeps on coming.
The coming onslaught of Democrat bluster will be mostly for show. There will be preening monologues on the House floor and breathless, overwrought denunciations of Trump’s private and personal life as ‘threats to our democracy.’ Impeachment may occur, though Democrats seem somewhat wary of the likely blowback from though Democrats seem somewhat wary of the likely blowback from such a bad faith political stunt.
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The good news is President Trump possesses almost superhuman qualities of political endurance. The left has thrown everything they can and more against this administration and Trump keeps on coming. Just as the only “collusion” proven thus far was between Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Christopher Steele and the FBI, the only real obstruction is the Democrats stop-at-nothing effort to take down this president.
And while the left conjures new ways to abuse the system against Trump, the most important process of all is one that they can’t control and is still in Trump’s hands to win: the 2020 election.
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