August 1, 2018: President Trump Isn't Obstructing - It Just Sounds Like He Is

 

August 1, 2018: The President of the United States walks up to the line where the rule of law ends, and authoritarianism begins. He stomps across the line and waits to see what reaction he stirs. In a series of tweets, Trump makes it clear. He’s more than ready to trample the U.S. Constitution. 

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“Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now.” 

President Trump

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You can blow giant holes in Trump’s Twitter logic any time you please; but his most avid supporters don’t care. Logic is for liberal wimps. And they don’t appear to care about the Constitution, either. They believe in Orange Leader. What if Orange Leader does break the law! They yowl. They salute. When Orange Leader calls out Jim Acosta, a reporter for CNN at a rally, as he did Tuesday night, they bay. “It felt like we weren’t in America, anymore,” Acosta says later. Trump, he tells conservative commentator S. E. Cupp, “is whipping these crowds up into a frenzy, to the point where they really want to come after us.” 

“I think it’s been dangerous for some time,” he adds, saying he’s afraid somebody is “going to get hurt.” 

It’s fine if you don’t like CNN. I don’t like Fox News. The danger is this. We have a president who is happy to rile the mob. Trump’s not Hitler yet; and I have faith the American people – including 90% of the MAGA crowd – would wake in time to stop him if need arose. Still, the president does achieve the level of a Mussolini or a Mugabe if he can pull off his next move. 

We can say this. We can say it again. The people in the red MAGA hats won’t hear the message because they don’t want to hear.

Salem, Massachusetts, 1692.

 

So, Trump stomps his foot over the line in a tweet: 

..This is a terrible situation and Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further. Bob Mueller is totally conflicted, and his 17 Angry Democrats that are doing his dirty work are a disgrace to USA!

 

Stop and think about what the president has just tweeted. He wants the Department of Justice to shut down an investigation into his campaign. He doesn’t want Mueller to pursue evidence of Russian meddling in our election. He doesn’t want investigators to discover whether American citizens (“known and unknown,” as one indictment reads), broke the law. He doesn’t want us to find out whether persons “known and unknown,” possibly working for him, helped a hostile power undermine democratic norms. 

Trump wasn’t done undermining the rule of law. All kinds of goofy and/or dangerous tweets followed: 

Paul Manafort worked for Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and many other highly prominent and respected political leaders. He worked for me for a very short time. Why didn’t government tell me that he was under investigation. These old charges have nothing to do with Collusion - a Hoax! 

(Good grief: You gave him the job as your campaign manager. You should have done due diligence your bloato orange self.)

 

Looking back on history, who was treated worse, Alfonse Capone, legendary mob boss, killer and “Public Enemy Number One,” or Paul Manafort, political operative & Reagan/Dole darling, now serving solitary confinement - although convicted of nothing? Where is the Russian Collusion? 

(Capone was a tax cheat. So is Manafort. Does this president know any history? He’s probably a tax cheat, himself.)

 

We could explain again why this is wrong. We could spell it out with blocks for Trump fans. It doesn’t matter if Manafort worked for Reagan. He’s charged with a wide array of crimes since. That includes witness tampering in 2018. 

Trump defenders like to say these are “process crimes.” In other words: No big deal.

And, of course, they like to say Manafort hasn’t been convicted. Good god. Let’s try it with blocks: H-E…I-S… N-O-W…O-N…T-R-I-A-L. I-F…C-O-N-V-I-C-T-E-D…H-E…C-O-U-L-D…S-P-E-N-D… T-H-E…R-E-S-T… O-F…H-I-S…L-I-F-E… I-N…J-A-I-L. 

In this free country, that’s how the courts work. We shouldn’t shout, “Lock her/him up!” until evidence has been gathered, juries seated, lawyers engaged, witnesses called, and verdicts rendered.

 

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REALIZING HOW MUCH Trump’s call for the Attorney General to shut down the Mueller probe sounds like obstruction of justice the president’s lawyers quickly walk back his words. 

Oh, don’t worry, they say, the President of the United States isn’t really saying he’s above the law. 

“It’s not a call to action,” Horndog Rudy explains. The most powerful man in the world is merely venting. Mr. Trump really wants the legal process to play out. “He’s expressing his opinion, but he’s not talking of his special powers he has” as president, Mr. Giuliani says. Giuliani adds that the fact Trump made his statements on Twitter, “a medium that he uses for opinions,” is proof what he said should not be taken as an order. 

Jay Sekulow serves up the same dish in an interview on TV. The president “doesn’t feel that he has to intervene in the process, nor is he intervening,” he explains.

 

Finally, Press Secretary Pinocchio comes to Trump’s defense. “The president is not obstructing,” she tells the White House press corps. 

“He’s fighting back.”  

 

POSTSCRIPT: Alex Jones is sued by the parents of two children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. Convinced Jones has no plans to leave them alone, they accuse him, through his Infowars website, of engaging in a campaign of “false, cruel, and dangerous assertions.” 

If you are a generally stable individual, you may never have listened to Jones’s daily ravings. So you’d have missed all the hatred that spews from his lips. Jones has called the Sandy Hook shooting a hoax and often questions the “official story.” As far as Jones, who also pushed the idiotic Pizzagate story, was concerned, the whole massacre could have been an inside job by the government. The parents who said they lost loved ones, he claimed, were liars and frauds who helped the cover-up. 

Naturally, hateful individuals tend to tune in to listen to Jones and spew out their own hatred on others. For years now, followers of Jones have taunted and harassed the families of the slain children. 

Fed up and convinced Jones wasn’t going to stop defaming them until they took legal action, they are suing for at least $1 million in damages. Lawyers for the parents filed suit in Travis County, Texas, where Jones lives. 

“Defendants’ defamatory statements were knowingly false or made with reckless disregard for the truth,” one lawsuit claims.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (October 1, 2021): Jones will eventually refuse to turn over documents related to these two lawsuits and one other. The judge in the three cases will cite him for “flagrant bad faith and callous disregard” of the court orders and issue a rare default judgment against the defendant. That means Jones could be liable for millions in damages.