The Democrats' contempt stunt

Andrew McCarthy:

Politics is front and center for the Russiagate probe, which has reached previously unknown heights of farce – and that’s saying something.

This week saw the spectacle of the House Judiciary Committee holding the attorney general of the United States in contempt for withholding Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report … notwithstanding that the report was actually provided to lawmakers.

Desperate to project the illusion of cover-up in the utter absence of cover-up, Democrats proceeded against the attorney general even though (a) Barr did not owe Congress a single comma in the report because federal law calls for it to be confidential (i.e., between the prosecutor investigating the case and his supervisor, the attorney general); (b) Barr nevertheless gave Congress about 95 percent of the report; (c) congressional Democrats did not avail themselves of the opportunity to read other unredacted portions to which he gave access; (d) all of the unsavory information about President Trump – i.e., the stuff in the report that Democrats truly care about – has been disclosed; and (e) Barr only withheld grand jury information which it would be illegal to disclose – meaning: Democrats put the AG to the untenable choice of violating the law or being held in contempt.

Oh, and about that grand jury secrecy rule … it is Congress’s own law. Democrats could easily get the information by just passing a two-line amendment to federal criminal procedure rule 6(e), so that grand jury material could henceforth be disclosed to Congress in special counsel investigations. With the Trump administration trying to show it is being transparent, the Senate would surely pass such a House amendment, and the president would sign it. But Democratic legislators are not taking any legislative action (you know, their job) because they don’t really want the information. They want the issue. They are straining to create the appearance of Watergate, even as Barr has turned over an Everest of information.

But that is just a sideshow compared to the Mueller report itself. The bottom line is that the special counsel not only found no collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

It appears that the FBI’s investigation was opened on false pretenses: namely, the fiction that low-level Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos was dealing with a Russian agent (he wasn’t), who told him Russia possessed emails damaging to Hillary Clinton (he probably didn’t), which information Papadopoulos passed on to an Australian diplomat – wrong again: Papadopoulos said nothing to the diplomat about emails; rather, after WikiLeaks published hacked DNC emails, the diplomat, in consultation with the Obama State Department, suddenly decided Papadopoulos’s reference to damaging information about Clinton must have been about the hacked DNC emails (it wasn’t).

It gets worse. The high likelihood is that, after taking over the investigation in May 2017, Mueller knew early on that there was no “collusion” case against the president.
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The Democrats and the mainstream media are in serious coverup mode as they pretend they have a case against Barr.  They should be embarrassed by the overall stupidity of their position.