“When your job is bringing down the president”

On Wednesday, during our show for Power Line VP members, John recalled the heady days of Watergate, when newly minted Harvard law grads descended on Washington to work for Archibald Cox, the Harvard law professor who was serving as the Watergate special prosecutor. John remembered that the young Harvard law grads he knew expressed clarity about their mission: to get Nixon.

The Washington Post expresses the same clarity in a story about the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Watergate hearings. The Post shared the recollections of various interns and young staffers who worked for Committee members back then.

The Post characterized the story as a look at “what it’s like when your first grown-up job is bringing down the president of the United States of America.” (Emphasis added.) The characterization is perfect. Depending on which Senator an intern or staffer worked for, the job was not to investigate possible wrongdoing. It was, precisely, to bring down President Nixon.

There’s very good reason to believe that key members of Robert Mueller’s staff view their job the same way — to bring down President Trump. Their partisanship is clear.

Much more than Nixon — an edgy but largely conventional politician with a centrist agenda who had recently won the presidency by a landslide — Trump is viewed by liberals as illegitimate. For them, he’s beyond the pale. He must be “resisted.”

I find it very difficult to believe that Team Mueller will give Trump a fair shake.

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