I’m on an airplane right now with the usual crappy airborne internet service, but watching the breaking news of AG Barr’s summary of the Mueller Report. It is a complete rout for Democrats and the media, notwithstanding the confused section about possible obstruction of the investigation by Trump. Expect Democrats to cling to this slim reed to keep The Resistance ginned up. But that slim reed is very likely to snap off underneath them pretty fast. In fact, if I were inclined to devious thinking (who, me?), I’d almost think Mueller and Barr wrote that problematic obstruction passage just to keep the Democrats in full beclowning mode. For Democrats, the Mueller Report has turned out to be the Fyre Festival of investigations.
At the very beginning of the investigation, a lot of observers raised eyebrows that Mueller hired so many Democratic lawyers—some of them even donors to Hillary’s campaign—to work on the investigation. I had a counterintuitive hunch that if Trump was in the clear, the final report that exonerated him would be politically bulletproof. How are Democrats going to argue with a straight face that the investigation was a sham or a cover-up? Right now it is hard to see House Democrats assembling enough votes to pass an impeachment resolution.
As usual, I’m not watching the Fox coverage, but flipping back and forth between MSNBC and CNN. They’re pretty glum, but also noting that there could be “voter fatigue” if Democrats won’t let go of it.
The hazard now for the impulsive Trump would be to grant pardons to Paul Mannafort and others and to continue to blast the investigation as a witch hunt (even though it was). I doubt this would go down very well.
More to come. Stay tuned.
P.S. Did you happen to notice that Trump was entirely silent on Twitter all weekend? And then this morning he seemed to be trolling everyone with these:
UPDATE: I’m watching MSNBC, and it’s only taken 30 minutes for the initial glumness to give way to rallying behind some talking points to keep the whole thing going. Resistance! Keep Hope Alive! (And boy are they mad that this didn’t work out like they expected.)
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