Continuing in the vein of Are you kidding? is Conrad Black on National Review, who happily wants to believe that, since he doesn’t see any signs of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians in the past, there won’t be any evidence found in the future as well:
It is now clear that Russian attempts at interference in the 2016 election, though somewhat outrageous, were ineffectual, unconnected with any particular party, a small effort given what a country of Russia’s resources and taste for political skullduggery and chicanery is capable of, and minor compared with the influence many countries, including the United States, have sometimes exercised in the elections of other countries. No serious person could find anything in the conduct of the president that could be construed as obstruction of justice, the all-purpose catch-all of American prosecutors, who can conjure that charge from the most mundane acts.
The Trump-impeachers, shuffling grimly forward into the desert like Old Testament slaves to the chant of the ineffable millionaire congresswoman Maxine Waters: “Impeach 45!” will perish in the sand. The vultures will pick their bones in an Ozymandian setting. No president has ever been impeached and removed successfully (though Andrew Johnson, who was not guilty of anything, escaped removal by only one vote in 1868). The required “high crimes and misdemeanors” the Constitution stipulates, have never been clearly defined, but apparently did not include President Clinton’s likely untruthfulness to a grand jury. After two years of exhaustive legal investigation accompanied by intense media innuendos about everything President Trump and his family have done more ambitious than putting on their shoes in the morning (unlike the Clinton case and much closer to the relentless media badgering and defaming of Richard Nixon in the Watergate affair), there is nothing to impeach with, or about.
Note the spurious inclusion of the claim that we do it, too, as if this has any relationship to, as if it excuses, the Russian attempts to influence the 2016 American Presidential campaign. An American patriot would be outraged at Russian interference in our election. Mr. Black? He can’t be bothered, because the elixir of power he holds to his lips through his proxy, Mr. Trump, is simply too delicious to let him consider clinging to his principles.
Or would Mr. Black have us believe he’d be equally insouciant if Mrs. Clinton had won the 2016 election?
But Mr. Black isn’t writing this merely to express his belief there was no collusion, but to prepare the way for open warfare against the American intelligence community which threatens his favored candidate’s exalted position:
It also seems to be clear that Comey, and former National Intelligence and Central Intelligence directors James Clapper and John Brennan, were involved in improper leaks of confidential information and in coordinating their activities to mislead the president-elect. All three also appear to have misled congressional committees while under oath. The inspector general of the Department of Justice, Michael Horowitz, is apparently only a week away from a release to the Congress (i.e., the world) of his report on the official handling of the Clinton emails affair. His report is reportedly 400 pages, and there has never in recent history been a 400-page nothingburger. It would be astounding if there were not further criminal referrals for some of Trump’s prominent tormenters, presumably starting with Comey, as there were for former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe from the inspector general’s first report. This will be a spectacular wind-up to Comey’s author’s tour, as he entrusts his defense to another of America’s most egregious rules-free prosecutors, Patrick Fitzgerald.
This is part and parcel with the Trump strategy of discrediting anyone who can damage him. Indeed, he admitted as much to Lesley Stahl, as reported today by CNBC:
President Donald Trump told the veteran journalist Lesley Stahl of the CBS program “60 Minutes” that he bashes the press to “demean” and “discredit” reporters so that the public will not believe “negative stories” about him, Stahl said.
And why does he feel that’s necessary? The easy answer is that he believes the press will be biased against him. The hard answer?
Here’s the question that no Trump supporter dares address, to even acknowledge: If Trump is innocent of collusion, then why the circus, the frantic attempts to avoid the questions, the open worries about a fallacious perjury trap? If your man is innocent, then a thorough investigation should reveal little more than the usual minor tripping over confusing campaign finance laws. So let him be investigated, let him come out shining like an angel!
That’s certain to shove a pine tree up the liberals’ collective ass, now wouldn’t it?
The behavior of the President, his family, and his lawyers is mere circumstantial evidence, and yet it is absolutely telling. Mr. Black may come to eat his words.
