Photo credit: Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead
There’s no denying that what little we’ve been told so far about the Special Counsel’s final report has been profoundly disappointing to every American who hoped Robert Mueller’s criminal investigation would rescue us from a vile, corrupt, incompetent presidency. Instead, we’re going to have to save ourselves.
But all we’ve really been allowed to see are a couple of partial sentence fragments carefully edited by Donald Trump’s Atty. Gen. William Barr to pretend there’s “nothing to see here” after a two-year criminal investigation into whether Trump’s campaign publicly welcomed Russia’s attack on the U.S. political system and lied about an incredible number of meetings between Russian agents and 14 Trump associates and family members.
No doubt there’s plenty more to see in the hundreds of pages and exhibits Barr is planning to take weeks censoring and redacting before turning over blacked-out pages to Congress—assuming there are any words left. No one was reassured when Barr publicly declared Trump wouldn’t be involved in deciding what goes to Congress, because the president trusts Barr to do the right thing. You bet he does.
According to Barr, Mueller didn’t find conclusive evidence Trump or his campaign criminally conspired with Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, but Mueller decided not to decide whether Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice. President George W. Bush’s former speechwriter, Michael Gerson—a Washington Post columnist regularly appalled at conservative Republican support for Trump’s sleazy presidency—compared those results to clearing “an ankle-high bar.” Trump has called them “a complete and total exoneration,” which, as usual, isn’t true.
Unless Barr permits the American people to read Mueller’s actual report, we may never know how many twisted new variations of reprehensible conduct and ethical violations may have been committed by Trump’s corrupt administration of liars and grifters. Is it really any major surprise that the inept criminal masterminds in Trump’s White House might not even be able to conspire with foreign agents successfully?
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For the majority of decent Americans, Barr’s suspiciously abridged version of Mueller’s investigation does nothing to alter the most important facts about Trump’s presidency. Trump is still utterly unfit for public office and a truly horrible human being who promotes racial and religious bigotry to spread hatred and divide Americans. That may not be a federal crime, but it’s despicable.
Endangering Millions of Lives
And lest anyone forget how a lying, ignorant president can endanger the lives of millions of Americans (including his strongest supporters), Trump celebrated his fraudulent self-exoneration with another vicious attempt to destroy former president Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA), which provides healthcare for 20 million previously uninsured Americans and prohibits insurance companies from charging exorbitant prices to 100 million more with pre-existing conditions. That’s right. Once again, Trump is trying to kill affordable healthcare for people with pre-existing conditions—the issue that flipped control of the House of Representatives to Democrats last November.
Remember how every Wisconsin Republican, including former Gov. Scott Walker, swore before the election they would protect coverage of people with pre-existing conditions? When voters saw through those Republican lies and dumped Walker, the top issue for a sleazy, lame-duck Republican session of the state Legislature was stopping Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Atty. Gen. Josh Kaul from withdrawing from a Republican lawsuit to kill the ACA and federal protections for coverage of pre-existing conditions. That’s the same lawsuit in which Trump just directed Barr to ask an appeals court to throw out the ACA as unconstitutional.
Asking courts to destroy the entire ACA is new for Trump but trying to destroy protections for pre-existing conditions is not. Last June—when Jeff Sessions ran the Justice Department and Wisconsin Atty. Gen Brad Schimel and Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton were leading the Republican lawsuit—Republicans asked the court to end protections for pre-existing conditions. That was only a few months before all those dishonest pre-election promises to protect pre-existing conditions. It was one of the reasons voters threw out Schimel along with Walker.
Even some of the dimmest bulbs in the Republican Party, such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, were shocked when Trump irrationally announced his latest push to destroy affordable healthcare. Trump’s ugliest obsessions with issues such as immigration and healthcare are driven by hatred. He despises Obama for successfully expanding healthcare and continues to express his undying hatred of the late Sen. John McCain for blocking Republican destruction of the ACA.
Another attack on healthcare and protections for pre-existing conditions could be as disastrous for Republicans in U.S. Senate elections in 2020 as it was in the House elections last year. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is facing an uphill election himself, knows it. Impeachment was always a longshot with Senate Republicans allowing Trump to drag America down to his level. We’re the only ones who can save our country, and we have to do it the old-fashioned way: at the ballot box.
