Alleged bad thoughts are not crimes — at least not outside George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”
During special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, his legal “dream team” tried to make a secondary case that Donald Trump also obstructed efforts to prove Trump-Russian “collusion.”
Trump was said to have advised his lawyers and other subordinates, past and present, not to cooperate fully with the Mueller investigation. Yet the special counsel did not pursue any actionable cases of egregious interference by the White House.
Indeed, Mueller would never have concluded his $35 million, 22-month investigation had he not enjoyed cooperation from the White House.
White House employees were questioned freely by the special counsel. Documents were released. When the special counsel’s exhaustive investigation into purported Trump-Russia collusion found no such crime, the fallback claim of obstruction arose. Trump allegedly wanted to curtail Mueller’s parameters of inquiry into something that was proven not to be a crime.
Mueller found no grounds for a criminal referral on obstruction of justice. But he repeatedly hinted that Trump had thought about obstructing the non-crime of collusion.
In the Ukrainian melodrama, Trump is accused of the thought crime of considering the withholding of military assistance unless Ukraine investigated possible Ukrainian tampering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and also former vice president Joe Biden’s intervention in Ukrainian politics on behalf of his son.
Biden had bragged at a Council on Foreign Relations conference that his threats to withhold non-military assistance to Ukraine led to the dismissal of a prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. It turns out Shokin may have been considering an investigation of the energy company where Biden’s son Hunter had enjoyed a lucrative position on the board of directors.
Two questions arise from hours of impeachment inquiry testimony before the House Intelligence Committee: —>
Read the rest from Victor Davis Hanson HERE.
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