Dear America,
I am constantly perplexed by the ability of the Republican Party to get away with hypocrisy. They've been puling about the Democrats' investigations of President Trump as if he hasn't invited them, starting in 2016 when he was just a candidate for the presidency. Remember him inviting the Russians to release the Clinton emails if they could get hold of them? That was the prelude to his self-dealing in the oval office. It started with his son meeting with a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower during the election campaign to evaluate her purported "dirt" on Clinton and it was downhill from there. The disclosure of the Russian intervention in the campaign in the forms of disinformation on the internet and snooping in the election hardware and data followed, and Trump's disavowal of his own intelligence chiefs regarding that interference, which was surely sufficient to invite scrutiny of Trump's motivations and integrity.
Then there was the letter firing FBI Director Jim Comey, purportedly based on a memorandum from Assistant Attorney General Rosenstein that was not influenced by Trump, in which Trump went out of his way to thank Comey for telling him three times--not once, not twice, but three times--that he himself wasn't under investigation regarding Russian interference...and oh by the way, you're fired. Then there was Trump's lacerating and constant berating of his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, who was and continues to be a shill for Trump, for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, which eventually led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Next came the attempts--sub rosa mind you--to have Mueller fired, all of which were ignored or rebuffed by the people Trump was trying to get to do his dirty work for him, among them his White House Counsel, Don McGann. And now there is the Ukraine phone call and sicking his personal attorney, Rudy Giulianni--a man whose ethics and morality are a close match with Trump's--on the Ukrainians and our ambassador there in an attempt to enhance Trump's reelection prospects by inspiring a bogus investigation of Trump's likely opponent in 2020. There's a lot to investigate regardless of Trump's and his party's persistent claims that it is all a deep state witch hunt, but with crocodile tears streaming down their collective cheeks they insist that what the Democrats are doing is contrived, political and outright wrong. They seem to have forgotten the "pillory Hillary" campaign they ran for four years starting in 2012. The Republican controlled House ran five of them more or less contemporaneously, none of them finding anything inculpating Clinton, which morphed into investigations of her emails, personal ones of which she wrote on the same private server that she used for her duties as Secretary of State. Darrell Issa and Jason Chaffetz ran the main Benghazi "investigation" and subsequently, Trey Gowdy, who now is regarded even by his own party as a pompous joke, ran the email investigation. Mike Pompeo was on the committee too. Again, nothing was found, which was no surprise since James Comey confirmed for the committee that no crime was committed by her, no matter what Donald Trump says. Between Comey's eleventh hour "vindication" of Clinton after his public proclamation that he was investigating her use of a private server in the first place, and the constant publicity the investigations in congress got...again, all finding nothing significant...the Republicans virtually invented the political smear campaign, and now they are complaining about investigations not of suspicions but of overt acts by their man in the White House as if butter wouldn't melt in their mouths.
But in spite of all this, we never hear the media point to the campaign against Hillary Clinton that they waged non-stop for four years using the power of the majority in The House and then The Senate. And of course there is the refusal to give Obama nominee Merrick Garland a hearing when he was put forward as a candidate for Justice on the Supreme Court in consequence of Mitch McConnell's abuse of Senate rules. There is the refusal by McConnell to allow a vote on gun control bills sent to The Senate by The House, and on and on, but somehow they get away with it and claim virtue in the political colloquy while the media stand by and fail to confront them. It must be nice to have such impunity. The Democrats could sure benefit from it.
Your friend,
Mike
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