Quote:
Originally Posted by LessinSF
He already built the case. WTF are you talking about? Congressional investigations? What would be added? I rue the day you and yours achieve any control.
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Democrats in Congress can do one of three things:
1. vote on impeachment now,
2. continuing investigating to build out the story and drive coverage, or
3. drop it.
1. appears almost as futile as 3., because Republicans in the Senate are not going to vote for impeachment at present. If that holds, the ultimate remedy is political -- use what Trump did in a way that hurts him and Republicans in the next election. The best path to that is 2. I believe that the Mueller report is pretty damning, but for those who don't, flesh it out and make the evidentiary record clear, instead of something in AG Barr's file cabinets.
eta: Josh Marshall:
Through countless debates over recent months we’ve had one core issue. We relied on a criminal investigation with the Trump/Russia scandal rather than an investigative commission or true congressional inquiry. That flawed decision is at the heart of most of what was discussed today.
Normally, prosecutors should investigate and indict or not indict and that is it. That was the repeated claim from Committee Republicans today and if it’s a conventional criminal probe they’re right. To them, there really shouldn’t have been a Report at all. Indeed, because the President couldn’t be indicted he shouldn’t even have been investigated at all. All of these claims make sense if you buy into the premise that this is a conventional criminal investigation – something the current Special Counsel guidelines leave ambiguous.
In practice it’s not true.
What the public has needed and to a great degree expected was not specific indictments or non-indictments but answers on what actually happened. Illumination rather than prosecution is what is really critical, especially since the most serious kinds of wrongdoing may not be crimes. That fact, by the enfolded logic of the probe, meant that the most critical information remained confidential, with the possibility of real disclosure in the hands of Bill Barr, the President’s fixer.
Because the only real investigation is a criminal one, we’re told that it’s really not ours to know. The only question we get an answer to is whether there was sufficient evidence to mount a criminal prosecution. That’s a legitimate legal standard. It’s all but meaningless as a civic, democratic standard. We got some information in the Report. But we didn’t get to see any of the key witnesses testimony. We can’t ask the chief investigators the most basic questions about what they found. Mueller and his team say we get some information, the Report. Republicans say we should get none. Both operate, however, on the basic premise that this is a criminal investigation and the public’s right to know is highly circumscribed by a thicket of DOJ guidelines and Bill Barr’s efforts to protect Donald Trump. To a significant degree, they’re right. That’s why a public investigation, a congressional investigation are absolutely critical.
The key questions and the critical questions of accountability and national safety are not bound up in statute laws. At the end of the day, Rep. Adam Schiff seemed to suggest he would conduct such an investigation as I’ve described above. “We must find out.” It wasn’t clear to me whether he was serious about this, whether we’re going to get the kind of investigation we need or whether he just means the same in the shadows stuff that has been going on for months to no particular end. We know that the President has basically stonewalled every effort to get the testimony of people who served in his administration. That in itself is an abuse of power. But his ability to shield events during the campaign is vastly less. Everyone who shows up in the campaign period investigation should be called up to the hill for public testimony. Clearly, from today, that should happen under Chairman Schiff.
