Donald Trump has incited a whole new explosion of phony outrage recently as he made a public announcement that he had been fully aware of the fact that General Flynn had been dishonest with the FBI and had lied to Vice President Pence at the time when Trump chose not to fire Flynn.
Predictably, Democrats have used this announcement as an excuse to once again level charges of obstruction of justice against the President. They are saying that the fact Trump fired James Comey and not Michael Flynn is evidence of politically motivated tampering with the administration of justice.
Of course, they fail to recognize that fact that a new president has the right to dismiss holdovers from the previous administration.
In fact, we wish that he would just summarily dismiss everyone hired by the previous administration- it might stop the leak problem.
Trump had this to say about the new outrage du jour on Twitter. “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!”
But President Trump had, even more, reason to fire Comey other than the fact that he is essentially a hostile Obama Administration appointee. He fired Comey because of time and time again, Comey refused to publicly announce the fact that Trump himself was not under investigation. That alone did, and still does, make it possible for the Mainstream Media and the entire Democratic Party to continue this complete and utter Russian collusion fabrication to score political points and stymie the president’s efforts to repair the economy.
Trump’s legal team released a statement on the issue earlier this week saying; “A President cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under [the Constitution’s Article II] and has every right to express his view of any case. The tweet did not admit obstruction. That is an ignorant and arrogant assertion.”
Harvard Law professor, Alan Dershowitz has echoed this point repeatedly over the past 12 months, saying, “You cannot charge a president with obstruction of justice for exercising his constitutional power to fire Comey and his constitutional authority to tell the Justice Department who to investigate, who not to investigate. That’s what Thomas Jefferson did, that’s what Lincoln did, that’s what Roosevelt did. We have precedents that clearly establish that.”
Even a number of left-leaning lawyers have chimed in saying precisely the same thing- showing that even though the law is often a matter for interpretation- some points of the law are so clear and settled that they simply cannot be debated. A top Washington D.C. constitutional law attorney said, that an obstruction charge is usually only an ancillary charge and not a principle one.
That is to say, no one goes to jail for obstruction of justice. They go to jail because they did something else- something substantial- and that they attempted to avoid punishment by obstructing justice. In Trump’s case, the primary charge would be collusion with the Russians, which is backed up by zero evidence. A charge of obstruction of justice alone is like a bun without the meat – it is, in fact, a complete nothing burger.
But the Democrats don’t need facts or evidence to keep their boat afloat. All they need to do is continue to convince low information voters that Trump is the craziest, guiltiest, most orange president ever.
Bob Bauer, a law professor from NYU attempts to rebut the claims made by Dershowitz saying, “It is certainly possible for a president to obstruct justice. The case for immunity has its adherents, but they based their position largely on the consideration that a president subject to prosecution would be unable to perform the duties of the office, a result that they see as constitutionally intolerable.”
Now here’s the shocker. Bauer is a former White House Counsel member who served under President Obama. He goes on to say, that part of the litany of charges that brought the Nixon administration to ruin were accusations that Nixon “obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice.”
Of course, he fails to note that Nixon was not charged with obstruction alone- and in fact- Nixon resigned before the investigation could be completed and charged proved true. But it’s interesting that they bring up Nixon because Nixon is perhaps the second most maligned and misreported president in history- second only to Trump.
But it stands to reason that the FBI would be concerned about the possibility of people in positions of great power obstructing justice. That’s why it would probably be more honest for them to start looking into the reasons why Comey has been posting tweets which could easily be interpreted as admissions of having obstructed justice, such as this;
‘“But justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” Amos 5:24 https://t.co/o89PSY1YBd
— James Comey (@Comey) December 1, 2017’
It seems odd that the former FBI director who has recently been outed as having altered an internal memo in 2016 that should have led to an indictment of Hillary Clinton over the Servergate scandal, has the nerve to get involved. His memo said that she had been “grossly negligent.”
Gross negligence is a technical legal term that describes the quality of a crime for which a person is liable. Once a thing like this has been said by a law enforcement official of any stripe or authority- action is required. It’s not a matter of preference, it’s a matter of the legal process- which was obstructed.
We know well that Comey, without missing a beat, went on from writing that memo to testifying before Congress that he didn’t think Hillary had acted with malicious intent.
What we are witnessing is yet another example where Democrats, and the enemies of Trump- indeed, the enemies of America- are accusing their political opponents of the very thing they are guilty of in an attempt to deflect the justice that should be coming for them.
