Dahlia Lithwick: What the Mueller Investigation Was Always About

[babylonsister]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/07/mueller-testimony-adam-schiff-threat-to-elections-russia-interference.html


What the Mueller Investigation Was Always About
In the partisan warfare that dominated Wednesday’s hearings, we’ve forgotten the point: Our elections are under threat, and the president doesn’t much care.
By Dahlia Lithwick
July 25, 2019
1:02 PM

snip//

For anyone hoping for a made-for-TV denouement, this wasn’t it. But anyone seeking a physical tableau of two men who love their country, from different parties and different eras, agreeing sadly that it was not “ethical” or “patriotic” or “right” for the president of the United States to sell the country into electoral oblivion for a hotel deal, the ending was sober and kind of perfect. Schiff and Mueller landed the plane on the tragic mutual agreement that whether or not the president committed a crime, he sold us all out.

For those who ever believed a by-the-books, unelected special counsel in the midst of a partisan political firestorm was going to save America by way of congressional testimony, Wednesday was a dramatic betrayal. He erred, as we expected, on the side of understatement and minimizing, disputing the characterization of events delivered by politicians on both side of the aisle and refusing to offer legal conclusions he had already arrived at in print. But none of that drains the force of what he revealed in his investigation, and the conclusions of that effort are not in dispute.

In these final moments, Robert Mueller and Adam Schiff weren’t worried about scoring points. They worried about the future of free and fair elections in a country that doesn’t seem to have noticed that free and fair elections are vanishing before our eyes. As Mueller warned of the interference, “they’re doing it as we sit here. And they expect to do it during the next campaign.” That is what Mueller was investigating. This is his warning. It’s easy to tell ourselves that all of the corruption and self-dealing and the purposive cruelty to immigrants and enrichment of the wealthy can be cured in November 2020. The problem is that this solution is precisely that which is under threat, and that which we may never quite realize was lost.

[gratuitous]

1. "Free and fair elections are vanishing before our eyes"

Well thank the good lord above that the media are dominated by the chucktodds who are far more concerned with "optics" than any boring old election stuff. I can't imagine why the country doesn't seem to have noticed that elections thing. Now a word from our sponsor, a prescription drug with a list of potential side effects far worse than any condition it's meant to treat.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. We don't need a manager of policies, we need a patriot cut from Founders' cloth

who lives, breathes, eats, and understands sovereignty. We're not explaining the importance of free elections well enough. Yes, it's about self-rule, self-determination, but it's also about having and supporting the Federal State to back it up.

That is what I'm not hearing from our candidates, or at least only hearing hints of it here or there. It's more than denouncing Trump, it's about denouncing Trump for the right reasons, well articulated, for the patriotism that founded the country and grew the political state. "Man is by nature a political animal," wrote Thomas Hobbes. We are losing that mental, moral, and realpolitik perpective.

[maddiemom]

3. Well put.....No, EXCELLENTLY put!

I felt just the same.