Cover-Up

The Worst Cover-Up of All Time

By RICH LOWRY

President Donald Trump may be guilty of many things, but a cover-up in the Mueller probe isn’t one of them.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, attempting to appease forces in the Democratic Party eager for impeachment, came out of an internal meeting on Wednesday and accused the president of a cover-up, a term with all the familiar Watergate connotations.

This infuriated the president, who blew up the latest pointless bipartisan meeting on infrastructure over it. So it goes in Washington’s constitutional crisis as opera buffa.

The cover-up charge is strange, not to say incomprehensible, in light of the fact that Congress is in possession of a 448-page report produced by the Trump Department of Justice cataloguing the alleged obstruction that Congress wants to investigate in such exhaustive detail that many members haven’t had the time to read it.

If this is a White House cover-up, it’s too late. It’s a cover-up of an alleged crime that has already been extensively exposed, not by whistleblowers, not by Jerry Nadler, not by hostile journalists, but a DOJ prosecutor who worked under the supervision of Trump’s handpicked deputy attorney general.

Pelosi declared later in the day Wednesday, “As they say, the cover-up is frequently worse than the crime.” Or in this case, a substitute for the crime.

Mueller found no Russia collusion or coordination and didn’t even accuse the president of obstruction, instead pronouncing him “not exonerated” (a bizarre judgment for a prosecutor to make, but that’s a topic for another day).

Pelosi hasn’t deemed the alleged obstruction detailed in the Mueller report worthy of impeachment, but now insists that Trump’s resistance to congressional probes is obstruction of justice “in plain sight” and “could be impeachable.”

This is an alleged process crime on top of an alleged process crime, all stemming from an investigation that Trump had the power to stop it but never did (even as he openly hated it and came up with various schemes, never effected, to crimp it).

The Mueller report is chock-full of direct accounts of private conversations with the president, which would ordinarily be considered the most sensitive White House communications most likely to trigger a claim of executive privilege. The White House never tried to block any of the testimony. On any given page, the footnotes of the Mueller report are likely to refer to Reince Priebus, Rob Porter, Hope Hicks or Don McGahn, among many others top officials.

Mueller writes about episodes involving the president in such compelling novelistic detail exactly because everyone talked. The only exception was the president himself, who only took written questions about the Russian portion of the probe (remember that?). But Mueller stipulates in the report that he didn’t try to subpoena the president, in part, because he had gotten the relevant information from everyone else.

After going through this investigation for two years, run by a prosecutor with extensive resources and considerable powers, and a well-demonstrated willingness to anyone not telling the truth, the White House is balking at repeating the experience with Congress.

It has zero political interest in abetting high-profile hearings with former White House officials such as McGahn, and legitimate privilege claims to make over communications between the president and his advisers and over the vast amount of unreviewed underlying material of the Mueller report.

This is a high-intensity version of the typical jousting between the two branches. Some of it will surely be negotiated out, as suggested by the deal between William Barr and Adam Schiff on Wednesday over counterintelligence documents, and some of it will land in the courts.

Congress obviously has its own legitimate claims here, although the fact-finding authorized by Pelosi is largely a charade to avoid grasping the nettle of impeachment.

The Democrats could slap together a couple of hearings with law professors and former prosecutors and impeach Trump tomorrow if they wanted to. But Pelosi doesn’t, still worried that the politics are too perilous.

This is what makes the current situation so crazy. Trump, let alone Barr or McGahn, isn’t the one stopping Congress from pursuing impeachment. They have no control over it whatsoever. Impeachment is entirely a matter for the House, which is entirely under the control of Pelosi.

She, not the president, is “obstructing” an impeachment inquiry in the literal sense of not letting one go forward, despite many of her members wanting one and despite the Trump DOJ handing her a potential road map in the form of a 448-page report reflecting the accounts of everyone even tangentially related to the matter.

If this is a cover-up, it is the worst executed cover-up of all time.