By Charles C. W. Cooke
Sunday, March 24, 2019
One of the stranger arguments that I heard throughout the
Mueller saga — and am hearing today, now that it’s turned out to be a dud — is
that Donald Trump’s irritation with the process was unreasonable and
counterproductive. This tweet, from CNN’s Chris Cilizza, is a nice illustration
of the genre:
Donald Trump spent 18 months
running down an investigation that has given him, largely, what he wanted: A
credible and well investigated report that he nor his campaign colluded with
the Russians.
Certainly, Trump does not always help himself. And,
certainly, there were times when it would have made more sense for him to have
to stayed quiet. But the idea that people who believe they are innocent should
remain sanguine about long and expansive investigations into their lives is a
preposterous and illiberal one, closely related to the dangerous question, “If
you’re so innocent, why do you mind the government poking around?”
This investigation, remember, was not mere neutral
background noise, which the White House could simply ignore. It was the
justification for endless public accusations of “treason”; the presumed driver
of inevitable impeachment; the text — and subtext — of an entire midterm
campaign. At times, it was even pointed to as a reason that the president
should . . . well, not be president (“no judges should be approved while he’s
under investigation!” etc.). It is true, of course, that we would not have the
“credible and well investigated” report if we didn’t have the “credible and
well investigated” report. But that logic, I’m afraid, is rather circular. It
would also be true that an investigation into whether I was a murderer would
demonstrate that I am not a murderer. That wouldn’t mean I’d have to be calm
about the arrangement.
Once upon a time, self-described “liberals” grasped this
intuitively. They also grasped that it was dangerous to repeatedly undermine
our well-established standards of evidence, to reverse our presumption of
innocence, and to insist in perpetuity that we find tangential process crimes
to serve as substitutes for the lack of underlying infractions? Do they know
these things now?
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