By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, September 30, 2019
The Australia story is not a story. Per the Times:
President Trump pushed the
Australian prime minister during a recent telephone call to help Attorney
General William P. Barr gather information for a Justice Department inquiry
that Mr. Trump hopes will discredit the Mueller investigation, according to two
American officials with knowledge of the call.
And this is bad because?
And like the call with the
Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, the discussion with Mr. Morrison shows
the president using high-level diplomacy to advance his personal political
interests.
Does it? Because it seems pretty unreasonable to me to
(a) invest the power of investigation in the executive branch, (b) demand the
executive branch conduct an investigation, and then (c) claim that if that
investigation ever intersects with the personal political interests of the head
of that executive branch, it’s ipso facto illegitimate. What is our
standard here? “You must investigate this topic, but don’t ask any questions
that might redound to your benefit”? Come now.
There’s no suggestion of a quid pro quo here. And there
is nothing odd about Trump’s asking these questions of Australia given that
Australia contributed information into the Five Eyes system that, eventually,
informed the Mueller investigation and had serious effects on American
politics.
Perhaps the problem is that it would be illegal and
untoward for President Trump to ask world leaders to cooperate with Attorney
General Barr, and/or that it’s not within Barr’s powers to speak with foreign
law enforcement officials about what his prosecutor needs from them?
Is that it? Here’s the Times again:
Justice Department officials have
said that it would be neither illegal nor untoward for Mr. Trump to ask world
leaders to cooperate with Mr. Barr. And it is within Mr. Barr’s powers to speak
with foreign law enforcement officials about what his prosecutor needs from
them.
Ah.
As I said on The Editors podcast last week, I
think that the Ukraine call was “pretty bad.” This? This is a non-story.
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