No, Mr. Rove, There Needs To Be A Reckoning On Russian Collusion

Contrary to Rove’s advice that Trump “move on” from Russian collusion, Trump needs to use his bully pulpit to expose Deep State crimes for Americans to see.

Rove Russian CollusionKarl Rove appears in the WSJ this morning with some advice: Move On From Mueller, Mr. President.  Mr. Rove is dangerously clueless. His is not advice President Trump needs nor is it advice that would serve the country.

Rove rightly observes that “William Barr’s letter summarizing special counsel Robert Mueller’s report lifted an enormous political weight off President Trump and his team.”  But then Rove advises that Trump leave all the unanswered questions about what was in essence an attempted coup to those below him in the executive office hierarchy.  Trump, he opines, should float above it all and ignore it.

These questions should be answered, but Mr. Trump need not devote much time to pressing them. He can count on Mr. Barr, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz to continue cleaning up the FBI and Justice Department. Mr. Horowitz is already investigating possible FISA abuses.

There’s also Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, who promises to get to the bottom of “disturbing” aspects of the FBI and Justice Department’s 2016 and 2017 activities. As House manager of the 1998 Clinton impeachment effort, he learned the importance of not overplaying your hand.

Further, Mr. Rove advises:

Mr. Trump now has an unusual chance to fashion something like the presidential honeymoon that media bitterness over Hillary Clinton’s loss denied him when he took office. Team Trump should use the Mueller report to pivot to issues, like the economy and the opioid crisis, that matter to swing voters who will decide the 2020 presidential election.

Where has Rove been?  Despite this ongoing, slow motion coup aimed at President Trump, our President has been addressing the economy, the opioid crisis, and most other of the serious issues effecting our country.  He does not have to “pivot” to those issues.  They have to make it into the press.  But the media has been focused like a laser on Mueller and Russian collusion.  They won’t start reporting in any meaningful way on other issues until Trump goes on the offensive and things start to look very bad for the left.  Then their focus will change.

It is amazing just how out of touch Rove is with this country.  This is decidedly not the America of 2000 when Rove partnered with George Bush to craft a successful run for the Presidency.   The Democrat Party of 2000 was dominated by Clinton centrists with at least some remnants of intellectual honesty.  The Left of today is a different beast, given over wholly to identity politics, post modern subjectivity, autocracy, and socialism.  Leftists are spoon feeding that toxin to every person coming out of higher education and, increasingly, K-12.  The Left in America started fast transitioning to this ideological “end stage” of hard core neo-Marxism, during the Bush Presidency.  No one more than Mr. Rove should recognize that, at least in hindsight.

To take a walk back down memory lane, in the wake of the 2000 election, you had the 60’s radicals completing their take-over of academia, the rise of far Left politically savvy groups like that led by Kos, and a massive infusion of money into far Left causes from George Soros and his mid-90’s creation, the Open Society Foundation.   The Democrats’ Overton window went from Bismarck’s welfare state to Marx’s socialism.  And with it came a whole host of toxins, including post-modernism, lawlessness, unequal application of the rule of law, disdain for the Constitution, and contempt for any American who does not wholly agree with the neo-Marxist dogma.

The first serious manifestation of this was the claim that Bush lied about WMD.  I am sure you all remember that.  It started out with Barbara Boxer on the Senate Floor in 2003, if I remember correctly, and then “Bush lied, people died” became both a mantra and a mythical dogma, endlessly repeated by the left and their increasingly corrupt media partners.  Rove advised Bush to ignore it and let those below him respond, much as he is advising Trump now to ignore this attempted coup and let others handle it.  That worked out well,

While Bush, at Rove’s urging, maintained dignified silence, the left and their number in the media succeeded in rewriting history into dark fiction and moving this nation hard to the left.  Indeed, at one time, at least as late as 2010, recognized this reality.  That was when he penned an op-ed in the WSJ admitting My Biggest Mistake in the White House, Failing to refute charges that Bush lied us into war has hurt our country.

In the end, Rove’s strategy gave us Obama, ISIS, Obamacare, a wildly triumphal class of neo-Marxists intent on seizing power by any means, and a series of constitutional crises — from DACA (presidential assumption of legislative powers), to the Iran Deal, to the Paris Accords, to using the regulatory bureaucracy to replace Congress, and to the Supreme Court assuming power to rewrite the Constitution — that threatened and, because there have been no systemic fixes, still threaten the fabric of our nation.

And yet Mr. Rove opines that:

Mr. Trump needs to understand that despite months of relentlessly railing against a “witch hunt,” his supporters are not as revved up as his detractors. That’s the conclusion of the March 20 Fox News poll, which surveyed voters before the Mueller probe ended. While it found Mr. Trump’s approval rating to be 46%—approaching his February 2017 high of 48%—only 27% strongly approve of the president while 42% strongly disapprove.

Has Rove had his head in the sand?  The fact that Trump has an approval rating anywhere in the double digits is simply amazing, given the relentless attacks on him every single day from virtually every single media outlet over a period of years.  There are a huge number of Americans who have no clue that this “Russia collusion” scam was an attempted coup.  Might that not be impacting the poll numbers.  This attempted coup could not have been more serious a direct attack on our nation, one designed first to throw an election and then, in the aftermath, to overthrow a validly elected President or, failing that, to utterly hamstring his administration and render him ineffective.  If this gets swept under the rug without the wrongdoers exposed and punished, our nation will not long survive.  It will only further embolden those who would destroy our nation in the future.

Trump needs to do the opposite of what Rove has suggested.  He needs to stand before the American people and lay out what is publicly known:

  • That the DNC paid for Fusion GPS to generate opposition research, generating a series of what is now known to be wildly false allegations. Moreover, if those allegations were knowingly false when presented to the FBI to start an investigation that constitutes a crime.
  • That it appears that certain members in the leadership of the FBI and DOJ, in an effort to spy on his campaign and to investigate himself and his administration in the hopes of finding a crime, themselves broke laws regarding FISA.
  • That it appears that several people involved may have committed the crime of lying to Congress.
  • That a whole host of leaks of false information seemingly came out of the FBI and DOJ in an effort to undermine and bring down the lawful government of the United States.
  • That a number of innocent people were unlawfully unmasked as part and parcel thereof, in violation of the law and their rights under the 4th Amendment.

Once the president loudly identifies those grievous alleged criminal acts, the President should say that he is joining with Congress to request that the AG appoint a special counsel to investigate what happened and to punish any who in fact have broken the law.  This is well beyond the powers of the Senate to fully investigate, however much I look forward to the entertainment of watching Lindsey Graham 2.0 unleashed.

Then, and only then, can Trump pivot, Mr. Rove.  Though actually, it won’t be Trump pivoting.  It will be the media pivoting, both to avoid showing the inner workings of the attempted coup that just played out and their own duplicity.

Two final notes.  One, Lee Smith at Tablet has an exceptional article up today, System Fail, excoriating the press for being nothing more than partisan mouthpieces for their favored ideology.  He concludes:

American democracy is premised on a free press that does its best to provide the public with information. Misinforming the public is like dumping toxic waste in the rivers. It poisoned our democracy—and it continues to do so. In fact, the most important thing for the public to understand is that Russiagate is not unique. It’s the way that the expert class opines on everything now, from immigration to foreign policy.

Take for instance last week’s big news that President Trump had decided to recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The decision was universally praised in Israel, by both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and by opponents like Yair Lapid. Yet Obama’s former ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, insisted that the decision was politically motivated, telling the Washington Post that “the timing seems pretty transparent.” Surely, like his ambassadorial colleague, McFaul, Shapiro knew exactly what he’s talking about when he tweeted that the decision was made without “any policy planning process to consider potential reactions by Russia, Assad regime, Hezbollah, Arab states, Europe, etc., some of which may not be immediate. A decision like this should factor in such questions. No evidence it has.”

Shapiro was dead wrong. As the Atlantic noted in a detailed reported piece posted hours after Shapiro’s tweet, “the push for Trump to make such a move has been going on for more than a year, due to parallel efforts by Israeli officials and members of Congress.”

But whatever. Experts can say anything they like—the Saudis hacked Jeff Bezos’ emails and photos of him and his girlfriend; Jamal Khashoggi was an American journalist; Jussie Smollett was nearly lynched by Trump supporters; Brett Kavanaugh was part of a rape gang, etc., etc. And reporters will print it, and editors will shrug, because that’s what the press is now—a pass-through mechanism mostly used for manipulative, ill-informed and often nonsensical propaganda.

Americans still want and need accurate information on which to base their decisions about their own lives and the path that the country should take. But neither the legacy media nor the expert class it sustains is likely to survive the post-dossier era in any recognizable form. For them, Russiagate is an extinction level event.

I couldn’t agree more.  But again, this goes to my point about Rove, that it is not enough for Trump now to float above this mess, but rather to set in motion the processes that will expose all of this to the public.  Otherwise, Russiagate will not be an extinction level event for a press full of partisan hacks, it will be an extinction level event for this nation.

Lastly, from Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, there is this:

RAND PAUL: Former Obama CIA chief promoted ‘dossier,’ demands investigation of Obama team.

Sen. Rand Paul escalated his demand for an investigation into former Obama officials who “concocted” the anti-Trump Russia scandal, revealing that former CIA Director John Brennan was the key figure who legitimized the charges and discredited “dossier” against the president.

In an interview, the Kentucky Republican said the Senate Judiciary Committee should immediately ask Brennan about his involvement in the document that helped to kick off the Russia collusion investigation of President Trump.

“I think we need to find the truth,” he told Washington Secrets. He said the goal would be to stop similar faulty investigations into future administrations, “Democratic or Republican.”

I think we need a special prosecutor to investigate this, not just Senate hearings.

Amen.


[give_form id=”59195″]