Pardoning Trump for Obstruction Would Be a Big Mistake

[dajoki]

Pardoning Trump for Obstruction Would Be a Big Mistake
https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/59337-rsn-pardoning-trump-for-obstruction-would-be-a-big-mistake

<<snip>>

Forgetting the Mueller Report is however a risky strategy.

The first problem with ignoring the Mueller Report is that it validates the Republican position that the report was a witch hunt and much ado about nothing. That’s double jeopardy for the Democrats, who argued that the report was comprehensive, damning, and illustrative of patently illegal conduct on the part of the President of the United States.

The Republicans will have a field day with this rhetorically. “The Democrats made such a big deal out of this and now they won’t even put it in the Articles of Impeachment.… If the Democrats were lying then, the Democrats are lying now.” It will be a big leg up in the court of public opinion.

The second problem is that if you ignore the illegal acts detailed in the Mueller Report now, you run the risk of ignoring them forever, in effect forgiving or even pardoning those crimes. After all, “If Congress didn’t include them in the Articles of Impeachment, then there probably wasn’t much to it after all.”

The third problem is that Robert Mueller’s report, while too lengthy and dense for the public to absorb and grasp, is still a very powerful legal document. If the impeachment of Donald Trump really does go to a full trial in the Senate, and the betting odds are that it will, the Mueller Report will be a very difficult piece of evidence for the Republicans to litigate. As a legal document, it is rock-solid big-time.

The smarter strategy for the Democrats is to include the Mueller Report in an article of its own. They can still focus rhetorically on Ukraine-gate if that helps the public stay engaged. But the risk of excluding Robert Mueller’s report far outweighs the inconvenience of including it.

[democratisphere]

1. No deals, no pardons, no nothing.

Indict, convict and imprison for life.

[KPN]

2. I agree. We cannot ignore the Mueller Report

without validating Barr’s absurd and false conclusion that its findings were inconclusive regarding criminality. The Rs need to be put on the spot about this, in public trial fashion. Trump also needs to face charges for his clearly criminal acts for the good of our country’s future. We’d be foolish to let these go and be normalized in doing so.