The President* Is a Crook and Everyone in Congress Knows It (Esquire)

Robert Mueller wasn’t Richard Pryor at the mic, but he confirmed it in his own way.

WASHINGTON—Rep. Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, Nuisance of the Nation, was gaggling outside the chambers of the House Judiciary Committee, and he was fairly glowing with the kind of radioactive glee common to shady used-car dealers and the peddlers of aluminum siding to infirm widows.

“Republicans,” Gaetz burbled, “are taking a victory lap.”

This is curious, indeed. In the first of his two appearances before congressional committees on Wednesday, former special counsel Robert Mueller testified that a) he didn’t indict the president* on obstruction at least partly due to that godawful Office of Legal Counsel opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted, an opinion that should be burned and have its ashes scattered on Sam Ervin’s grave; b) that a president*—like, say, this one—can be indicted once he leaves office, thereby implying that there is something there for which he could be indicted; c) that his report did not exonerate the president*; d) that there was a concerted effort on behalf of the White House to hamstring his investigation into the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 presidential election; and e) that Russia definitively wanted the president* to become the president*. And, remarkably, two of these statements came as answers to Republican senators. If this is a victory lap, I don’t know what a crash-and-burn would be.

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