While I want the Mueller investigation to continue – and I sure want to know if the Trump campaign directly colluded with the Russian government to hack the DNC and Podesta – I’m not comfortable with every aspect of it.
First off, the recent subpoena against Sam Nunberg seemed awfully broad – both in terms of the time period covered and the number of people involved – especially for someone who left the campaign pretty early on.
Secondly, from this Washington Post article outlining the possible state of the investigation, there are a couple of facets from the possible legal case that should be unsettling. Apparently, there could be charges of “conspiracy to defraud the United States”. Which can be interpreted this way:
In the 1910 case Haas v. Henkel, the Supreme Court interpreted the provision broadly to include ‘any conspiracy for the purpose of impairing, obstructing, or defeating the lawful function of any department of government.’ Notably, there is no requirement that the government be cheated out of money or property.
Wow. Interpreted broadly, almost any form of direct protest against a federal agency becomes a crime.
Also, there’s the crime, which some Trump associates have already pleaded guilty to, of lying to federal officials. Perjury is a crime, of course. And that’s sensible. A duly constituted court of law can’t function without some incentive to make people tell the truth. But federal law enforcement officers are not the court. People might have all sort of reasons they don’t want their personal lives picked over by federal officials. It’s on the federal officials to find a way to build a case without being overly invasive.
Again, I’m no fan of Trump, and I want the investigation to continue. But we should be cautious about overly empowering federal law enforcement. You would think this would have been a lesson Democrats would have learned during the Clinton administration.
Oh, and for what it’s worth, there’s no evidence yet that anything Mueller comes up with will be persuasive politically to Republicans or Trump’s supporters. And that is key to this whole effort to understand what happened in 2016. If we can’t agree on a shared set of facts and a set of values for what’s acceptable in our republic, we have years of political poison ahead of us.
Bill Poorman 