Around the world in a one-hour drive to Mystic
It took Sen. Chris Murphy about an hour on Friday to ride between his home in Cheshire and a speaking engagement before the Mystic Chamber of Commerce. So it seemed like more than enough time to issue tweets on the state of the world today and U.S. foreign policy, in easy-todigest “thread” bites.
Let us stipulate here that Murphy was not driving, so he had both his hands and presumably a full attention span to accomplish the task at hand.
For a liberal Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a Republican Senate and President Donald Trump at the helm of U.S. foreign policy, this was not going to amount to a pretty picture.
In fact, Murphy said in tweet # 1 that his aim was to “list all the current foreign policy disasters caused by Trump.”
North Korea? “Murdering politicians left and right under the cover of praise from the American President.”
Israel? “Further away from peace than ever.” And a two-state solution “seems to be disappearing forever before our eyes.”
Iran? “Restarting their nuclear weapons program and threatening to attack American forces in Iraq.”
Impending climatechange disaster? “The US government no longer believes climate change exists or cares to do anything about it.”
China? “1 million Muslim Uighurs and Kazakhs (are) in detention camps as the US withdraws from global human rights leadership.”
Russia? “Election interference operation is kicking into higher gear, as US government sits idly (and purposely?) by doing virtually nothing.”
Murphy was just getting warmed up, with Syria, Ukraine, Canada, U.S.Mexico border and other hot spots left to go.
But eventually the destination in Mystic drew near and Murphy had to relax his fingers and come back down to local ground.
“I feel like I’m halfway through the list,” he said in #13 of the thread. “The point is — things are worse than ever and Congress needs to stop sitting on its hands. We can put a check on a foreign policy that has gone off the rails.”
‘Robert Mueller is the movie’
Robert Mueller’s brief statement before the cameras on Wednesday provided two or three times the daily dosage of catnip to liberal Democratic antagonists like Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
Among other things, Mueller appeared to contradict Attorney General William Barr’s statement last month about the nowinfamous opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which stipulated that a sitting president cannot be indicted.
Barr on April 18, hours before release of the full (albeit redacted) 448-page Mueller report, said that Mueller had assured him the OLC policy was NOT the determining factor in Mueller’s decision to sidestep prosecuting President Donald Trump for obstruction. (And that’s why Barr, stepping into a perceived vacuum, made the decision himself not to go forward against Trump on obstruction.)
Fast forward to Wednesday: Mueller, the evercareful chooser of his own words, essentially said the OLC report is precisely what brought the curtain down on him.
“The special counsel’s office is part of the Department of Justice and, by regulation, it was bound by that department policy,” Mueller said. “Charging the President with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider.”
For Blumenthal and other Democrats, this is the “but for” question, as in “Trump would have been indicted for obstruction but for the OLC policy against indicting a sitting president.”
And it was a “Bingo!” moment.
Mueller’s “message to American people is the longstanding policy that there can be no indictment of a sitting president prevented him from indicting Trump,” Blumenthal said.
So notwithstanding Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declaring “case closed,” the Democrats theater of operation now shifts decisively to Congress. The market may be in decline but stock in the “i” word is on the rise.
As a potential interrogator on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Blumenthal said his first order of business is summoning Mueller to testify. Easier said than done, since Republicans who control the committee have expressed little interest, and Mueller himself said such an appearance would be pointless (and that the report itself “is my testimony.”)
Why does it make such a difference? Like them or not, the facts (as far as we know them) are there in the report, right? So why must Mueller appear himself, against his wishes?
“Most Americans will never read the report, and many will not see or hear his nine-minute statement (made on Wednesday),” he said. “Most Americans won’t read the book, but they’ll see the movie. And Robert Mueller is the movie.”