U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy -- a conservative Republican, former prosecutor and Benghazi attack dog -- offered some advice to Donald’s Trump’s personal attorney over the weekend.
"If you have an innocent client, Mr. Dowd, act like it,” Gowdy said on Fox News. "If the allegation is collusion with the Russians, and there is no evidence of that, and you are innocent of that, act like it."
If Trump is innocent, Gowdy pointed out, “you should want special counsel Mueller to take all the time, and have all the independence he needs to do his job.”
Yet that is not what they want, and they do not act as if Trump were innocent.
Trump attorney John Dowd didn’t act like it over the weekend, when he demanded the immediate and premature end of the Mueller investigation, before it can be concluded.
Trump certainly didn’t act like it either:
Those do not sound the tweets of a man confident that he is innocent. They sound like the rantings of a man grown increasingly fearful of being exposed, and increasingly desperate to halt the investigation by any means necessary. That sense of paranoia is compounded by other Trump tweets, including one alleging “tremendous leaking, lying and corruption at the highest levels of the FBI, Justice & State.”
Remember, Trump has already fired one FBI director in an unsuccessful effort to end the Russia investigation. He has also threatened to fire his own attorney general for recusing himself from the investigation, because by doing so Jeff Sessions surrendered his ability to protect Trump from its findings.
Now Trump is publicly accusing lifetime Republican Robert Mueller, a man who was universally applauded for his fairness when appointed special counsel, of conducting a highly partisan “witch hunt” against him that disqualifies him as an investigator and prosecutor.
My fellow Americans, this is bizarre.
While acting guilty is not concrete proof of guilt, Trump’s behavior leaves us with one of two choices: He is indeed guilty -- of what we do not know -- or he is so unhinged that he can’t help but act guilty even when he’s not. Neither speaks well of a person who serves as president.
We’ve also seen this pattern too often not to know where it is headed. We saw it with Rex Tillerson, with James Comey, with Andrew McCabe, with Reince Priebus. In an ever-escalating series of tweets and statements, Trump is whipping himself and his followers into an emotional state in which firing Mueller comes to seem justified and necessary to them, even when it is not. He is being encouraged in that process by much of the conservative media industry, which thrills at goading Trump into following his own worst instincts.
If that process plays out as it has in the past, if Trump does fire Mueller to stop an investigation into his own actions, all hell breaks loose and we face a constitutional crisis that exceeds even that posed by Watergate. And the people in positions of power that could intercede and prevent it are instead doing little or nothing.
In the interests of their party and more importantly the country, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should immediately request a private meeting with President Trump. In that meeting, they should warn him against interfering in any way with the Mueller investigation, and lay out the potential consequences if he does not. They should do so soon, before it’s too late.
If they don't, what happens next will be on them too.
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