Cal Thomas: Political animus and personal vendettas

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, August 1st. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Commentator Cal Thomas with some thoughts about what’s next, following the Mueller hearings.

CAL THOMAS, COMMENTATOR: Following Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s appearance before two House committees, the anti-Trump Washington Post seemed to raise the white flag. A headline read: “Democrats struggle to figure next move against Trump after Mueller hearing falls flat.”

The hearings were mainly a non-event, but Mueller’s response to questions about why he had an all-Democrat team of attorneys was interesting. He claimed they were hired because of their experience and he did not know their politics.

That’s difficult to believe when we’re talking about 10 attorneys. 

Federal Election Commission records examined by CNN analysts found one of the Mueller attorneys contributed more than $56,000 to Democrats before the 2016 election. Two lawyers contributed the maximum of $2,700 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 

Mueller wants us to believe they conducted their investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia without political bias. Imagine if the situation was reversed and a special counsel had hired only Republican attorneys to investigate a sitting Democrat president.

Kimberley Strassel got to the heart of the investigation’s bias in her Wall Street Journal column. She said it wasn’t as much about what was investigated as what was ignored.

“The most notable aspect of the Mueller report,” she wrote, “was always what it omitted: the origins of this mess. Christopher Steele’s dossier was central to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe, the basis of many of the claims of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. Yet the Mueller authors studiously wrote around the dossier, mentioning it only in perfunctory terms. The report ignored Mr. Steele’s paymaster, Fusion GPS, and its own ties to Russians. It also ignored Fusion’s paymaster, the Clinton campaign, and the ugly politics behind the dossier hit job.”

Mueller said an estimated 200 times this and other related matters were “out of my purview,” when they should have been central to it.

Unwilling to give up, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler announced he will try to gain access to grand jury testimony—which would be illegal.

Yogi Berra famously said, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over. And in the case of this fishing expedition, it’ll never be over for Democrats. 

More than 100 House Democrats and several senators have now expressed support for impeaching the president. But a recent Washington Post-ABC poll found only 37 percent of Americans agree with them. Fifty-nine percent oppose impeachment.

If Democrats choose to run on the Mueller investigation in 2020, they’ll find themselves losing to Trump again. 

For WORLD Radio, I’m Cal Thomas.

(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) Former special counsel Robert Mueller arrives for a House Intelligence Committee hearing on his report on Russian election interference, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Wednesday, July 24, 2019. 

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