Inquiring minds want to know, what will Justin Amash — wait, who? JUSTIN AMASH, you know, he’s the US Representative from Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District. He’s a bona-fide Trump-hating Republican. Waaaay back in 2016, he joined the lemming list of Republicans who opposed the nomination of Donald Trump. Some individuals who had signed onto that list — Sen. Lindsey Graham, for example — have had second thoughts and now support the President. But not Justin Amash. No siree Bob. His motto is ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ In case you doubt this, consider his recent Twitter emission, which is a series of variations on a theme announced at the beginning of his Twitter thread.
1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.
2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.
Oh dear.
Since there is no evidence that No. 1 is correct — on the contrary, the contention is absurd on its face — No. 2 is also preposterous, since the Mueller report concluded 1. there was no collusion (‘conspiracy,’ ‘coordination’) between the Trump campaign and Russia and 2. there was not sufficient evidence to bring a charge of obstruction of justice, either.
Hinc illae lacrimae: hence these tears. Mueller tried. God knows he tried. He staffed up his team of bloodhounds with anti-Trump Hillary supporters like the despicable Andrew Weissmann, a man who has specialized in destroying innocent companies and putting thousands of innocent people out of work. Weissmann is a walking poster child for prosecutorial abuse, ergo he was just the chap Mueller wanted by his side. That ‘dream team’ of gotcha lawyers spent nearly $40 million, turned over every stone (and at least one Stone, i.e., Roger) they could find. They uncovered some slugs, but for all their carefully orchestrated made-for-TV SWAT-team-driven dawn raids, they found exactly nothing about any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Because there was none. There was only the scabrous bit of oppo ‘research’ — unverified gossip and malicious fantasy, really — assembled by a Trump-hating Brit, commissioned and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and siphoned into the DOJ’s grinder by Brennan-Comey as a pretext to conduct illegal spying against an America citizen (Carter Page) and hence as a backdoor into the Trump campaign.
It’s all over now, Baby Blue. The chief conclusion of the Mueller report — no collusion — was a watershed. The American people had been waiting around for nearly three years. Every night, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, George Stephanopoulos, and their confrères bleated on about how the latest bombshell/tipping point/beginning of the end was just about to unseat the President. And then the dawn choristers of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski took up the refrain, aided and abetted by the moist scribes of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and whatever organ it is that is responsible for the upkeep of poor Jim Acosta.
They seem not to have got the memo, though, anymore than the Nadlerites in the House or the Warren tribe in the Senate have gotten the memo. It pleases me, Dear Reader, to share it with you: the Mueller report, followed hard on by the appointment of William Barr, is what Aristotle called the ‘catastrophe’ for this little drama. Those events marked sudden change of fortune for The Narrative. The hunters are now the hunted. The investigators the investigated. King Oedipus is now blind and wretchedly alone. Byron York got it exactly right: ‘Without a judgment that a conspiracy…took place,’ York wrote, ‘everything else in the Trump-Russia affair began to shrink in significance.’ And that’s not all: ‘In particular, allegations that the president obstructed justice to cover up a conspiracy were transformed into allegations that he obstructed an investigation into a crime that prosecutors could not say actually occurred.’ If there is no crime, there is nothing to obstruct. Anyone not spoiled by a law degree can understand that.
Next up, James Clapper, John Brennan, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and all the rest of that unofficial Stasi will fall over themselves to accuse each other of wrong doing while loudly, loudly protesting their own innocence. ‘Dossier? What dossier?’
Which brings me back, finally, to the uncompleted question with which I began: what will Justin Amash be doing after the 2020 election? One thing we can be confident in predicting: the representative of a solidly Trump-supporting Michigan district will not be returning to Washington. As the RNC’s Ronna McDaniel observed, Amash has made a career out of ‘parroting the Democrats’ talking points on Russia.’ His latest tweets are just the latest installment in that anti-Trump comic book. Maybe the soon-to-be former congressman can take John Brennan’s place mouthing anti-Trump slogans on the nightly news: Brennan will be occupied elsewhere, possibly clad in orange (it would be orange). Anyway, the bottom line is that Justin Amash will soon be pursuing a new line of work, pundit, probably, maybe the Michigan correspondent for The Bulwark. Time will tell.
