Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats are in a tight spot. They came up empty with the Mueller report but their base still wants blood.
They can’t impeach Trump without making him even more popular and as a result handing him reelection on a silver platter.
They will try anything to get to Trump, that they can get away with, so in a preemptive move designed to shield Trump from Pelosi’s coming reign of terror, Chuck and Lindsey among others in the GOP are building a firewall around Trump to protect him from Dem overreach.
From The Hill: Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) on Monday set the tone for his caucus’s rank and file, signaling the GOP will join the White House in casting Democratic attacks emanating from the Mueller report as being all about the 2020 campaign.
“If this were legitimate oversight, that would be one thing, but I think this is more like harassment and it’s all politics,” said Cornyn, formerly the No. 2 Republican in the Senate. “Obviously Democrats were very disappointed in the Mueller report and they’re not willing to accept the conclusions and move on.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, said House Democratic subpoenas and demands for senior administration officials to testify are unnecessary because “the president already gave a million pages to oversight,” referring to Trump’s order to the director of national intelligence and the Justice Department to declassify Russia-related documents.
Grassley downplayed Mueller’s finding that Trump ordered then-White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, arguing “there wasn’t any crime committed.”
“Any conversation that a president has with anybody is between him and his colleagues,” Grassley added.
The GOP arguments are a departure from some comments made by Republican senators in the days after the Mueller report was released.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday: “I don’t care what happened between him and Don McGahn.”
Trump, last week, denied that he directed McGahn to terminate Mueller, claiming, “if I wanted to fire Mueller, I didn’t need McGahn to do it, I could have done it myself.”
Cornyn told reporters Monday that Trump’s conversations with McGahn aren’t relevant because Mueller was never fired.
“While there were some comments about stopping … Mr. Mueller, that was never followed through on,” Cornyn said, noting that the president didn’t need his aides to get rid of Mueller and could have fired him himself.
