Justice obstructor President Trump
Mitchell (SD) Daily Republic, Letter to Editor
Reasonable people can see President Trump’s recent actions as criminal.
When he demanded an oath of loyalty from the chief of a federal probe into his presidential campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia, that’s obstruction of justice. When, failing to get this oath, he then fires the chief, thus beheading the probe, that’s obstruction, too. And when he then threatens to publicly unveil alleged secretly taped private conversations between him and the chief in which the president insists without proof (and the FBI denies it) that the chief assured him he wasn’t under investigation himself, that’s obstruction, as well.
I’m not talking lawyerly here. I don’t know the formal, precise description of “obstruction of justice” in codified law, but, as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said about pornography in 1964, “I know it when I see it.” And so, I suspect, do most rational, reasonable folks. It’s clearly an egregious abuse of power. Mr. Trump is trying to throw up roadblocks—obstructions, one might say—to impede an official investigation targeting a campaign that he ahimself led. That can’t be legal, can it?
In the news today, our own Sen. John Thune flaccidly referred to this stiff presidential middle finger to the American judicial process as “a little bump in the road.” Haven’t yet heard from our other two federal legislative “representatives,” but their previous cynicism and self-serving political calculation regarding the president’s serial moral atrocities—and thus their manifest disregard for the larger dignity and well-being of their state and nation—implies they will merely second Thune’s disturbingly limp response.
What else can we do but call them out if our own U.S. legislators won’t stand up to this narcissistic, ethically vacant ignoramus who endlessly threatens and violates all of us?
