A Time to Kill
It was 1996, amazingly, twenty-two years ago. John Grisham’s novel about race and the South, A Time to Kill, was released on film. Matthew McConaughey played the young white lawyer who discovers his own prejudices; his client, Samuel L Jackson, falsely accused of rape, made them clear. His mentor, a disbarred and disgraced Southern gentleman, was Donald Sutherland. Sandra Bullock was the young researcher who found the important information, and was kidnapped by the Klan. The pivotal scene, when the white McConaughey convinces a white Southern jury to be color blind is one of the great closing arguments in cinema.
Trey Gowdy, retiring Congressman from South Carolina, is fifty-three, too old for the McConaughey role. But he’s carefully combined the smoothness of McConaughey with the worn tiredness of Sutherland to create his own persona. Thursday, his “cross examination” of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in the House Judiciary Committee; tied pulled loose, three days of blonde beard on his face; had the drama and pace of that climatic scene in A Time to Kill.
Of course, it wasn’t a cross examination, it was a closing argument. Gowdy used the idiotic tweets of FBI Agent Peter Strozk, to try to discredit the Mueller investigation. Gowdy tried to demonstrate that Strozk’s bias against Trump managed to save Clinton from prosecution, and prevented Trump from being President. It would all make sense; except that Trump did become President. The Russia investigation was never leaked out. The FBI and Strozk protected it, keeping it so secret that they misled the media, convincing them that there was no investigation.
Gowdy demanded that Mueller take his evidence and, “…present it to the damn grand jury.” “Finish it the Hell up,” Gowdy insisted of the year-long investigation. This, after leading his own Benghazi committee on an $8 million, 322,000 word, two and a half year quest to find wrong-doing by Hillary Clinton: and found nothing.
The fact that the Judiciary committee questioned Strozk himself this week was left silent. Strozk, and the Democrats on the Committee, asked for the testimony to be made public, but the Republican members have kept it classified, carefully cherry-picking snippets to bring up in public hearing.
But Gowdy did make one good point in his “McConaughey” moment.
During the hearing, the US House of Representatives, led by the Freedom Caucus and not Speaker Ryan, voted to warn General Rosenstein that they will consider his impeachment if the Justice Department doesn’t give them the “scope and sequence” documents of the investigation.
Those documents outline the “who, what, and where” of Mueller’s investigation. It is beyond unheard of that a criminal inquiry would be opened bare in the middle of the investigation, even more that the information would be turned over to those being investigated, as Mayor Giulani has suggested. Mueller and Rosenstein will never allow it: should the House of Representatives truly want, they can create a Constitutional crisis.
Rosenstein may be impeached by the House. The Republicans are so enamored with defending the President, that they are “all in” regardless of what might come out of the investigation. And while the Senate would never remove Rosenstein, the impeachment itself would probably require his recusal from oversight of Mueller. Or, more likely, it would give the President the excuse to fire him. And once Rosenstein is gone, Mueller loses his “air cover,” and is open to attack.
The Mueller investigation can bring charges against almost everyone involved, except for the President himself. It is highly unlikely that Mueller would bring those charges; instead, he will probably report to the same House Judiciary Committee a referral for impeachment of the President. Whether that report is private to the Committee and buried, or public to all; is up to Rosenstein, or whoever would replace him.
Where will things go? We have the crisis on the border, the Supreme Court vacancy, the ongoing trade war with our “former” allies, and a President still unconvinced that Russia attacked our elections. We are in a world of crisis, and the Mueller investigation is looming over all. Gowdy’s dramatic diatribe, intentional or not, was really a warning: get the investigation done, get the charges out; or the political situation may spin so far out of control that no one can foresee the consequences.
On that point, he’s right.
The title of this piece – “A Time To Kill” – is sadly ironic.
Yesterday, a day after President Trump called the press “the enemy of the people”, a man shot and killed 5 newspaper reporters who worked at one of the oldest papers in the country, a newspaper that published the Declaration of Independence when it came out.
Your comment that “we are in a world of crisis” is a rather cosmic understatement.
We have a President who is a “wanabe” Hitler. He’s not a Hitler yet – but the only safety net that keeps him from achieving that dream is the network of American institutions that have held for over 200 years. And that network is now fraying.