Here the promised follow-up rebuttal to the Faux News-Pence-Giuliani shrill scream that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Trump’s Treason has gone on too long. From them comes the predictable panic-laced cry of “Wrap it up!”
I believe their protests should be faced and answered forthrightly, and that I intend to do. My credentials? Well, as a sometime historian without portfolio, I have published on historical matters before (for example: here, here, here, and here). Historians, of course, rely on the written record, as do I. And they deal with real facts, not “alternate facts” or “relative facts,” nor do they ignore precedent.
With that in mind, I submit that the truth-seeker Mueller has not exceeded his “time limit;” indeed, considering all the facts in play, he’s barely begun, with a long, long way to go. To prove the claim, I’ve researched the last ten major scandals that have rocked our nation, and focused on how long they occupied the civic mind and lasted in legal time. Moving pastward, we have:
10. Benghazi.
This fresh-in-the-mind “scandal” that began in September 2012 when Islamic terrorists attacked and killed the American ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, along with three other diplomatic personnel in the city of Benghazi. Who was to blame? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became the prime target of Republicans. After at least eight congressional investigations spanning four-plus years, the final probe, held by the Republican-led House Select Committee on Benghazi and chaired by Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, reluctantly found in its June 2016 report no evidence of her culpability. Conveniently, the televised eleven-hour questioning of Clinton, marked by angry exchanges, was held during the summer of 2015, as her candidacy for the presidency was just gearing up.
Well, if she wasn’t to blame for the tragedy, then who was? That vaguely and thinly spread to lesser officials among the diplomatic corps—and to the U. S. military for not effecting a timely (and impossible) rescue. Realists and veterans of conflicts know it all falls under the common label, the ”fog of war.”
In my version of the truth, the only real scandal was that House Republicans used a national tragedy to play an obvious and odious game of partisan politics. Duration of the farce? Well, Gowdy’s committee actually issued its final report on December 12, 2016 –when the mare was already out of the barn and the reptilian monster was on its way in. My addition comes up with four years and three months. Compare that with Mueller’s mere year on Treasongate.
Next to come in a Ten Part Series: “The Valerie Plame Affair”