There is no possible way that the media can wrap itself in the banner of the First Amendment to get away with the fact that they have lied repeatedly, since before Trump was even inaugurated, that the repudiation of Hillary Clinton was somehow connected to Trump colluding with the Russians.
The First Amendment protects a lot of things, including what the left is pleased to condemn as “hate speech”, but one thing it does not condone is out and out lying for political gain and/or to swing elections. News organizations and individual reporters need to be hauled up before federal grand juries and forced to testify to what they knew and when they knew it, and who told them to spread their lies to an unwitting* American public. As has been noted repeatedly since forever, this is not Watergate and the Administration was not trying to get the press to play along with its coverups. There were no coverups, but the press attempted to infer that there were, and have been lying at Mueller’s feet like slavering dogs waiting for the master to drop doggie treats ever since the special counsel inquiry began.
Glenn Reynolds highlights a Rich Lowry tweet this morning: “That there was nothing to Russia collusion gets to a key point about Trump’s motivation that the media and the Left were never willing to credit – he *really thought* he was being treated unfairly, and for good reason.” To which Reynolds adds: “Yep. He knew what they were trying to do to him from the beginning.”
The press (and in fairness, the Dems in Congress) are now baying about Mueller’s unwillingness to find any evidence that Trump obstructed justice, claiming that means he must have done, and that AG Barr is Trump’s buddy and must be covering it up. They demand that the entire special counsel report be made public. AG Barr has already said that his end intent is to make public everything that can be legally made public, which means some of the report is going to be redacted because it contains privileged grand jury testimony and other such things that the DoJ has traditionally never made public. (In other words, AG Barr is going to do exactly what any other AG before him would have done, and possibly more, because he understands transparency in this matter is the only way the grumbling will ever be muted — and of course it will never completely go away, because after all, Orange Man Bad.)
The other thing about obstruction is that to credibly claim it happened, you have to show that actions claimed to be obstructive were unusual and would actually have hampered a legitimate investigation. It’s become clear that the FBI was complicit in the lies surrounding the Steele report, and that FBI agents were working to discredit Trump and (effectively) to pull off a “soft” coup that would remove him from office. (Not that I’m sure what that would have accomplished, since Pence would have become President, not Shrillery.) It’s also become clear that Trump had every right to fire FBI Directory Comey, without that being prima facie evidence of obstruction of justice, because it’s not illegal for the President to remove people who work for him. That’s just the bottom line. This isn’t 1867 and we don’t have an unconstitutional Tenure of Office act that the Radical Republicans used to trip up Andrew Johnson when he fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. And Comey was obviously a loose cannon who needed to be terminated the very day Trump took office, and not a moment later. Instead, Trump inexplicably kept him around for a couple of months and then terminated him, so that was sort of a self-inflicted media wound on his part, notwithstanding the fact that it was done legally and with cause.
If there is no collusion and no obstruction, there is no case, and the media have out and out lied for months with their sole purpose being to either bring down or severely hamper the President of the United States. This calls for severe punishment of all involved, both in government and in the media, and some solemn and heartfelt promises that this sort of thing will never happen again. It also points up the fact that the bureaucracy is far too large and out of control — the swamp really does need to be drained, and there really is a Deep State apparatus working against the best interests of the United States.
On top of this, we now have calls to “pack the Court” (an unfortunate slogan for the left, since their idol FDR got a beat-down over that very phrase) and to abolish the Electoral College. These calls are not originating in a vacuum, since the millennial children who are making them are not sufficiently educated in civics to know either what the proper function of either of those institutions is, or why it is important to keep them as they are. Whenever the youth start agitating to overthrow institutions, you can bet they are being gently prodded by shadowy agents of change funded by those who do not love this country and would prefer to run it themselves as a fiefdom, with the rest of us as their compliant serfs.** Follow the money. It will lead you to interesting places, as it generally does — Tom Steyer, George Soros, et al. And who knows? Possibly “the Russians”, too.
But Trump won’t be the one they’re colluding with.
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* Well, not really unwitting, if you already didn’t trust the media — like most conservatives.
** Good luck with that.