Mike Pence Thinks A Year Is Long Enough For The Russia Investigation
Mike Pence's obsequiousness to his master knows no limits.
In an interview this morning with Andrea Mitchell of NBC News, Vice-President Mike Pence suggested that it was time for Special Counsel to shut down his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, and efforts by the President and others to obstruct justice or otherwise undermine the investigation itself:
Vice President Pence on Thursday urged special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to bring his investigation into Russian election interference to a close, saying “it’s time to wrap it up.”
Pence’s remarks echoed calls by President Trump and his lawyers, who have argued that there is no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and that Mueller is now seeking to trap Trump into committing perjury about his actions related to the investigation.
Pence was asked Thursday by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell if he believes the investigation is a “hoax,” as Trump has repeatedly characterized it.
“Our administration has been fully cooperating with the special counsel, and we’ll continue to,” Pence said. “What I think is that it’s been about a year since this investigation began. Our administration has provided more than a million documents. We’ve fully cooperated in it, and in the interest of the country, I think it’s time to wrap it up.”
Pence added: “And I would very respectfully encourage the special counsel and his team to bring their work to completion.”
Pence was interviewed at Joint Base Andrews, where he and Trump early Thursday greeted three Americans returning from North Korea after being held in custody.
Pence declined to comment on Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, who is at the center of a widening investigation of his business practices.
“What I can say is that that private matter is something that I don’t have any knowledge about,” Pence said. “I think the White House issued a statement saying the same.”
Pence’s remarks about Mueller drew flak later Thursday morning from Democrats, including Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
“VP Pence has now brought his sycophancy to a whole new level,” Schiff wrote on Twitter.
In arguing the investigation should continue, Schiff cited unanswered questions about what Trump’s senior transition officials knew about former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s discussions with the then-Russian ambassador, as well as “new revelations every day.”
Here is Schiff’s tweet in full:
VP Pence has now brought his sycophancy to a whole new level. With questions concerning which senior transition officials were aware of Flynn’s secret talks w/ Russian Ambassador still unanswered and new revelations every day, investigation must continue without his interference. https://t.co/gXFdZVc15h
— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) May 10, 2018
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes that this is an interesting change in position for Pence considering the position his party has taken on past investigations:
[I]t’s worth picking out Pence’s assertion about the “interest of the country.” What this means isn’t clear, except that Trump is eager to be viewed more positively by the American public than he is and certainly sees the Russia investigation as an impediment to that. It seems clear that America will not soon mend its partisan differences and unify around any political leader, much less a president who’s never been viewed with approval by even half the country. The “interest of the country,” according to an April poll from The Washington Post and ABC News, is to continue the Mueller investigation, a position held by nearly 7 in 10 Americans, including 43 percent of Republicans.
What Pence is really saying is that a politically inconvenient thing should go away. There’s not much more to it than that, and one need not read too far into things to get that message. What’s striking, though, is how far that deviates from recent Republican attitudes toward investigations into their political opponents.
There’s the Benghazi investigation, of course, which extended from the attacks in Libya in 2012 until about a month after the 2016 election. It was instrumental in affecting the 2016 election, not because it implicated Hillary Clinton in her role as secretary of state but because it exposed the private email server she used during that period, leading to the FBI investigation that reemerged right before Election Day.
But it wasn’t just Benghazi. There was also the investigation into a failed 2009-2010 ATF program nicknamed “Fast and Furious,” which involved selling guns to criminals in an effort to uncover trafficking networks but resulted in putting guns into criminals’ hands with tragic results.
Republicans seized on “Fast and Furious” as a significant scandal in the early days of the administration of Barack Obama. Beginning in January 2011, shortly after Republicans regained control of the House, Republican members of Congress began pressing the administration hard on the issue. A preliminary report was issued that June.
That wasn’t the end of the investigation. When Attorney General Eric Holder refused to provide documents related to the investigation, he was held in contempt by the House. That was in June 2012, about 18 months after Congress first started asking questions.
Among those voting to hold Holder in contempt? Pence, then a member of the House from Indiana.
The probe kept going. In July 2012, Republicans released another report on their investigation, part one of three. In September, the Department of Justice’s inspector general released a report. The second part of the congressional report was released in late October 2012.
The third and final part? It came out last June in conjunction with a public hearing on the subject. Six years after questions began, questions continued.
Extricating politics from Congress’s oversight role can be tricky. But clearly Republicans felt as though an extended dive into the Obama administration’s handling of the ATF program was warranted. There were clearly partisan elements to the investigation, but also clearly issues that deserved more investigation.
The Mueller probe began about a year ago, picking up on an investigation that began in late July 2016. The overall Russia investigation, then, is a little under two years old. In that period of time, Mueller’s team has already secured over a dozen indictments and four guilty pleas. The scope of the inquiry began at a much broader scope than the “Fast and Furious” investigation and has only grown since then. While it’s been portrayed as partisan (often for partisan reasons), there’s no indication that Mueller’s leadership of the investigation is motivated by any partisan bias.
For Trump, it’s inconvenient at best that the probe continues, just as it was inconvenient for Obama that the House kept poking around on “Fast and Furious.” But that’s not a reason to curtail an investigation.
As Bump goes on to note, if Pence were still in the House and Hillary Clinton had assumed the Presidency under a similar cloud it is extremely unlikely that he or any of his fellow Republicans would be calling for an end to investigations after less than a year. That fact can be established by the fact that even before the election, Jason Chaffetz, who at the time was the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said that he planned to begin investigations of Clinton, her time as Secretary of State, the Clinton Foundation, and Clinton’s campaign as soon as the new Congress convened in January 2017. Somehow, I doubt that Pence would have objected if Chaffetz’s investigations were still going on today, or if the F.B.I. had reopened investigations of Clinton’s email server or the role of the Clinton Foundation and donations to the State Department while she served as Secretary of State. Indeed, he and other Republicans would most likely have been calling for the investigations to be expanded, not curtailed, and that they would have called for the appointment of a Mueller-esque Special Counsel to investigate Clinton because, of course, a Justice Department led by her Attorney General cannot be trusted to do the job on its own. And if by some chance, Clinton had done what Trump has done, it’s rather obvious how Republicans like Pence would be responding.
Coincidentally, these remarks come a day after The Washington Post published a broadside from George Will that goes after Pence for the obsequiousness he has shown in the face of Trumpism:
Donald Trump, with his feral cunning, knew. The oleaginous Mike Pence, with his talent for toadyism and appetite for obsequiousness, could, Trump knew, become America’s most repulsive public figure. And Pence, who has reached this pinnacle by dethroning his benefactor, is augmenting the public stock of useful knowledge. Because his is the authentic voice of today’s lickspittle Republican Party, he clarifies this year’s elections: Vote Republican to ratify groveling as governing.
Last June, a Trump Cabinet meeting featured testimonials offered to Dear Leader by his forelock-tugging colleagues. His chief of staff, Reince Priebus, caught the spirit of the worship service by thanking Trump for the “blessing” of being allowed to serve him. The hosannas poured forth from around the table, unredeemed by even a scintilla of insincerity. Priebus was soon deprived of his blessing, as was Tom Price. Before Price’s ecstasy of public service was truncated because of his incontinent enthusiasm for charter flights, he was the secretary of health and human services who at the Cabinet meeting said, “I can’t thank you enough for the privileges you’ve given me.” The vice president chimed in but saved his best riff for a December Cabinet meeting when, as The Post’s Aaron Blake calculated, Pence praised Trump once every 12 seconds for three minutes: “I’m deeply humbled. . . . ” Judging by the number of times Pence announces himself “humbled,” he might seem proud of his humility, but that is impossible because he is conspicuously devout and pride is a sin.
Between those two Cabinet meetings, Pence and his retinue flew to Indiana for the purpose of walking out of an Indianapolis Colts football game, thereby demonstrating that football players kneeling during the national anthem are intolerable to someone of Pence’s refined sense of right and wrong.
(…)
Hoosiers, of whom Pence is one, sometimes say that although Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky and flourished in Illinois, he spent his formative years — December 1816 to March 1830 — in Indiana, which he left at age 21. Be that as it may, on Jan. 27, 1838, Lincoln, then 28, delivered his first great speech, to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield. Less than three months earlier, Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist newspaper editor in Alton, Ill., 67 miles from Springfield, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob. Without mentioning Lovejoy — it would have been unnecessary — Lincoln lamented that throughout America, “so lately famed for love of law and order,” there was a “mobocratic spirit” among “the vicious portion of [the] population.” So, “let reverence for the laws . . . become the political religion of the nation.” Pence, one of evangelical Christians’ favorite pin-ups, genuflects at various altars, as the mobocratic spirit and the vicious portion require.
It is said that one cannot blame people who applaud Arpaio and support his rehabilitators (Trump, Pence, et al.), because, well, globalization or health-care costs or something. Actually, one must either blame them or condescend to them as lacking moral agency. Republicans silent about Pence have no such excuse.
There will be negligible legislating by the next Congress, so ballots cast this November will be most important as validations or repudiations of the harmonizing voices of Trump, Pence, Arpaio and the like. Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic. Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying.
These remarks by Pence today only add to the list of the things that Will writes about in his column, and they essentially confirm everything that he said about the Vice-President. While it’s understandable on some level that the Vice-President would be loyal to the President that selected him, the extent to which this Vice-President has been obsequiously loyal to the President even in the face of all the outrageous comments and other evidence that has mounted against Trump in the sixteen months since he became President. Whether it’s the President’s constant attacks on Mexicans and Muslims, mocking disabled people, women such as Megyn Kelly and Carly Fiorina., the Access Hollywood tape, the credible accusations of sexual harassment and assault by more than a dozen women, or Trump’s comments in the wake of the racist rally in Charlottesville last July, Pence has either been silent or has repeated the same nonsense he repeated in the Cabinet meeting that Will references above.’
Now, the Vice-President suggests that an investigation that is less than a year old has gone on long enough. He does this not because all the evidence has been uncovered but because the investigation itself, and the truths that it has already exposed, is politically investigation to his master. As Will says, one could almost excuse the way Trump acts because he’s an old man who has gotten away with acting like this all his life so he sees no reason to change. Pence, on the other hand, is a supposedly moral man who, like other Republican’s has sold his soul to the Trumpidian God. In some moral sense, that makes him worse than Trump and most certainly someone who should never be President in his own right.
Let me offer a deal on behalf of the Vice President. If you stop blogging about the investigation until charges are actually filed against President Trump or someone in his administration OR you actually blog about the multitude of serious questions and problems with the Muller investigation, he’ll be happy to let it go on as long as necessary.
You know what’s worse than being a bully? Being a bully who whines and cries when your victim fights back.
Mike
Pence’s pathetic servility is probably the only reason he’s still around, when nearly everyone else has been booted.
@MBunge:
Agreed, Trump is the worst type of bully.
Seriously starting to think MBunge is really losing it – now he thinks he can negotiate on behalf of Pence. Get back on your meds, Bungy.
@Franklin: Indeed, why who would think that the robotic bootlicker Republobolshevik Bunge would be so aware.
One should think he’d fear the Politruk would come round for him
Maybe Pence is looking at it another way – “How on earth could you still be investigating this crook? A year should have been plenty. The only reason I took this gig is that I figured I would be president by now.”
@MBunge:
You really understand that people who write about this idiotic rant of Pence’s are not crying about it, they are expressing disbelief that he can have so little self awareness as to actually have said it, right?
Deep down, you also really understand that claiming that this president (or anyone in his entourage) are being victimized by bullying is projection?
You cannot be as clueless as the character you play in this comments section.
Love that photo of Pence looking adoringly at his fearless leader.
@MBunge:
Michael Flynn? Or do you insist on one who has only had charges filed without yet pleading guilty?
@Pete S:
Back in the summer of 2016 I had the same thought: that Pence accepted the gig thinking, “Okay, Trump’ll get bored and overwhelmed and resign after a year, tops, or maybe, since he’s such an epic sleaze, he’ll be forced to quit and the job will be mine.”
Nothing, however, excuses the groveling Pence has done. It’s enough to make a vulture gag. George Will, whom I normally regard as a tedious old gasbag, really nailed it here.
@Joe:
Four years of Benghazi produced zero indictments. Merely one year of investigating the Trumpers is of course producing vastly different results.
“Mike Pence( Thinks) A Year Is Long Enough For The Russia Investigation”
I am sorry but I have to question the validity of the above word used in your title. I have yet to see any valid evidence of Pence having this ability. He does demonstrated a base level survival instinct via his ability to brown nose Trump numerous times. But reasonable, rational, empathetic thought of others, is just not there.
Seems that this is a required characteristic of all those Trumpers as is clearly demonstrated one post above. Must be a missing gene that allows Trumpers to despise truth, respect for others and apathy unless of course they are the injured party. Then we can hear the gnashing of their teeth and the beating of their chests proclaiming their unjust treatment. Found on numerous airwaves, TWITTER and on TV for days.
@MBunge:
I have two words for you Binge…Mike Flynn, National Security Advisor…pled guilty to to one count of lying to the FBI (a felony) about contacts he had with the Russian government during Trump’s presidential transition.
Yeah…I know you won’t admit you were wrong…you just run-away…that’s your MO.
@MBunge:
I’d love to hear what these are…
Did you see that Guiliani was forced out of his Law Firm in NY because of the way he’s made a fool of himself these past couple weeks?
Guiliani:
Greenberg Traurig spokeswoman:
Everyone and everything Dennison touches turns to crap.
What is it about Indiana and light weight Vice Presidents? Dan Quayle and Mike Pence?
I’m not sure Mike Pence could locate Russia on a labeled map of the world, with Russia being the only country that is labeled.
Everyone who defends him winds up humiliated, and that includes internet commenters.
@MBunge:
I refreshed my memory at VOX.
You may remember the original concern was “collusion” with the campaign, so “administration” is a nice try at goal post moving. However, the administration‘s first National Security Adviser has pled guilty. Two individuals from the campaign have pled guilty and the Chair faces multi count indictments in two jurisdictions. Several Russian individuals and organizations have been indicted, and some nobody in CA has pled guilty to helping the Russians. Not to mention Cohen, who I believe has not been charged. Yet. And it’s only been fourteen months.
@teve tory:
It did, however, produce over 40 criminal convictions of various Clinton cronies, allies and dog washers. Why do you guys always try to pretend that there was nothing to the Clinton investigations when so many people went to prison over it? And not for “lying to the FBI” garbage charges but things fraud, embezzlement and bribery? And the main reason the Clintons weren’t charged is because the MacDougals wouldn’t talk?
I have maintained and still believe this you should look to the Whitewater investigation if you want to know how Mueller’s is going to go. Like Whitewater, the investigation is broadening into more areas of sleaze. Like Whitewater, it is being denounced by the President’s political defenders as a witch hunt. Like Whitewater, it is producing criminal indictments of people in the President’s orbit. And, like Whitewater, I expect it to indicate a great deal of unethical behavior by Trump but to not to indict him, since the bar for indicting a sitting President is very high.
Returning to the subject of Pence: while he’s preferable to Trump, that’s about as low a bar as you can get. The longer this goes on, the more I despise him for having acquiesced to be a part of it. He’s showing, with every day that passes, that his supposed values mean far less to him than power. Kasich, to his enormous credit, was offered the chance to be the real power behind the throne and turned it down. Pence sold his soul for no power at all.
(PS – Doug, your link to the George Will article is to a different article).
Nothing in my comment ‘pretended’ anything of the sort. If you’ll go back and look, I bolded the words “Six years”, which is what’s directly relevant to Pence’s claim and the OP.
@al-Ameda: Geoffrey Nunberg’s book The Way We Talk Now includes a funny anecdote about Quayle when he was Senator:
In seriousness, I don’t think the problem with Pence is that he’s a lightweight, I think the problem is that he’s a morally loathsome snake.
a lot of idiots use “Virtue Signaling” to mean “someone doing something virtuous which I won’t.” but is there any more extreme example than this bullshit?
Is there anyone in this corrupt administration who is even remotely clean? Not only is this sleaze ball the worst president in American history, but his administration is probably the most corrupt, or certainly one of the most corrupt, in American history…and the dulcet tones of the chief lickspittle, who, by the way, is the personification of evangelical rank hypocrisy, aren’t making anything to do with this slimy clique any less repulsive…
@Hal_10000:
If that’s the case, we should all prepare for the Mueller investigation to serve, regrettably, as an exoneration of Trump.
@Hal_10000:
Well, except that Jim McDougal, the managing partner in the Whitewater Development Corporation, did cooperate with Starr. And still they couldn’t find anything to charge the Clintons with.
And of course you ignore that the vast majority of convictions had absolutely nothing to do with the Whitewater Development Corporation, i.e., the part of the wider “Whitewater controversy” in which the Clintons were directly involved.
For instance, there was fraud at the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan Association (without any involvement of the Clintons) and fraud at the Rose Law Firm (of which Hillary Clinton had actually been a victim).
So it remains plausible that the Clintons kept, in fact, clean.
To be honest, maybe there is stuff that I overlooked – it’s been more than twenty years. But your presentation of what happened doesn’t appear to be terribly reliable either. So you will have to work a bit harder to make your point that the Starr and Mueller investigations are on similar trajectories.
ETA:
I hope that you aren’t suggesting that the Starr investigation wasn’t pretty blatantly partisan…
@Daryl and his other brother Darryl: Just listen to Hannity some time, that’s where they all get this from.
…stop blogging about the investigation…
Stop trying to bully people ito silence!
Who do you think you are? One of der Fuerher Trump’s speech police? You don’t get to tell other citizens what they can say!
Get bent!
@MBunge:
And those would be…?
This should be easy for you, Mike. All ya gotta do is look up some stuff at Red State and Worldnut Daily and you can bury me in alternative factoids, but I’m betting I don’t hear from ya.
…into silence!
(even though edit function works and 15 minutes is 5 times longer than the old format…I still miss preview)
@Hal_10000:
Yes, a six year investigation into Arkansas real estate wheelers and dealers found corruption. I’m glad. Crooks should go to jail. And the Arkansas governor was seen at events with these people. They were everywhere that Was anywhere in Arkansas. And over the course of six years the governor was investigated and was found to not be criminally involved with these people. That’s what was the conclusion.
I don’t worry about Pence. Cults of personality are not transferable.
Echo chamber much?
@michael reynolds: He could always develop a cult of no personality, that seems more appropriate for Pence.
I agree with Pence. A year is long enough for the investigation.
Now it’s time for every single member of this Administration and all their supporters in congress to start doing hard time.
@MarkedMan:
Seen at events with people? Yes, he just happened to be around … his primary business partners of 20 years, the man he appointed to be head of thrift regulation, some of his legal advisors (including the AAG) and his lieutenant governor. These weren’t random people he met. Good Lord, the lengths to which you guys will go to pretend that the Clintons weren’t sleazes.
Of course it will. Trump could, in his words, shoot someone on the street and his followers would declare it be an exoneration.
http://nypost.com/2017/04/03/fresh-evidence-the-russia-scandal-is-a-team-obama-operation/
@Hal_10000:
That quote is one of the more misused quotes I’ve seen. He said it during the GOP primaries, when “his followers” merely referred to the roughly 30% of the Republican primary electorate that seemed to stick with him through every one of his controversies on the campaign trail. In the context of the primaries, Trump’s remark was an accurate (and uncharacteristically self-aware) observation at the time.
But after the primaries, that “rule” stops being so clearly applicable. In the general election many people voted for Trump very reluctantly. Exit polls showed only 38% of voters expressing a positive opinion of him, while overwhelming majorities of voters described him as unqualified, dishonest, and misogynistic. When you consider that he won right on the knife’s edge, the notion that he’s politically invincible becomes hard to defend. Sure, by all the conventional laws of politics and by all normal standards of decency, he “should” have been destroyed by all those controversies. But that doesn’t mean the outcome was inevitable or that everyone who voted for him couldn’t have cared less. If he loses even a marginal amount of supporters, then unless he somehow gains support elsewhere it’ll have a real impact, both this fall and in 2020.
Now, impeachment and conviction for whatever turns up in the Mueller or Cohen investigations is another matter. I’m still highly skeptical that we’ll ever see 67 Senators voting to remove Trump from office, no matter what gets revealed–because even though not all Republican voters are hardcore Trump cultists, enough are that most Republican office-holders live in terror of them.
Still, that’s a far cry from saying Trump can do anything without any political consequences.
Mmmm, smell the panic. Our disappearing Trumpaloons, @Bung and @Florack and @Guareri have all re-emerged, filled with a desperate need to fulfill their master’s agenda of discrediting the investigation because. . .
. . . because Trump is just so very innocent.
I savor your fear.
@MBunge:
You support Trump, a President for which the above is truer than of any President in American history. Not only is he the most degraded and petty of bullies, he is also incredibly thin-skinned–a bully, and a whiner, without equal.
@teve tory: “a lot of idiots use “Virtue Signaling” to mean “someone doing something virtuous which I won’t.”
Yeah, “virtue signaling” is a phrase that used to have a meaning, but now is just “that guy thinks he’s better than me because he doesn’t want to beat up fags.” It’s up there with “political correctness” and — well, just about any phrase Pearce uses — in the hall of murdered language.