Democrats' Russophobia Hid Trump's Real Crimes

Jeff Cohen: And it’s been this obsessive focus on Russiagate to the exclusion of issues that might actually resonate with the U.S. voting public, like Trump’s corruption.

And what’s concerned me all along as a political analyst is the Democratic leadership, whenever anyone over the last two years would bring up impeachment–and there are so many provable, in light of day, done in public actions by Trump against sectors of the U.S. public, against the Constitution, against democratic process, whether it’s his refusal to divest his business interests which leads to financial conflicts of interest, that’s unconstitutional, the Muslim ban, you can’t discriminate against people based on religion, abuse of the pardon power with Joe Arpaio, politicizing federal prosecutions, attacks on the media coupled with threatening to use federal agencies to go after journalists that you don’t like. This kind of thing is unprecedented in modern presidential history and goes beyond Nixon.

And yet, all you got from Pelosi and other leaders when they were asked about these abuses and “what about impeachment,” they’d say, “We’re waiting for the Mueller report.” Those were some of the stupidest words ever uttered by a political leadership. And they did it for months and months, over and over, “We’re waiting for Mueller.” Well, Mueller was investigating this very narrow thing, did Trump’s associates conspire with Russia? And it was just very bad politics to put all their eggs in that basket. And this month, USA Today did a poll well before two days ago, and 50 percent plus a little bit more said they saw the Mueller probe as a witch hunt. If the polls are taken tomorrow, it’s going to be even bigger. So this whole strategy on the part of the Democratic Party leadership, sort of marginalizing the big issues of corruption and attacks on the constitution, pushing them to the side while waiting for Russia, Russia, Russia collusion and Mueller, that turns out to be, I think, a big political error.

Paul Jay: And of course, the biggest issues one would think we’d go after Trump for, climate change denial being by far the most important, and then all the way down from what’s been happening in the Department of Justice and Department of Energy, the most reactionary set of policies that could possibly be imagined.