Bob Kerrey: How did Department of Justice get the Trump-Russia investigation so wrong?
The writer, of New York, is a former Nebraska governor and U.S. senator.
Delusions fascinate me in part because I have so many of my own. Most often delusions are harmless. Sometimes they are not.
At
the moment my fellow Democrats are suffering from two that are harmful.
The first is that Americans long for a president who will ask us to pay
more for the pleasure of increasing the role of the federal government
in our lives. That this is a delusion can be seen in the promises made
by six successful Democratic candidates in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and
Michigan: three governors and three senators. Not one of them supported
the Green New Deal, a tax on wealth or “Medicare for all.”
The
second Democratic delusion is that Americans were robbed of the truth
when Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and Attorney General William Barr
concluded that President Trump did not collude with Russia in 2016. All
evidence indicates that the full report will not change the conclusion
that Donald J. Trump did not collude with Vladimir Putin to secure his
victory in 2016.
Rather than
investigating the president further, Congress needs to investigate how
the Department of Justice got this one so wrong. If the president of the
United States is vulnerable to prosecutorial abuse, then God help all
the rest of us. Members of Congress cannot do this themselves. We do not
trust them enough with such a vital mission.
Congress
should create a nonpartisan commission to find out what went wrong and
to tell us what needs to be done to make certain it never happens again.
A commission to investigate the FBI needs to focus on four questions:
1. Has the law that gave the
director of the FBI a 10-year term of office been sufficient to protect
the appointee from political pressure to investigate potential crimes of
candidates or elected officials? Neither Democratic nor Republican mobs
should decide the outcome of our criminal justice system.
2.
How can we write clear rules that govern the behavior of the candidate
or officeholder? Tweets can and do stoke the fire of the mob. That is
what they are intended to do. When the chief law enforcement officer
encourages his audience to chant “lock her up,” this signals the FBI to
follow the mob. When he sends out tweets that encourage law enforcement
to investigate political opponents, this is also mob rule. Rules of
acceptable behavior do not apply just to the president but to Congress
as well. In the Twitter age, all of us need to understand when our
candidate has crossed the line.
3.
When is it appropriate for the FBI to begin an investigation? Once
started, these things are hard to stop. A single campaign official
suggesting the possibility of collusion with a foreign power or a
document written as opposition research or a demand from a member of
Congress are very thin reeds upon which to challenge the legitimacy of
an elected official.
4. Are
federal pardons justified? The commission needs the authority to examine
whether some Americans were convicted and sentenced because they did
not tell the truth about a collusion that never happened. The commission
should be given the authority to recommend a pardon for anyone it
believes was sentenced unjustly.
Our
democracy will survive the hostility of Vladimir Putin. What it may not
survive is distrust of our system of justice. At the moment that
distrust is deep and wide. We need a nonpartisan national commission to
tell us what has just happened and to advise us on what we need to do to
keep it from happening again.
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