A lot of people, myself included, have homed in on the timing of Jeff Sessions's firing. The White House reportedly refused to let Sessions serve out the remainder of the week. Robert Mueller's grand jury meets on Fridays.
That at least *looks* like an effort to obstruct the proceedings. Maybe Trump wants to get to Mueller before he indicts Don, Jr. Maybe he wanted Matt Whitaker in place before Mueller completes a "report" of some kind.
But there's another aspect of the timing that really stinks to me. Nobody comes out looking good under this reading of things.
Trump just ran a campaign warning everyone that Democrats secretly want to impeach him. Every Democrat thus faced questions from the press about impeachment and nearly all of them said, "no, no, that’s not what we’re about. We just want to do proper oversight, see where it goes."
If you're a corrupt president, and you've successfully forced most Democrats and the Democratic leadership to weigh in—on the record, ahead of an election—against impeachment, when do you commit a pre-meditated impeachable offense?
Right away is when.
Right away is when.
And it's working. Democrats aren't out front decrying what just happened as what it obviously is: a naked and unconstitutional effort to obstruct justice.
Why? Perhaps because if they say Trump and Whitaker are conspiring to obstruct justice, they will have to be prepared to answer why they think he shouldn't be impeached.
And now there's no good answer. There's only the obvious answer: Of course he should be impeached. But they just spent months on the campaign trail foreclosing that option.
So Whitaker settles in, we all get to wait and see what he has in store, and we may be stuck with it for months. Or longer.
