The mysterious game of Richard Burr: Why does a Republican senator still pursue assets?

A day after the mid-term elections in which Republicans lost the majority in the House, President Trump again tried to reverse the scenario by dismissing his longtime foe, Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He announced his dismissal during a particularly bitter press conference, during which he insisted that all lost Republicans refrain from attaching himself close enough to him, what was wrong. He of course insisted on sealing their defeat.

But the dismissal sessions did not raise the minds of Trump as much as he would have hoped. He was reportedly depressed and upset by rumors in the city that his number one son, Donald Trump Jr., was about to be indicted by special advocate Robert Mueller. Vanity Fair reported:

Over the last three days, according to three sources, Don Junior told friends that he feared to be indicted as early as this week. A person close to Don Jr. has assumed that Mueller could be indicted for making false statements to Congress and the F.B.I. about knowing he had talked to his father about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians in June 2016 to bring "dirt" on Hillary Clinton.

It was already known at that time that Junior had lied to congressional committees, mildly reproaching his knowledge of the Trump Tower project and failing to disclose information that he would have met with other emissaries from foreign countries about a problem. possible help for Trump. campaign. So, the idea that he was in Mueller's sights was not really a surprise.

Mueller has never accused Junior, of course. But despite the insistence of Trump and his allies that the special council report has "erased" it is not true. Mueller has never interviewed Don Jr., and the redactions in the report strongly suggest the likely scenario that he would have been summoned by the grand jury and won the fifth. The general consensus is that Mueller concluded that Junior's collusion was so silly that he could not have been involved in a criminal conspiracy.

But Mueller is not the only game in town. In the end, the Senate Intelligence Committee still wanted Don Jr. to come back to testify before the senators. (He had previously spoken only to the staff.) They asked him kindly but unlike all the others who had testified under the same agreement, including his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, Don Jr. having apparently refused. There is therefore a month or a month (the information differs depending on the time), the committee issued a summons to appear. When the news was leaked on Wednesday, Trump Jr. and his allies lost their minds.

This hysterical statement was transmitted to the media:

Trump's allies rushed to the rescue of Junior, especially those who must be re-elected in 2020, after being reminded that they might not want to annoy the president and have him back a main opponent. As a result of the untimely words of this "source" close to Trump Jr. describing Burr as cowardly, other Republicans came to convict their colleague – a very unusual event, especially within the GOP – and asked for the closure of the inquiry of the committee.

It was a fit of anger to which the president himself was associating:

It is clear that Trump is only aware of the sunny Mueller Report Cliff Notes that he sees in Fox News. He therefore probably ignores that Burr also played a leading role during the investigation. . But Trump mentioned that Burr had publicly stated that his committee had found no evidence of collusion and seemed confused since he had apparently considered Burr to be one of his loyal henchmen.

Burr is a strange figure in all of this. He did his best to avoid appearing publicly with Trump, supposedly to avoid the appearance of a conflict, even as he was sharing information with the White House and intervened to the press on behalf of Trump. He managed to work with Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, Senator of the Democratic Group, and according to all the reports, the committee's investigation was not compromised.

Why Burr has decided to summon the son of the president to appear, if it's just a clean-up exercise, as other Republicans have hinted sitting on the committee, remains mysterious. Some people assume that it is because Burr believes that it is wrong to lie to his sworn committee, and that he wants to preserve the integrity of the process. Others think it's because it's his last term in the Senate and he's decided to take a stand. (Burr said that he would not run again in 2022.)

It's tempting to believe it. Burr's back-channel activities with the White House remind Senator Howard Baker of Watergate's celebrity, the Tennessee Republican known for his repeated question: "What did the President know and when did he know? -he?" It was later learned that Baker secretly provided the Nixon White House with information about the Watergate committee's investigation; his question was to protect Richard Nixon, assuming that Nixon had not known anything about the criminal cover-up. When one could no longer deny that Nixon knew everything, Baker changed sides and sealed his reputation as a man of integrity, though the truth was much more obscure than that.

There have been so many of these possible parallels between Republicans of the Watergate era and those of today, and none of them has failed. I am no longer willing to extend this possibility. This kind of Republicans who are willing to do the right thing, even reluctantly, has disappeared. I do not know why Burr made an extra effort, but I doubt that he intends to hit Donald Trump Jr. with a rape of perjury or expose the President's collusion with Russia. . Maybe Burr thought that Don Jr. would eventually obey and that they could sit down nicely to purge the air. In any case, the likelihood of the Republican Senate sending a criminal case to William Barr so that the sworn lies of Don Jr. are about the same as the chances that President Trump will join the Space Force on his first trip on the moon.

All of this would probably have failed if the Trump administration, as well as the entire Trump family, had not decided to block all Congressional demands, no matter what they are, in order to mount a show for the base and run up to the end on the myriad of outstanding legal issues. But Don Jr., not being the smartest of all time, did not understand that blocking the Senate would not really work – since the Senate is run by Republicans – and that it ended up causing a huge mess at Trump. Party. He is a real chip from the old block.