The man who was the former chief of staff at the CIA and Pentagon and was the chief counsel for Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee just gave the most intriguing potential reason for the failure of the Justice Department to indict President Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., over his participation in the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russian agents during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Speaking with MSNBC anchor Nicholle Wallace earlier today, Jeremy Bash was discussing how Americans should interpret Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian collusion and obstruction of justice when the redacted version is released tomorrow.
“I think we have to zoom back and look at what’s happening at this moment in our democracy,” Bash proposed. “Which is a special counsel is going to be issuing a report on the conduct of a presidential campaign, a candidate, and a president ultimately that amounts to a heap of shameful, unpatriotic, and unethical conduct where the president sought Russian interference, he received Russian interference, he benefitted from Russian interference, and he rewarded Russian interference,” the former intelligence officer said.
Bash then went on to speculate as to why Don Jr. may have escaped being indicted for conspiracy charges despite his obvious glee at learning that the Russians would be coming bearing gifts in the form of damaging information on his father’s opponent Hillary Clinton, as multiple accounts of the origin of the meeting have reported.
“Whether the special counsel concluded at the end of the day that someone like Don, Jr. didn’t have the mental capacity — and I use that term specifically — because he didn’t have the intent, because he didn’t understand politics, whatever the basis for saying a crime wasn’t committed is important to know,” Bash concluded.
The idea of the president’s son being rescued by his own ignorance — coming just days after White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders impugned the intelligence of members of Congress by declaring that they were not “smart enough to look through the thousands of pages that I would assume that President Trump’s taxes will be” — is decidedly ironic.
If Bash is indeed correct — and the release of the redacted Mueller report tomorrow morning is unlikely to shed full light on all of the reasons behind the special counsel’s prosecutorial decisions — then those of us trained through years of watching TV crime dramas that “ignorance of the law is no excuse” will have to accept the fact that such concepts do not apply if you happen to be the son of the president.
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No wonder Trump “loves the poorly educated.” He now knows the benefits that a lack of knowledge can reap.
You can watch a clip of MSNBC’s Nicholle Wallace speaking with former CIA chief of staff Jeremy Bash in the video below.
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Original reporting by Bob Brigham at RawStory.
