EDITORIAL: Reject Republican fictions and protect Robert Mueller’s investigation

For the sake of our country, the Senate should stop playing make-believe and take action on a bill to protect the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller.

Until that happens, we support Sen. Jeff Flake’s threat to his fellow Republicans to block Senate confirmation of all of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominations.

Protect Mueller, first and foremost.

A couple of fictions are floating around on Capitol Hill. They were concocted to allow Republicans to avoid standing up to Trump, which is so overdue.

The first fiction is that passing legislation to protect Mueller is unnecessary because Trump won’t dare fire the special prosecutor, who is probing Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Even most Republicans, so the story goes, would rise up in outrage.

That argument fell apart when Trump forced Jeff Sessions to resign as attorney general right after the mid-term elections. Trump named as Sessions’ temporary replacement Matt Whitaker, who has been critical of the Mueller investigation. Trump’s sole motivation in dumping Sessions for Whitaker was to get himself an attorney general who is willing to thwart or fire Mueller.

The second Republican fiction, reported by Politico on Friday, is that the best way to dispel fears that Mueller is about to be fired would be for Trump to quickly nominate a permanent attorney general. Trump, according to this line of thinking, could nominate somebody who has vowed to preserve the Russian probe.

Talk about a whopper. It’s premised on the notion that Trump would ever do anything that wasn’t self-serving. Make no mistake, Trump wants an attorney general who, at his command, will kill the Mueller probe. That’s all he cares about.

A third Republican fiction, by the way, might be that House and Senate Republicans would even squawk if Trump canned Mueller. We stopped waiting for Republicans to act on their principles a long time ago.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., says he supports the Mueller investigation, but his actions say otherwise. He has blocked a vote on legislation, co-sponsored by Flake and two other Republican senators, that would codify Justice Department rules requiring that a special counsel be fired only for good cause.

McConnell says the full Senate is much too busy to take up the bill, called the Special Counsel Independence and Integrity Act, which was approved by the Judiciary Committee in April. The Senate has its hands full, McConnell says, just trying to pass important spending bills and a farm bill before the current lame-duck session ends.

For two years, the Senate has done so little. Now nobody has time to go to lunch.

Flake, freed to be an honest man by his decision to retire in January, says that’s hogwash. All Democrats and plenty of Republicans, he says, would approve the Mueller bill instantly if McConnell allowed a vote. It would be a day’s work.

In the meantime, Flake has the power, as a member of the Judiciary Committee, to keep Trump’s judicial nominations from moving to the Senate floor, and that’s what he says he’s going to do.

That’s having your priorities right.

As a practical matter, none of this may matter much longer. All signs are that Mueller’s team, which is looking into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and any collusion by the Trump campaign, is about to hand down many more indictments.

That would explain Trump’s latest Twitter rants. When the president knows bad news is coming, his preemptive strategy is to go ballistic on social media.

On Thursday, Trump railed against Mueller in three separate tweets, accusing the special prosecutor’s team of going “absolutely nuts” and “horribly threatening” people to “come up with the answers they want.”

If Mueller’s latest charges prove substantial and credible, as we expect they will, all the fictions in the world won’t be able to derail him.

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