You Give Me Fever
“You give me fever, when you kiss me
Fever when you hold me tight
Fever in the morning
Fever all through the night”
Little Willie John sang the original version of Fever released in 1958. A year later the sensual Peggy Lee did a cover version that skyrocketed into the top ten songs worldwide.
Ordinarily, fever is not a welcome sense—it is often a symptom of illness. But, fever is also characteristic of passion and in today’s overheated political jargon, the swamp.
At the risk of over-extending the metaphor, fever and incoherence are first cousins. Whether it is the fever of a passionate love affair or malaria, it works against reason. Fever and rationality often are at cross-purposes.
In the United States, the election of Donald Trump produced a fever. The news became feverish. Political debate likewise. And nowhere is our feverish behavior more pronounced than the commentary surrounding the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
The President has been poked and probed by every imaginable adversary for over two years. First, the Clinton campaign. Then, after his election, the full array of denouncers kicked in—the news media, social media, and the variety of organizations he offended and offensive he has often been. This swirl of investigation and accusation was followed by House and Senate Committees and then the Special Counsel and his staff.
If there is the proverbial smoking gun of criminality, it should have, by now, been revealed. And if Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, is as good as advertised he has certainly had enough time to put together a case. To-date Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and several minor functionaries have been charged and presumably have or will reveal what they know to lessen their penalties. One is left to wonder why Mueller cannot isolate the culpability of the President, announce his findings in that regard, and continue against the minor actors as warranted.
I will not cite the litany of important issues that require minute to minute attention from the White House, but there are a large number. It is time to “fish or cut bait.” As a former Assistant Attorney General in Missouri, I know that a criminal investigation opens up many avenues of inquiry and that it is hard not to prolong an investigation, but we are talking about the President.
We elect each President knowing that we are not electing an angel. One President in my lifetime, Bill Clinton, was impeached by the House of Representatives. Richard Nixon would have been, but he resigned. Another, Lyndon Johnson, stood aside from the nomination battle when his popularity sunk to the basement. And we have a mid-term election coming up which gives voters a chance, if they choose, to make Trump the lamest of lame ducks.
In the meantime, the work of the Special Counsel that deals with the President should be wrapped up in the next sixty days, a report given to the Congress and, of course, the public, and then if warranted action taken.
In 1974, President Gerald Ford, understanding the potential divisiveness of a criminal trial of Richard Nixon, who had resigned under the dark cloud of Watergate, pardoned him. It probably cost Ford the Presidency, yet historians often point to the pardon as the most farsighted and courageous act of his Presidency. They, on reflection, understood how debilitating it is for the nation to be caught up in the incoherence of a fever.
Al Sikes is the former Chair of the Federal Communications Commission under George H.W. Bush. Al recently published Culture Leads Leaders Follow published by Koehler Books.
James Nick says
Re: “If there is the proverbial smoking gun of criminality, it should have, by now, been revealed… Mueller has certainly had enough time to put together a case [against trump]… One is left to wonder why Mueller cannot isolate the culpability of the President.”
What am I missing missing here???? The smoking gun for an obstruction of justice case against trump is in plain view. In a meeting with Russians in the Oval Office on May 10, 2017, trump said “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job.” “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” The next day, when talking about the process of firing James Comey in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, trump explicitly verbalized the link between firing Comey and the Russian investigation. He said on camera “When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing, with Trump and Russia, is a made up story, it’s an excuse for the Democrats to have lost an election that they should have won.” Case closed!
The case for collusion is just a solid. The June 9, 2016 meeting with the Russians in trump tower happened. There’s nothing fake or ambiguous about it despite clumsy initial attempts by the trump campaign to cover it up and ludicrous denials that trump, himself, didn’t know about the meeting despite having helped his son draft a misleading statement about purpose of the meeting and then telegraphing at a campaign rally only hours after the meeting that “We are going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons”. The actual purpose of the meeting? To obtain stolen property the Russians claimed to have received from Wikileaks about Hillary.
And it goes on and on. Someone who built real estate in Manhattan and casinos in Atlantic City and is as untethered from morality as trump is doesn’t do that without having dealt with countless shady characters and exceeding the limits of the law. It’s not much of a stretch to assume trump simply co-opted his unethical and illegal business practices for a campaign that, by many accounts, actually started out as a narcissistic, money-making venture to further burnish the trump brand than a legitimate presidential run.
Why is it taking Mueller so long to put together a case? One reason is that trump keeps flooding the zone. Everyday, more and more threads of the story are emerging in the media. The case is apparently of such byzantine complexity at this point, that running all the leads to ground and validating them must be enormously time consuming.
But more importantly, Mueller is only going to get one shot at this. He better get it right. He is investigating people at the very highest levels of power not only in this country but worldwide. If charges of high crimes and misdemeanors are to be forthcoming such as conspiracy to commit collusion with a foreign adversary, treason, obstruction of justice, money laundering, and who knows what else , the reaction will be nothing short of pyrotechnic given the intense polarization in the country. trump and his surrogates have already launched a sustained attack on the credibility of Mueller and his investigation. He is preparing the battlefield. The objective is to preemptively discredit any findings from the investigation as fake and motivated by politics and partisanship run amok. “Spygate”, “Witch Hunt”, “Deep State”, “illegitimate”, all emotionally charged words repeated over and over again by trump, his surrogates, and trump TV that are designed to inoculate his cult followers to what they know must be coming. We’re all going to get to see if the “I-can-shoot-someone-on-5th-ave-and-not-lose-voters” metaphor actually plays out in real life.