Robert Mueller “testifying” before congress.

Democrats and Republicans performed intricate dance steps while trying to lure Robert Mueller onto the dance floor yesterday. He, however, stubbornly refused to move from the wall onto that floor.

Republicans
The Republicans performed like a skilled magician: use constant patter and wave the left hand around to distract the crowd from what the right hand is doing. They threw in a whole series of disjointed events and allegations to distract from the fact that Trump did collude with the Russian government and that he did try to kill the investigation.

The ranking Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, was an example. He waffled on and on about the Steele Report, Fusion GPS, Hillary Clinton and the DNC, somebody named Bruce Ohr… It was all an elaborate conspiracy. Why the FBI, among others, would conspire against Trump was never even touched on. Overall, the Republicans have jumped from claiming that the investigation was a big witch hunt to claiming that the report was a complete exoneration and back again to the witch hunt claim.

Democrats
The Democrats’ idea seemed to have been that, since 79% of people in the US have evidently not read any of the Mueller report, they wanted to get its chief findings more out there in the general public. Their main theme was that Trump was guilty of trying to kill the investigation – “obstruction of justice”. Their problem is that it makes no sense for Trump to have wanted to kill off the investigation if he didn’t have anything to hide. What he had to hide was his collusion with Putin & Co. in the 2016 election. But again, to make this credible, they’d have to provide a reason for why Trump would collude with Putin. The best they could come up with was that Trump was secretely planning to build a hotel in Moscow and wanted Putin’s support. Putin, therefore, had something to hold over Trump, something with which he could blackmail Trump. This hardly seems like anything big enough to explain Trump’s ties to Putin.

Predictably, the Wall St. Journal editors – who are now solidly in the Trump camp due to his policies having helped boost profits – called the whole hearing “a bust”. They said that Mueller is “slowing down”, in other words he’s getting old and confused. That’s especially humorous since they don’t seem to have noticed that about their hero who can hardly utter two consecutive sentences that make any sense.

The New York Times editors, on the other hand, said that Mueller’s testimony “made clear the threat to American democracy is urgent.”

Representative Jackie Speier questioning Mueller. She’s been sitting on a memorandum exposing Trump’s money laundering past and failed, once again, to raise the issue during Mueller’s testimony.

Cover-up
But from Devin Nunes to Adam Schiff to Robert Mueller, from the editors of the Wall St. Journal to the editors of the NY Times, the real issue is being covered up. That is the issue of Trump’s past as a long time money launderer for the Russian mafia capitalist class. (See this article for the documentation.) Liberal Representative Jackie Speier (D, CA) had the perfect opportunity. A year and a half ago, she had been sent this memorandum summarizing and documenting Trump’s past. (The memorandum was co-authored by a former top federal prosecutor.) She’s sat on that memorandum. When she questioned Mueller she raised none of it. The reason for the coverup, as Oaklandsocialist has explained many times, is that money laundering for the drug cartels is rampant in the US real estate industry. Opening up that can of worms would not only tend to drag down major politicians, it would tend to expose the level of degeneration of US capitalism itself.

We can’t expect anything different from the different capitalist mouthpieces, but how about nearly the entire socialist left? From DSA to the socialist groups further to the left, they are all ignoring this issue. That is really a shame, because a united campaign to really publicize Trump’s past could actually have an effect on the public consciousness.

Robert Mueller testifying before congress.