In the week following the Mueller report's release, we've watched more obstruction of justice roll before our very eyes - sometimes frightfully and sometimes hilariously.
Frightfully, as in watching President Donald Trump tell reporters outside the White House, "We're fighting all the subpoenas," just after his Justice Department refused to let an official testify before Congress.
Frightfully, as in learning from The New York Times that former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen grew so concerned about the growing threat of Russian and foreign interference in the 2018 and 2020 elections that she wanted to convene a cabinet level meeting, only to be told something like not a chance by acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney.
Why? Mulvaney said Trump still equated any public discussion of Russian influence with questions about the legitimacy of his victory, and it was best to keep the information "below his level." Translation: Trump is so thin-skinned that just talking about the Russian interference diminishes his election. Well, of course it does. Can't you hear him? He won "the greatest election in the history of the world."
Hilarious was Jared Kushner's critique of the Mueller probe in an interview with Time magazine's Brian Bennett. Kushner allowed that "quite frankly the whole thing's just a big distraction for the country."
Kushner added that what Russia did, "buying some Facebook ads and try to sow dissent" was a terrible thing "but I think the investigations and all the speculation that has happened for the last two years has had a much harsher impact on democracy than a couple Facebook ads."
It wasn't, of course, just that the Russians bought "a couple" of ads on Facebook.
Facebook told Mueller's investigators that Russian-controlled accounts made over 80,000 posts before their deactivation in August 2017, and those posts reached at least 29 million Americans and "may have reached an estimated 126 million people."
What's more, Russians, largely through social media, organized groups and orchestrated protest events on the soil of the United States. Russians also phished into state and county voter registration systems in dozens of states. They stole and disseminated campaign information from Trump opponents. They tried, at the very least, more than once to offer overt help to the Trump campaign.
Kushner's comment was so ridiculously and deliberately an understatement as to be hilarious, but taken as a whole it is terrifying that he and Mulvaney and the rest of the Trump administration - like Trump himself - continue to ignore what should be considered an act of war on our country.
It reminds us, once again, of Trump's claim that he surrounds himself with "the best people."
The reality is that Trump surrounds himself with the worst people. And then he manages to bring out their very worst angels.
Trump and his cronies decry the Department of Justice, the FBI and American security agencies as "the Deep State" that made up the "Russia hoax."
Sorry, most Americans aren't buying it. And as more read the Mueller report, that number will grow.
The Deep State couldn't have been imaginative enough to make up all the craziness of Russian election hacking, stealing emails, WikiLeaks' postings, Russian social media manipulation, the Trump Tower dirt-on-Hillary meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer, Trump's part in concocting a false narrative about that meeting, 140 Trump campaign and associate contacts with Russians, efforts to arrange "back channel" meetings with Russian and other foreign leaders, and a beautiful red-haired woman alleged to be a spy infiltrating the National Rifle Association in an organized effort to open up unofficial lines of communication between Russians and Americans in the NRA and the Republican Party.
Ask yourselves: What would Congress, the courts, the Cabinet and voters have said if Franklin D. Roosevelt declared Pearl Harbor didn't really happen - it was a hoax? What would have happened if Roosevelt said that, and then we learned Japan helped him get elected? What if Roosevelt had moved to shut down any investigation of how and why Japan interfered in our election to help him?
Ask yourselves: What if, after our planes were hijacked by terrorists and flown into the World Trade Center towers, President George W. Bush and the United States Congress hadn't convened the 9/11 Commission?
Ask yourselves: Why is it we're so accepting of Donald Trump and his "best people" - and, yes, we might as well say Trump's "best Senate and Congress" - making a joke of Russia's interference in the democratic freedoms we hold most dear: trusting in our government and voting?
Make your congress members and your senators hear you.