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https://www.wsj.com/articles/mueller-drains-the-swamp-1509577888" Mueller Drains the Swamp "
" The Manafort charges are an indictment of a Washington that disgusts Americans. "
By Daniel Henninger
" To understand the dance of death in Washington now between Donald Trump, Robert Mueller and the media, you need to watch the first 10 minutes of “The Wild Bunch,” Sam Peckinpah’s classic movie of the Old West.
It shows a trapped scorpion struggling in the dirt as it fights off hundreds of ants. A group of children are watching the scorpion fight the ants, and sometimes they poke it with a stick.
In Washington’s wild bunch, the scorpion is Donald Trump and the children delighting in his struggle are the Washington press. Robert Mueller is their poking stick.
No one can stop watching this grisly movie, and that’s too bad, because in the background something real is going on that Americans cared about long before Donald Trump became president.The whole world knows that Mr. Mueller’s special counsel’s office announced an indictment of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, charging him with evading taxes on payments of millions of dollars to his lobbying firm from the former Ukrainian government run by Viktor Yanukovych.
There was another, less noticed event this week, but no one in Washington missed it, or its significance. Within hours of the Manafort indictment, Tony Podesta, who is former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s brother, abruptly resigned from the lobbying firm they founded in 1988. OpenSecrets.org annually lists the Podesta Group as the third- or fourth-highest-paid lobbying firm in Washington.
The special counsel has not named or charged Mr. Podesta or his firm with any violation. But Tony Podesta resigned so that he could address his firm’s involvement with Mr. Manafort’s firm while lobbying on behalf of then-Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych on, for example, “the propriety of imprisoning” his presidential rival. Yanukovych lives in exile in Russia now. Possibly additional cleansings will emerge from Mr. Mueller’s shop.
While the children poke the dirt over whether Mr. Mueller’s Manafort indictment does or doesn’t involve Trump “collusion” with Russia, the rest of us should see that Robert Mueller is opening a drain on the Swamp.
The Swamp has many aliases—K Street, the Favor Factory, the Beltway bandits. And there is no fact in politics more established than this: The American people are disgusted with Washington, and have been for a long time.
The indictment of Paul Manafort reads like a Google Maps navigation through the Swamp. That Tony Podesta would jump off the Swamp luxury liner called the Podesta Group suggests the seriousness of the threat Mr. Mueller could pose to the Washington economy.
Any conceivable legal exposure of Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Mike Flynn, almost certainly is about possible violations while engaged in lobbying work, rather than the standard collusion narrative.
Some caveats here.
The Swamp disgusts me, too, but the First Amendment’s most overlooked phrase is the right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
As the U.S. regulatory state rose, the American left believed that the private sector should simply let the regulators and their rules roll over them—“in the public interest.”
Over time, the government fattened, and legitimate private petitioning turned into rent-seeking protection, a booming economy for the locals and inevitably corruption.
Messrs. Manafort and Podesta are founding fathers of the Swamp. Now, even the holier-than-thou creators of our new economy—Google, Facebook , Apple—pay the Swamp big bucks for protection.
But, some scream, Mr. Trump, who promised in every speech to “drain the swamp,” hired Mr. Manafort to be his campaign manager!!!
Yup, and here’s an educated guess: When all this is over, President Trump will be seen as one of the greatest political naïfs to come down the Beltway pike in a long time.
That doesn’t mean he can’t do the Swamp drainage so many voters expected of him. Call it the Wollman Rink in reverse. The famous developer’s job is to disassemble Washington, not make it bigger.The largely unheralded Trump effort to reduce regulation—in energy, the environment, land use, education, finance, telecommunications—won’t kill the Swamp but should shrink it.
This week, though, the Trump administration turned on the sump pump. That would be the tax reform act to be released Thursday in the House.
You will read endlessly how every provision is a mistake or can’t happen. Translation: This is the first serious simplification of the tax code since 1986, and the Swamp is fighting back.
In ’86, the Swamp was called Gucci Gulch—the K Street lawyers and accountants with little gold bars on their shoes who gamed the tax code for whoever could afford it. They’re back to smother tax reform in its crib.
Pick your obsession: collusion or the Swamp. In the life of the country, getting to the bottom of the second matters more. "
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