Saunders: Push for special prosecutor or political witch hunt?

Then-Deputy Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who would become President Barack Obama’s first attorney general, spoke in favor of letting the law die. “As the old adage, adopted from Mark Twain, goes: ‘To a man with a hammer, a lot of things look like nails that need pounding.’ ”

With a Republican in the White House, Schumer now wants to resurrect the dead. He called on Republicans to help him pass a bill to restore the law Democrats rejected when they occupied the Oval Office.

“Cognizant and wary of this history, we would work to craft a narrow authority with specific guidelines for this investigation to prevent this from becoming a political witch hunt,” Schumer said. “We hope that if the administration fails in its responsibility, that Senator McConnell and Speaker Ryan will rise to theirs.” He was referring to Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the Senate majority leader, and Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., the speaker of the House.

President Trump took to Twitter to rib Schumer. He found a photo of Schumer and Russian Leader Vladimir Putin and suggested a probe into Schumer’s ties to Putin. When Politico reported that Pelosi wrongly claimed she never met Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — Politico found a photo that proved the contrary — Trump called for a second investigation. The second focusing on Pelosi.

In a series of tweets, Trump laid out his reason for opposing a special prosecutor. “This whole narrative is a way of saving face for Democrats losing an election that everyone thought they were supposed to win,” Trump wrote. He called their efforts a “witch hunt.”

Time-consuming and costly

To Schumer’s suggestion that the Trump White House should not object to a special prosecutor if it has nothing to hide, Victoria Toensing, who worked in the Reagan Justice Department, said, “It’s a distraction. It costs all kinds of money. It goes on and on.” Toensing should know — she observed that her law partner and husband Joe DiGenova was appointed independent counsel to investigate allegations that someone in President George H.W. Bush’s administration had searched Clinton’s passport files illegally. “It takes six months to set it up.”

It is entirely possible that there was no inappropriate collusion between Team Trump and the Russians, and that calls for law enforcement’s biggest gun is nothing but Democrats “lighting their hair on fire” — to quote Speaker Ryan — to delegitimize Trump’s victory.

As for Trump, he’s not exactly in a strong position to complain about political opponents using the specter of the special prosecutor to make political points. During a presidential debate, Trump told Hillary Clinton, “If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation.” Now he is fighting to protect his own flank.