Not with a bang but with a quiet whimper

Just a note to self.  

In the past month, two major political initiatives have come to a close, not with a bang but with a whimper.

Democratic Party fear of and disgust with Donald Trump is widely known and commented on.  Less commented on but just as real is the hatred of Establishment figures from both Parties for Donald Trump.

Democrats threw everything at him they could.  There was the whole Mueller Report which found no evidence of collusion by the Trump Campaign with the Russians.  A not especially surprising finding given that the so-called Steele Dossier was known to be a manufactured set of accusations by the Clinton campaign, launched and talked up by an embittered losing politician.

Twice while they held the House and Trump was president, Democrats tried to impeach him on the most manufactured of charges and thinnest of evidence.  Both times they failed.  After Trump lost and became a private citizen, they again sought to close his political future by launching a House judiciary committee investigation of the events of January 6th.

This was supposed to have been the coup de grâce.  With the full resources and investigative authority of Congress, finally Trump's crimes would be made manifest to the public.  

Very quickly it descended into farce when Republican leadership refused to go along with the one-sided investigation.  The Committee, under the leadership of Rep. Adam Schiff of California, repeatedly announced that they had major legal news that would sink Trump and then delivered diatribes instead.  

With the House switching to Republican control now, the January 6th committee has wrapped up their work.  There is no indictment of Trump.  There have been no revelations beyond what was already known.  There has been no case made for an insurrection (consistent with FBI findings).  

It was an entirely partisan use of federal government resources to destroy a political opponent with no legal basis or justification.  

There is still the matter of the Department of Justice raid on Trump's residence, at the instigation of the January 6th Committee, but that all along looked suspect and the findings made public to date seem threadbare.  Nothing seems out of place with the usual sort of issues when a President retires and retains some records.  For all Presidents, the established guidelines are ambiguous, the enforcement perfunctory, and outcomes haphazard.  

The other big news was that Trump finally turned over the six years of tax returns demanded by the House Ways and Means Committee.  This was a separate effort by Democrats to destroy Trump's political future.  The promise was that with these returns, they would finally be able to show deep malfeasance and criminal conduct on the part of Trump.

Once again there is nothing there it seems.  Granted, it is still less than a week but all the mainstream media players were ready and waiting for this information.  So far there investigations have led to headlines emphasizing that the IRS rules are arcane and can be exploited by the wealthy; that Trump made no deductible donations in some years; that Trumps tax reforms increased his obligations and reduced his income.  

No criminal conduct so far identified.

Between them, the January 6th Committee and the Tax Returns were supposed to be the artillery which destroyed Trump's political future.  For all the talk, both efforts have expired with nothing to show for the effort.

It was all a political operation and nothing to do with protecting democracy.

There are at least two remaining eddies of this Democratic Party effort to use the authority of government to go after a citizen whom they view as a political threat.  There is the aforementioned DOJ documents investigation.  Without the House January 6th Committee, I suspect this will die a quiet bureaucratic death.  

The Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has just won a protracted suit against the Trump organization on tax evasion related to executive compensation.  Trump is not a named party and the anticipated fines are less than $2 million against the organization.  It seems like business as usual in a high tax complexity state like New York with a particular beef against Trump for his passage of tax reforms that did away with the open SALT deduction.  

Bragg has declared that he will continue investigating Trump personally but I would suspect that this one also peters out.  It is not just the lack of evidence to support charges.  It is one thing to bring charges with the J6 Committee in the wings to provide cover.  Its dissolution may change the dynamics.  Also, the recent election results saw a significant shift towards the Republican Party in New York.  Possibly that has an effect.  On the other hand, the donors with the deepest pockets and worst cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome tend to reside in New York and they also fund other local campaigns, such as those of District Attorneys.  So who knows.

The key point though is that two initiatives, J6 and Trump Tax Returns, have come to the end of the road.  Once trumpeted in the mainstream media, the empty-handedness of the outcomes seem to dictate the  minimal coverage I have come across.

An interesting phenomenons.