David Frum: Roger Stone's Arrest Is the Signal for Congress to Act

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/what-roger-stone-indictment-demands-congress/581272/

Roger Stone’s Arrest Is the Signal for Congress to Act
Robert Mueller is looking for crimes. It’s up to legislators to safeguard the country.
9:08 AM ET
David Frum
Staff writer at The Atlantic


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Through the election and to this day, the Russians have held damaging information about Trump, information that is only now being confirmed to Americans. In October 2016, it was an obvious inference that the Trump campaign was working with WikiLeaks. Now that obvious inference forms the basis of an indictment.

Many other inferences could be drawn today, but there is not yet public evidence to support them, and they are not yet lodged as formal criminal charges: financial connections between Trump and Russia, the sharing of operational campaign information, and other terrible possibilities, too.

The truth about these things is presumably known to Mueller and his team. To the extent that this truth is prosecutable, Americans will eventually learn more of it through further indictments and—if the next attorney general allows it to be released—a future Mueller report. Perhaps that will happen this year, or maybe next.

But now—now!—the country is in danger. Now—now!—it is headed by a president whose fundamental loyalty to the United States cannot intelligently be trusted. Waiting for Mueller has always been a slow option. That slowness more and more appears a danger that the country cannot safely risk.

It’s time for Congress to step in, not with a view to punishing the guilty, but with a view to protecting the security of the nation from the guilty, whether they are ever juridically punished or not.