By Quin Hillyer at the Washington Examiner;

If President Trump has nothing to hide vis-a-vis his relationship with Russia, then he should direct his administration to work overtime to cooperate with the review conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. That’s how he can get the dratted subject behind him.

In some ways, Trump has been showing a normal human reaction: If accused (at least by inference) of something you didn’t do, you get angry at the accusation and want to stifle the accusers.

But that’s not how a public servant should act — especially when there clearly is plenty of fire-induced smoke wafting around former colleagues. Sure, Trump may think he did nothing wrong personally to “collaborate” with the Russians — but with all the long-standing ties between Russian entities and former Trump top dogs Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn, any objective person would understand that reasons for questioning them exist, even if the rush to prematurely convict them in the media is unseemly.

A public servant, especially the president, should want all questions of wrongdoing examined expeditiously and conclusively – and, if wrongdoing by others is found, even if those others are or once were close to the public servant, then the wrongdoing should be punished. Indeed, if wrongdoing is found, the president especially should want it punished specifically because it brought disrepute into his orbit, a disrepute he should resent and should blame on the malefactors, not on the media messengers.

And if bad judgment but no criminal acts are found, well, the president should want it cleared up and behind him as soon as possible — not by trying to retard the investigation, which only makes it last longer, but by helping it work thoroughly and quickly. No matter how much the president wants the innuendos about his own actions stifled, his better course is to let the investigators work so they can expeditiously determine his innocence…..

[The rest of the column is here.]

By the way, a note, for those who wonder about this: There is a good reason I can’t publish the entire articles here at my site, even if I wrote them. Almost all of these pieces are written for other publications, which own the copyright to them. Via fair use, I can quote a reasonably extensive excerpt, as long as I provide a link back to the original — but I am not allowed, by law, to publish the whole thing here….

 

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