Hi, and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boyler.

This is our first August episode, we're well into summer.

The news usually tends to quiet down a bit around now, but before we take the opportunity

to look a bit afield from the news of the day, we wanted to board deeply into a big elephant

in the room in America right now, which surrounds the question of investigating, inditing,

and trying a former president of the United States.

Early on in the Trump era, the Trump opposition was, I think it's fair to say, a little unhealthily

fixated on the law as a tool of accountability, and the sort of daydream that men of rectitude

would catch Trump red-handed in one crime or another and bring him down.

And everyone's defense, it was a weird time.

It's hard to believe looking back, but the big Senate Russian investigation began under

a Republican majority.

Republicans in Congress supported the Republican Attorney General, recusing himself from

the Russian investigation, and supported the Deputy Attorney General, appointing Robert

Mueller to be special counsel after Trump fired Jim Coney.

But once that was done, everyone kind of let Mueller assume the full burden of what really

should have been a more political, public-facing form of accountability.

Fast forward, for most of the past year and a half or so, I think it's pretty fair to say

that something like the opposite mindset has taken over, where the people who most want

Trump to face justice have begun to assume that the law isn't coming for him, that Attorney

General Garland is too meek or ambivalent about the social consequences of treating Trump

like a criminal to allow federal investigators to get too close.

...