For eighteen months, Democrats and the liberal media have been hoping beyond hope that the Mueller investigation will result in Donald Trump being found guilty of colluding with Russia or obstruction of justice.  They would prefer the latter, for while collusion could be conjured into grounds for impeachment by an increasingly unlikely Democrat-controlled Congress, it is no crime.  So obstruction of justice, an actual prosecutable crime, is what they have really been salivating for.  In Thursday's congressional hearings featuring the FBI figure central to all of these hopes, Peter Strzok, the Dems showed the world just how willing they are to engage in some major obstruction of their own to prevent House Republicans from investigating the investigator.  While their behavior may not rise to criminality, it certainly robbed the American people of a full opportunity to hear Strzok's responses to penetrating and pointed Republican questioning.

Time after time, when Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee tried to pin down the unctuous, slippery Strzok, some Democrat member or other would break into the questioning to raise a superfluous objection that broke the line of questioning and refocused attention away from the legitimate target – a corrupt FBI investigation, or rather multiple corrupt FBI investigations – relieving the frequently beleaguered subject of the committee's immediate focus.  Or, when it came their turn to speak, the Dems would dredge up unrelated criticisms of the Trump administration, such as poor little immigrant babies being abused by evil ICE.  One of the most despicable things they did was to rope in all the other members of the FBI by painting Strzok as just one of the regular guys, thus tainting the whole force.  I've lost count of how many former FBI agents, even executives, who have come forward to deny this, pointing out that Strzok's and his cronies' behaviors were clearly atypical of the service.

The most heated outbreak of such Democrat witness protection came when Texas Republican Louis Gohmert raised the issue of how Strzok could expect the committee to believe his, Strzok's, every pious assertion of virtue when the guy had been cheating on his wife with another member of the FBI investigatory team throughout the time he was investigating Trump and Hillary.  I thought it was a legitimate question, although I might have asked it even more pointedly – such as, "Mr. Strzok, you ask this committee to accept your virtue without demurral, so I'm wondering: are you still cheating on your wife?"

The Democrats couldn't have stunk things up more if they'd wheeled in a cart of week-old red herring and dumped it in the open area between the committee members and the witness.  What made this obfuscating all the more infuriating was the fact that Strzok's culpability is so well and thoroughly documented, much of it in the public domain, yet in spite of that, he and the Democrats could so blithely, even haughtily, ignore that 900-pound gorilla while mouthing continuous denials of known facts and wrapping this smarmy, smirking swamp creature in pious protestations of public service and patriotism.