Background and feature photo credit: The Ind.
A couple of hours after Robert Mueller III spoke to the American public for the first and only time about his two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and the allegations that President Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice in order to illegally end the investigation before it even began, Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s attorney general and a former one-term member of the U.S. Congress, turned to Trump’s favorite online soapbox, Twitter, offering his own assessment of Mueller’s remarks.
In his haste to reflexively defend a President who once boasted about sexually assaulting women, paid $25 million to settle a case involving claims of fraud against his phony university, encouraged a foreign government to criminally infiltrate the email account of his opponent, ordered the separation of undocumented immigrants from their children, ordered those small children to be held in cages, a man who illegally funneled money to a porn star in order to force her to remain silent about their sexual relationship, spoke about white supremacists as “good people,” and, among other things, instituted an unconstitutional ban on Muslims seeking to travel to the United States, Landry inadvertently proved his comically wrong and vapid understanding of the law.
Jeff Landry currently has fewer than 7,000 followers, a paltry amount for an official who pines for the spotlight as much as he does, but that hardly mattered. His tweet is so riddled with basic errors about the judicial process, including the differences between a court case and an investigatory report, that he quickly generated nearly 20,000 people, including a number of celebrities, responding to point out the obvious: Landry’s comment reflects an embarrassing ignorance of his own profession. Thousands asked a variation of the same question: How are you a lawyer?
And my personal favorite: