As the old saying goes, nothing screams “clean hands” like repeatedly phoning up the FBI director for updates on your investigative status, asking him to publicly exonerate you, asking other intelligence chiefs to quash the FBI’s work, firing the FBI director, then attacking the prosecutor assigned to oversee the investigation that you wanted the fired FBI director to interrupt.

Having established his indisputable innocence with the above pattern of behavior, President Donald Trump is now peeved to be under investigation for obstructing justice regarding crimes that definitely did not happen.

They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2017

You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history - led by some very bad and conflicted people! #MAGA — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2017

Nobody likes to be investigated, powerful people least of all. But it is worth marveling at how quickly we reached this point, and how pathetic the organized pushback against the Trump investigation and Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller has been.

These are not tendentious or subjective ways to describe Trump’s predicament, but rather inescapable consequences of things Trump has done to expose himself to legal jeopardy and deny his loyalists clean lines of defense against the bad news.

Trump’s case against the case against him is that it’s an endless fishing expedition, conducted by obscure but powerful anti-Trump partisans. The Republican National Committee’s more polished rendering of the complaint in Trump’s tweets is that the obstruction inquiry represents a “pivot,” which “shows that they have struck out on trying to prove collusion [with Russian intelligence] and are now trying to switch to another baseless charge.”

