Over drinks at the side of the Eno River, Harvey the wild turkey and Ethel the raccoon were overheard discussing the day’s news.

HARVEY: Looks like the walls’r startin’ to close in on Trump. Congress is investigatin’ this thing about Russia maybe messin’ with our presidential election.

ETHEL: Sure, I watched some of the opening hearing, too, but what I don’t get is why Jim Comey, of all people, is leading an FBI investigation.

HARVEY: What’s wrong with that? He’s head of the FBI. Makes sense to me.

ETHEL: Come on, Harvey, Comey cleverly knocked Hillary’s campaign off the tracks with only a few days to go. She never recovered. How can he be unbiased?

HARVEY: You have a point, but at least someone is starting an investigation. I read in the Post that the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency all said they have high confidence that Putin ordered an influence campaign aimed at our election and that Putin and the Russian government favored Trump. That scares me, I’ll tell ya.

ETHEL: Well, both the House and the Senate have started their investigations, but that’s not enough for me, and it shouldn’t be enough for any American with a brain.

HARVEY: What? Why not?

ETHEL: Who’s running these so-called investigations, birdbrain? Republicans. Don’t you think they’re playing to the gallery with this? Listen to their questions. Doesn’t look like they want to uncover election-tampering. That’s too uncomfortable. They’d rather change the subject.

HARVEY: You got a better idea?

ETHEL: What we need is a Democrat who’s like Ken Starr.

HARVEY: What’s a Ken Starr?

ETHEL: He was the special prosecutor who led the charge to impeach Bill Clinton. Starr was a reg’lar barracuda, I mean. Fierce prosecutor. He was George Bush’s solicitor general, and then he became president of Baylor University. He quit that, though, when the university had a sexual assault scandal. Rumor has it he might wind up working for Trump in some government job.

HARVEY: So you’re sayin’ that investigations by the FBI and committees in both the House and the Senate ain’t enough? We need a special prosecutor?

ETHEL: If we want to get at the truth, we need an aggressive, truly independent body not tainted by politics and a special prosecutor. It doesn’t need to be a Ken Starr, but he or she needs to be really independent and determined to get at the truth. Every American deserves to know the truth, and that’s been ’way too scarce around here lately.

HARVEY: You’re really worked up about this, aren’t you?

ETHEL: You bet. We all should be. If the Trump people and Russians were working together to interfere with our ability to choose our own leaders, that could be treason, my friend, and our cherished democratic system is threatened. If there’s anything more serious than that, I don’t know what it is. This affects all of us.

HARVEY: OK. I get it. But I still have one question. If so much is at stake here, why are Republicans pushing back and trying to change the subject?

ETHEL: Good question. Doesn’t make sense, does it?