Let Mueller Keep Going

It was not a very good week for the Mueller investigation, of what once was suspected to be collusion between the Trump campaign in 2016 and some Russians.  Obviously it has turned into the biggest of nothingburgers since, with zero evidence of any such collusion, and now appears simply to be an exploration of anything that the special counsel can get his hands on so at least some charge gets filed that justifies the expense of the counsel.

Worst of all, we know now that very senior FBI types involved with the investigation of both the Hillary email scandal and the Trump russiarussiarussia thing, and also senior people at the Justice Department itself, were incredibly biased against President Trump and willing to do anything, legal or (mostly) not, to bend the investigation so it would get him out of office.  Moreover, the lawyers involved from the DoJ side were not only all Hillary types but big, often maxed-out donors to Democrats.

That this all fouls any dream that the Mueller team would be unbiased has not stopped the investigation, such as it is, from going on.

And that's not a bad thing, in my view.

You see, the USA now knows that the investigation is not just tainted but totally compromised; no one in their right mind believes that honest, impartial career investigators are doing the work.  So the longer it goes on, and the longer that the president lets it go on, not firing Mueller but just letting him go on, well, the more upset the people are going to get with the spending of taxpayer money for a partisan witch hunt.

At some point, Mueller will have to come up with a report, and somehow it doesn't seem to be what we expect what it should be -- an essentially thorough clearing of the Trump for President campaign and its people -- and Trump himself -- of any collusion of any kind with Russians of any kind.  That would seem like a failure, right?

What I suspect is that Mueller will try to find one more victim before closing up shop.  He got Paul Manafort on some 2005-era business indiscretion, and Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn for lying to the investigators about something that had not happened in the first place except for there having been an investigation -- not exactly entrapment, but a crime the investigation itself facilitated.

Mueller knows there was no collusion; shoot, we all know that.  He has to justify his existence, and that becomes really hard given the exposure of his team as partisan hacks.  He looks personally worse each week this goes on, and President Trump knows it.  The president is perfectly happy to have an investigation of his campaign go all Keystone Kops, because it will eventually die of its own lack of a crime.

President Trump is not, as some California congresswoman said about "rumors" she had heard, going to fire Mueller.  He's not going to fire him, because Mueller is the best thing that he has going for him.  While Mueller is churning up nothing, President Trump is out there getting tax reform done, booming the stock market to record heights, defeating ISIS and producing jobs all over the place.  Who looks better by contrast?

Mueller will doubtlessly haul up some poor sucker as a third and final victim, probably on some weird charge that also wouldn't exist without the investigation, or maybe something from 2003 or so.  But he will have to end the investigation himself, because the president sure is not going to fire him.

Mueller is far too good for this president to let get away.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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