The Legacies of Robert Mueller’s Investigations, by Victor Davis Hanson.
Some 450 days ago we were treated to melodramatic announcements from the media about the start-up of Robert Mueller’s “dream” and “all-star” team.
Reporters gushed in the general hysteria of the times that Mueller would no doubt soon indict President Trump, some of his family, and almost anyone else in his campaign — and therefore end the Trump aberration.
Press puff pieces highlighted the résumés of his superstars — of Lisa Page … , Peter Strzok … and a host of other pros, who were all shortly to prove Trump-Russian “collusion.”
Although that Mueller mandate of collusion was never formally defined, much less explained as a criminal offense, the media salivated at the idea that Mueller’s whiz kids nonetheless were going to find it and no doubt thereby usher in impeachment.
Now we have gone from melodrama to bathos.
The supposed high drama of election sabotage has descended into leveraging Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen and then outsourcing him and his baggage to federal prosecutors. The FBI, having seized from his home and office his stealthily recorded and secret tapes of his own alleged lawyer-client conversations with Trump, now hope to find therein something, anything, untoward with which they can accuse and damage the president.
Paul Manafort is to be exposed for what most already knew he was, a high-flying wheeler-dealer and influence-peddler along the lines of his Clintonite doppelganger, Tony Podesta. Mueller’s team at some point presumably will embarrass Trump concerning his Cohen-arranged hush deals about an alleged fling a decade earlier with a playboy bunny.
What was billed as an investigation into high intrigue with the Kremlin, has now devolved into questions surrounding one Stormy Daniels and Paul Manafort’s blue ostrich jacket. Quite a come down. …
Studiously ignoring the real collusion:
Mueller originally was appointed due to the contrived leaks from the Steele dossier — a misnamed document that was more likely cobbled together by Glenn Simpson and his wife of Fusion GPS for purposes of destroying Donald Trump’s candidacy and then presidency. …
Mueller’s lawyers show little concern for whether Christopher Steele himself colluded with Russians to find his dirt, or whether Hillary Clinton’s hiring of Fusion GPS and Steele constituted a sort of Russian collusion in and of itself …
Mueller’s testament thus far will be one of willful blindness: he saw nothing ethically or legally wrong, or dangerous to the republic, in a bought and fictional dossier that fueled both his own reason to be, and in various ways was central to an historic government effort to surveille, to infiltrate, to undermine, and to discredit a political campaign first—and later to derail an elected presidency.
