Last week, for the first time in months, it looked like President Donald Trump and his legal team might be inching back toward a strategy of cooperation with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. According to presidential lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Mueller had assured them they did not believe they had the power to indict a sitting president and had said the investigation was likely to wrap up by September; meanwhile, Giuliani said the legal team would soon begin to prepare the president for an interview.
Then came a weekend report in the New York Times that Donald Trump Jr. had met with a representative of two Gulf states during the 2016 election for the purpose of securing their help in the campaign—and that the meeting had become a “focus” of Mueller’s investigation. When he read the story, Trump exploded.
“Things are getting really ridiculous,” the president tweeted Sunday morning, blasting the Times’ “long and boring story,” which he said indicated that “the World’s most expensive Witch Hunt has found nothing on Russia & me so now they are looking at the rest of the World!”
Trump complained that Mueller’s reported focus on countries beside Russia would likely allow him to continue his investigation through the midterm elections, “where they can put some hurt on the Republican Party.” And he rattled off a laundry list of Republican complaints about the Department of Justice: that the FBI allegedly obtained preliminary surveillance warrants against some of his staffers with information taken from the infamous Steele dossier during the embryonic stages of the Russia investigation, that Mueller’s team was comprised of “13 Angry and Heavily Conflicted Democrats and two people who have worked for Obama for 8 years,” that the “hard charging (except in the case of Democrats) FBI” had come down hard on his people while handling Hillary Clinton with kid gloves.
“They have found no Collusion with Russia, No Obstruction, but they aren’t looking at the corruption in the Hillary Clinton Campaign where she deleted 33,000 Emails, got $145,000,000 while Secretary of State, paid McCabes wife $700,000 (and got off the FBI hook along with Terry M) and so much more,” Trump tweeted. “Republicans and real Americans should start getting tough on this scam.”
It was a typical Trump rant, a mixture of vague assertions, legitimate grievances, and conspiratorial non sequiturs. On the one hand, as many conservative writers have noted, the president is justified in being steamed that prosecutors were more deferential to Hillary Clinton than they have been to him—although on the other, the charge of colluding with a hostile power to undermine America’s institutions is somewhat more serious than deleting emails. Other joyrides, including the bit about “McCabes wife” (Jill McCabe, wife of former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe) and “Terry M” (former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe), are too garbled and tenuous even to explain.
The more important question is what any of this has to do with Mueller. While then-FBI director James Comey and his band of merry men were investigating Clinton, the man who would become the special counsel was plugging away at his private practice at WilmerHale. Whatever gaffes the FBI might have made during that investigation or during the early stages of the Russia investigation, it is preposterous to lay them at Mueller’s feet—particularly considering that he was hired in part because that investigation had become such a political mess that it was necessary to bring in an objective third party to take over.
The president has not bothered to let such distinctions get in the way of his story. Trump does not seem to understand that Mueller, the FBI, and the Department of Justice are separate entities. Rather, they are all simply the “Witch Hunt”—a monolithic force of destruction and obstruction that, like its close cousin “fake news,” exists for no purpose other than being unfair to him.
