In May, when deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” we welcomed the news. So did the president. “As I have stated many times,” he said in a press release, “a thorough investigation will confirm what we already know—there was no collusion between my campaign and any foreign entity.”
There was no reason to think attorney general Jeff Sessions was a Russian stooge and little evidence that Trump himself had actively colluded with the Putin government as he ran for the presidency, we reasoned, “but many others in Trump’s coterie of advisers have had significant dealings with Russia, relationships likely to be at the center of Mueller’s probe.” Since then, Mueller’s office has indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on charges of money laundering and failing to disclose his work as an agent for the then pro-Russian government of Ukraine, and Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak—conversations that included a request that Moscow not escalate in response to Obama-imposed sanctions on Russia for meddling in the 2016 election.
We’re inclined to be grateful that Manafort and Flynn, with their close alignments with Russian interests, are no longer in positions of influence. Mueller has done valuable work.
Even so, and despite Mueller’s well-deserved reputation for probity and professionalism, we were troubled by the December 2 revelation that one of Mueller’s top deputies, Peter Strzok, had been taken off the investigation for sending anti-Trump text messages to an FBI attorney, Lisa Page, with whom he was having an extramarital affair. We don’t know what the texts said, but they were sufficiently ill-advised to prompt Mueller to transfer him from the special counsel’s office to the FBI’s human resources department.
Nor does it inspire confidence that another member of the Mueller team, Andrew Weissmann, sent an email to Sally Yates, the Obama-appointed acting attorney general, praising her refusal to defend Trump’s travel ban. “I am so proud,” wrote Weissmann on January 30. “And in awe. Thank you so much.”
We don’t begrudge Weissmann his view of the travel ban or of Yates’s actions. The fact that a longtime Justice Department attorney might disapprove of a controversial Trump administration policy proposal is hardly surprising. But it was careless of an experienced attorney to put such gratuitous opinions about the president in writing.
Add to that the very real concerns about the double standards on display in the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email, and even reasonable observers will begin to wonder about the impartiality of justice at the highest levels of our government.
And then there are the less reasonable observers, who have already chosen to interpret Strzok’s texts and Weissmann’s email as evidence Mueller is leading a witch-hunt. Fox News’s Sean Hannity called Mueller “a disgrace to the American justice system” and described the revelations as evidence of just how “corrupt, abusively biased, and political [Mueller] and his team of so-called investigators really are.” “Mueller has been using the FBI as a political weapon,” inveighed Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett on Hannity’s show and added: “The FBI has become America’s secret police. Secret surveillance, wiretapping, intimidation, harassment, and threats. It’s like the old KGB that comes for you in the dark of night, banging through your door.” The host nodded along: “This is not hyperbole you’re using here.”
Of course it’s hyperbole. The vast majority of FBI officials are hardworking, patriotic, and focused on truth and justice. That there are partisans scattered among them does not make the nation’s premier law enforcement agency anything like the state security apparatus of the Soviet Union.
In May, we called Robert Mueller “a man of integrity” and we’ve seen nothing to alter that judgment. From his time as a Marine platoon commander in Vietnam through his years as a federal prosecutor and U.S. attorney and finally his tenure as FBI director from 2001-2013, he has been a model of distinguished public service. There is no reason to call for his resignation. His job wasn’t to find collusion but to investigate it and present a comprehensive report to the acting attorney general. It remains an important job.
But time presses, and the questions surrounding the investigation’s credibility are not trivial. Make haste, counselor, make haste.
