The New York Times has noticed that, as President Trump faces “the sort of politically charged investigation that dogged Bill and Hillary Clinton when they were in the White House in the 1990s, he has consciously adopted a strategy from the Clintons’ playbook.”
The strategy includes “a campaign to discredit the investigators” before they hit their stride. The point, writes reporter Peter Baker, is “to do to Robert S. Mueller, the special counsel [in the Russia inquiry], what the Clintons did to Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel [in Whitewater].”
Trump aides, we learn, have actually “studied and privately expressed admiration for the no-holds-barred way the Clintons attacked Mr. Starr’s integrity at every turn in an effort to shift attention from their conduct to his.”
Trump’s attack on Mueller is made in terms of conflict of interest. Mueller came to the White House to interview for FBI director just before he took the job of special counsel in the Russian matter. That was a conflict of interest, Trump says. “There were many other conflicts that I haven’t said, but I will at some point” he said in an interview with the Times. The president may order the Justice Department to fire a counsel for conflict of interest. Trump is reading from the playbook: Make Mueller the issue.
Not every Trump aide is a Mueller critic. Mark Corallo, a member of the president’s legal team and a friend of Mueller’s, recently resigned: not for him the task of sullying the special counsel’s reputation. Watch to see how many others follow Corallo out the door for the same reason. The number is likely to be low.
It’s disconcerting that Trump aides have found the Clintons’ playbook and have studied it—and admire it. It teaches their kind of politics, and we’ll know how much they’re using it if attacks on Mueller’s aides become routine—as they did on Starr’s—and if more White House staffers join the attack team.
During the Clinton administration, deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes told his attack team, “This is a fight to the finish. We have to damage this a—hole. Everything is fair game. All guns up and loaded.” It’s not hard to imagine that kind of inspirational talk inside the Trump White House.
