Give credit to special counsel Robert Mueller. In what he hopes will be his final public words on the subject, and fully consonant with his entire conduct of his assignment, Mueller put the focus exactly where it should be.
“I will close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments — that there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election,” he said. “That allegation deserves the attention of every American. Thank you.”
If President Trump from the start had supported the investigation into Russian perfidy, as a president should feel morally and constitutionally obligated to do, he would not have undertaken efforts to make the investigation difficult while he at least bordered on obstructing justice. Indeed, if he had acted appropriately against Russian efforts to undermine our republic, he would not have done anything to necessitate appointment of a special counsel in the first place.
Oddly, a May 28 column by former FBI chief James Comey, who is otherwise a morally preening hypocrite, lays out these realities most succinctly. Until his final paragraph, where he draws some highly debatable conclusions that the FBI acted entirely appropriately during the Russia probe, Comey stuck to actual facts that are inconvenient to Trump’s slavish devotees.
“Russia engaged in a massive effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election,” Comey wrote. “What should the FBI have done? Let it go? Go tell the Trump campaign? Tell the press? No. Investigate, to see what the facts were. We didn’t know what was true.”
Toward that end, as Comey notes, the FBI acted in ways that (unintentionally) did far more to help than harm Trump’s election chances. Rather than leak word of an ongoing probe that might embarrass the Trump campaign, they kept it secret (as they should have). Then, when Comey made the strange decision to announce publicly the re-opening of an investigation into Hillary Clinton, it was Peter Strzok, “alleged architect of the treasonous plot to stop Trump, [who] drafted the letter I sent Congress.”
As Comey accurately noted, “It was a decision William Barr praised and Hillary Clinton blamed for her loss 11 days later.”
So the supposed lead conspirator against Trump actually torpedoed Clinton. Likewise his supposedly anti-Trump superior, deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, who “authorized a disclosure that revealed the FBI was actively investigating the Clinton Foundation, a disclosure that was harmful to Clinton.”
So the overall Russia probe itself was not a “get Trump” effort, even if some FBI personnel acted wrongly, and with bias against Trump, after Trump was elected. The investigation into the central issue — again, quoting Mueller, “that there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election” — was not just legitimate but important for our constitutional system.
As early as April of 2016, two months before the FBI opened its probe, I received emails from tech-knowledgeable conservatives alerting me to an apparent effort by Russians to use social media, systematically, to help Trump. The most important part of Mueller’s report details those Russian efforts, and their considerable effectiveness. Any good American, Republican or Democrat, should care about that, want to punish Russians and any Americans who participated, and want to prevent a repeat in future elections. It is abominable that our president seems not to share those concerns.
