Now that special counsel Robert Mueller has quit the Department of Justice, many Republicans give him a pass for the way he conducted his investigation. This is because his report into the Russia collusion hoax found that neither President Trump nor any other American worked with Moscow to fix the 2016 election. The logic is, “No harm, no foul,” so people avoid shedding their decadeslong admiration for Mueller as a straight arrow.
But there’s an elephant in the room that no cloud of bromide can conceal. It’s that Mueller conducted his investigation and wrote his report with an animus against the president and a reflex to defend his own colleagues in the intelligence community. Byron York provides a lucid retrospective on the whole Russia conspiracy theory, which has plagued our politics and hobbled the federal government for more than two years.
Bad though it is, the worst of Mueller’s work is not that he knew by the end of 2017 that there was no collusion, yet let the country twist in the wind for another 15 months. He still had to look into obstruction of justice, but with DOJ approval he could have issued an interim report revealing that the central crime he was investigating never happened.
Nor was the worst of Mueller that he evaded his responsibility to determine whether there was evidence to convict Trump of obstruction. He left the decision to Attorney General William Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, ensuring that a stink of cover-up would hang over it.
Mueller’s outlandish inversion of norms in pointing out that he’d failed to prove Trump innocent was not his most egregious contribution to our poisonous politics. Nor was his invitation to Democrats to impeach the president.
No, the worst of Mueller was not what he did but what he failed to do. To identify that, ask yourself whether you really know the extent of Russian interference in our democracy? Mueller didn’t lay out the probity or abuses of intelligence officials who set his investigation in motion. Have you actually got your mind around what they did? No, you have not. For Mueller didn’t bother to look into the origins of the dossier, which was the seed of the scandal and is legitimately suspected to be Russian disinformation. He didn’t investigate how it fell into the hands of media organizations who used it against Trump. He cast no light on whether his old pal, James Comey, or other intelligence bigwigs such as John Brennan and James Clapper, were duped (and by whom) into believing the claptrap it contained.
The central point — I’ve made it here before — is that falsehood doesn’t spring into being from thin air. It has to be invented. The dossier and the collusion narrative were false. So who made them up? Who were they working for? And why? Mueller has dropped the mic and walked away into private life without attempting to find out.
So no, sadly, he is not a consummate professional. He has failed. Let us hope that Barr succeeds.
