Maybe Robert Mueller never had a political agenda after all. Maybe, just maybe, he is a patriotic public servant whose motive was answering the call of duty, to protect our elections from very real Kremlin skullduggery. No more, no less.
And maybe everybody who has slandered Mueller for more than two years, following the lead of our slander-happy president, were always wrong to ascribe nefarious motives to someone whose whole career refutes the “nefarious motive” scenario.
Occam’s razor makes those “maybes” much more likely than not.
Occam’s razor is a principle of logic most succinctly explained as holding that “the simplest explanation is usually the right one.” When applied to personal character, it holds that an individual’s past behavior is usually a good guide for understanding recent behavior. (In the fictional The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the professor used this form of logic, quite rightly, to suggest to the two older Pevensie children that if they always had found their sister Lucy to be truthful before, then they should believe her when she said she discovered a whole country inside a wardrobe.)
Mueller has performed a half-century of distinguished public service. He never, ever was known as a man with a partisan or ideological agenda, but, to the extent that he was identifiable politically at all, it was as the appointee of Republican presidents. The very idea that a famously “by the book” prosecutor with a vaguely Republican pedigree would engage in a “witch hunt” or “coup” against a duly elected Republican president was always nonsense on heroin, laced with despicable calumny.
If we use Occam’s razor to accept the almost universally shared pre-Trump assessment of Mueller, then everything he has done and said as special counsel and in his public comments since then fall into a perfectly logical place. Moreover, his widely panned performance in Wednesday’s committee hearings actually looks like a dignified and successful effort to do no more or less than his duty.
In excellent columns, my colleague Kaylee McGhee and former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti both say (quoting the latter) that Mueller managed to “thread a needle, staking out very nuanced and careful legal positions.” McGhee described it as “professionalism and caution, not incapacity.”
For what it’s worth, that was my immediate reaction, too. As I wrote to a good friend soon after the hearings: “I saw a guy who knew exactly what sorts of things he could honorably discuss, being asked about lots of other things and thus having to walk a tightrope. I saw a guy whose only disability was that he was slightly hard of hearing — a disability made worse because so many of the [congresspeople] asking him questions weren’t actually asking questions, but making statements, and he was trying to figure out if there was an actual question amidst all their verbiage that he was expected to answer. I think if you or I sat down one on one with Mueller, we would come away thinking he is sharp as a tack and in full control of his faculties.”
Again and again, in his report and in his press conference and in his congressional testimony, Mueller has stressed not the question of Trump’s culpability or lack thereof, but the dire need to combat Russian perfidy.
As Mariotti correctly noted, “When Mueller wanted to say more, he did. He described in detail the threat posed by the Russian attack on our electoral process, testifying that ‘they’re doing it as we sit here, and they expect to do it during the next campaign.’ He warned that ‘many more countries are developing the capability to replicate what the Russians had done.’ When Mueller had the rare opportunity to testify about matters that were not partisan—matters that should concern all Americans—he testified freely and strongly.”
Occam’s razor would lead us to think a proven by-the-book American patriot would have, as his real motivation, the desire to protect America from foreign dangers. If Mueller wanted to nail Trump on Tuesday, he could have. Instead, he let his report speak for itself when it came to Trump, but he strongly warned us against Russia.
That makes Mueller not a witch hunter, but a hero.
