Nowhere is the collapse of the Democratic Party as a
coherent political organization more evident than in the astounding
metamorphosis of Robert Mueller.
He returned to public notice as special
counsel and was instantly heralded by the Democratic media as a virtual Douglas
MacArthur of selfless national duty, precisely the sort of rigorous,
incorruptible, no-nonsense public servant who would tear the Trump fraud of
corruption and artificiality, dirty tricks, shady accounting, and outrageous
misbehavior apart and expose the whole rotten mess that had, by nightmarish
mischance, moved into the White House (where the Clinton pay-to-play casino
should already have been installed).
Mueller looked the part: tall, slender, slab-faced,
jut-jawed, and unsmiling, all business, and no soft bonhomous weakness for
anything but a thorough plumbing of the depths of Trump’s unutterable
hucksterism, skullduggery, and larceny. The commentariat, though well gone in
the saddle after their long incumbency as the country’s political sages,
dressed for the part again and took to the airwaves with the smug confidence of
veterans and the zest of those addicted to tearing down administrations they
found distasteful.
Disentombed from the obscurity that had long enshrouded
him, Carl Bernstein resurfaced, speaking matter-of-factly of imminent
impeachment and removal of the usurping miscreant. From Nate Silver to Charles
Blow and even the once-professional David Gergen, like a phalanx of bobbleheads,
they agreed that impeachment was coming and . . . coming and . . . just around
the corner.
Bernstein became so exasperated waiting, he
sanctimoniously called Trump a “grifter,” but tempered his judgment with an
endlessly repeated theory that Trump’s brain had turned to mush and he was not
physically and mentally fit to govern. “We have a constitutional crisis.” Not
that anyone else noticed. On and on it has gone, without a thought to
professionalism, balance, or anything but another partisan smear job on a
non-conformist Republican.
The Bushes after all, were good old boys; you had to have
a tame Republican on the top of the Democratic wedding cake from time to time,
and at the start, practically all the Republicans in Congress were as appalled
at the Trump imposture and intrusion as the Democrats. After all, he ran
against them, too.
Mueller packed his investigative team with notorious
Democratic partisans. Andrew Weissman, who had cooked his share of Republicans
already, and attended Hillary Clinton’s victory party the night she lost to
Trump, took over the actual work.
He and many of those he recruited had just
finished white-washing Clinton—on to the tarring-and-feathering of her
opponent. Mueller, never a martyr to the work ethic, despite the Democratic
media’s wall-to-wall effort to spin him as a war hero Republican, flawless FBI
director, and a rail-splitting confessant to the chopping of the cherry tree, left
the direction of the investigation to Weissman and his gang, all of them
desperate to destroy the president.
Perish the thought of any of this
pusillanimous bourgeois rubbish about impartiality! Trump was an interloper and
he had to be sent packing with such finality that no one would dare interrupt
the self-enriching slumbers of the political class for at least another
century.
Sessions immediately recused
himself on all Russian matters and sat like a great eunuch-toad leaving the
president whom he served practically defenseless while this rampaging lynch mob
ransacked his personal, corporate, campaign, and presidential records.
The
Strzok-Page text messages indicate that the Mueller team ascertained quite
quickly that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and
in fact, no nominee of any serious party to the presidency of the United States
in its history would ever have partaken of such an evil and preposterous
enterprise.
From early on, Mueller’s game was obstruction. He piled
demands on the president, required sworn testimony over several days from the
White House counsel (who should have immunity in respect of his chief client).
The president’s tactic of talking tough while furnishing everything asked by
the special counsel got him through the midterm elections.
Few commentators noticed that the big winner in those
elections was not the Democrats but the president. When he started out in
January 2017, there were demonstrations all around the world and though the
Republicans were in nominal control of both houses of Congress, in fact they
were both controlled by coalitions of Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans.
They sand-bagged the president on health care reform, the Republicans strutting
in their hypocrisy, having voted many times to repeal Obamacare while Obama was
there to veto their votes.
The only place Trump could get a consensus was in
appointing conservative judges who would generally adhere to the Constitution
and the relevant legislation, (a terrible inconvenience for the Democratic
addicts to the authoritarian state). Then he cobbled together the necessary
votes for his tax cut and reform package, which has proved an immense success.
The Republicans lost the House in the midterm elections,
but Trump never had the majority anyway. His speaker, Paul Ryan, was a
conflicted NeverTrumper and retired. But in the Senate, he added two senators
as three NeverTrump Republicans—Bob Corker of Tennessee, Jeff Flake of Arizona,
and John McCain—departed; in the case of McCain, by dying and causing his
funeral to be a tasteless bipartisan Trump-bashing session. This shifted the
balance in the Senate.
Trump then fired Sessions, appointed an unsurpassably
competent and upright replacement, William Barr, who had held the position
under George H. W. Bush. Barr ordered Mueller to wind down his investigation,
which Mueller and his sponsors had apparently hoped to keep going through the
next election. Trump’s enemies had thought it was their right to have an
impeachment-launching special counsel lurking around the White House ready to
pounce on anything the Trump-hating media could confect into a cause for
removal.
Mueller, the lion of official redemption, failed again
and again. He had to choose between keeping faith with his rabidly Trump-hating
sponsors, or his claims to professional integrity. Having found no evidence of
collusion by anyone, he tried to leave the door open to impeachment for
obstruction. He went down with the ship, and stated his inability to
“exonerate” on obstruction.
A special counsel finds adequate evidence of criminal
wrongdoing, or not. No one wants or asks him to exonerate anyone. In his
summary of the report, Barr said there was no conclusion on obstruction but
that he and the deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, Mueller’s old side-kick
who had protected Mueller all through the phantom Sessions term, and the in-house
counsel of the Justice Department, all agreed that the elements of obstruction:
a corrupt act for a corrupt purpose in contemplation of a legal action, were
all absent in this case.
The pitiful attempt by Mueller to leave Trump a live
grenade with the pin pulled was made even more absurd by his attempt to run
away and hide. He spoke to the press inarticulately from a printed text for
less than 10 minutes, took no questions, and said he would have nothing more to
say.
Finally, the two egregious Democratic committee chairman who still claim
to have evidence of impeachable offenses by the president but can’t cite any,
Representatives Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), both
seriously ill-favored men, called Mueller as a witness, and designed a
timetable for his appearance clearly intended to prevent the Republican members
from really getting at Mueller.
If his stumbling press statement was indicative of his
forensic talents, Mueller will have a real sleigh-ride with a gang of Democrats
angry because he couldn’t find anything on the president and Republicans who
rightly consider his entire performance an unprofessional and morally corrupt
operation.
Attorney General Barr has offered him support if he
wishes not to appear. The Trump lynch mob has reached the last round-up.
It
only remains for Barr and his special prosecutor, John Durham, to indict those
who politicized the intelligence agencies and the FBI, fraudulently sought FISA
warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, and lied to congressional committees and
the FBI.
Those who would use the wheels of justice to persecute the innocent,
will be ground to powder by them. Mueller is unlikely to have committed any
offenses, but his conduct has been contemptible at every stage.
