(Photo, Doug Miller, New York Times)
I believe that Robert Mueller has always believed that Donald Trump was capable of any crime, if he thought he could get away with it, and took the job as Special Counsel with that in mind. In other words I think he was predisposed to want to find Trump guilty of something.
Only he couldn’t.
He may have had some personal beef, or just the same turned-up, who-farted nose many inside the establishment, including conservatives, had for this backwater usurper from Queens.
Historians will speculate about just what that one thing was, but only to diminish Mueller more, for from his comments at the Office of the Attorney General on Wednesday, it was clear that no evidence gathered since the investigation began had anything to do with his final analysis…not that Trump was innocent, but only that he couldn’t prove Trump was guilty.
Mueller had a predisposition not to like Trump, and nothing the lack of evidence could do could change his mind.
That said, as you know, everyone has a set of personal priorities they want to protect at all times, and often at all costs. There are the intangibles; honor, integrity, duty, a reputation, if French, a way with women. And there are the accomplishments, things built, cases tried, convictions won, or from the opposite end, innocent men acquitted. All these things lead to one’s place in history from a chapter, to a paragraph, to a margin footnote.
The same is true of the Annals of Harlan County, Kentucky, or maybe just the rod and gun club of the same county, where may still be hanging the photo of Marlin Haskins with the head of a black panther in his lap, from the time that big cat escaped from the circus traveling through the county in 1948. Marlin took him down with a single shot of a 30-06 Springfield. It was Marlin’s one claim to fame, but which, over the span of a lifetime, earned him a lot of free beer, which is saying a lot for a dry county.
Marlin probably died more proud of his accomplishments than Robert Mueller likely will.
How individuals rank these priorities are known only unto them, but it’s interesting to observe that of all the achievements and reputation gathered because of them, and which Robert Mueller would want to protect, he was willing to concede his personal honor and his reputation in history, reducing many in his more notable ones in the FBI to mere footnotes, all for the sake of protecting the appearance of actual bias by refusing to state publicly what he wanted to be true, but could not prove.
I’m sure the “appearance of bias” is among a list of things most lawyers would want to protect. In summer, 2017 I penned, “Just Whose Side is Robert Mueller On, Two Schools”, where I tried to evaluate Mueller based on competing choices, as Vegas bookies might handicap them. In rereading that piece I found I was largely right, yet missed the essence of Mueller altogether. I wrote then, “More mathematically, Vegas would assume that Robert Mueller, by his very nature, would only consider that there are places he will not go to secure a conviction.”
In fact, that was the case. Mueller just couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger that would openly denounce a man he wanted to be guilty. But instead of taking the high road and acquitting Trump (as he knew a court would) he took a coward’s path by inferring a guilt existed that he could never prove, knowing he would be laughed out of town should he ever try.
The name of Robert Mueller has been on everyone’s lips since he presented his final report in April, 2019, yet essentially the case was closed then. It’s locked away in a closet, with no significant indictments, a couple likely to be dismissed or reversed, and absolutely not a shred of evidence that could guide any federal prosecutor toward a trial on the merits of any possible crime committed by Donald Trump, his family and team, in the pursuit of the presidency in 2016.
I assume the hope is that the voters will be less discerning.
That legal ship has sailed. And personally, I think it’s time to lock away Robert Mueller’s name as well, It’s not a good look for us to still be standing around stomping our feet about the unfairness of a man who ultimately failed in a thing he wanted to accomplish.
Mueller is likely hoping for a return to power by his Establishment clique, only doesn’t know that because of other forces unleashed by the emergence of Donald Trump, such as the unmasking of elements of the Left that have no intention to allow the return of the good old days of “useful idiots” who once ran Washington, there will never be written the history that will rehabilitate him. He won’t get his own postage stamp.
If the people stay true to the MAGA message, and elect 4-5 more presidents who will remain true, as well, with a house-full of House and Senate members, a truer history of the era will be written that will take at least 200 years to unwrite, as the Left is now trying to unwrite America’s first century.
Closing the book on Mueller, we should be instructed on the way people in power assess their place in history.
Without knowing whether there are third parties who had gotten to Mueller, or his family, the sort of thing we’ve found easy to accuse Chief Justice John Robert of falling prey to, such things are totally outside the realm of predictability.
Of all the things Robert Mueller wanted to protect, I’d say he lost many of them.
For one, he proved he is petty, having convicted at least one innocent man, General Flynn, and breaking him and his family financially without remorse, and stepping far outside the bounds of standard prosecutorial behavior for offenses that in the regular course of law would end with much lighter fines and punishments.
Two, he proved he can be mean, for the very same reasons. Or, in the alternative, he runs around in his bathrobe in a drunken stupor while allowing his underlings to do these mean things in his name.
History will not treat him well on this.
This renaissance of the common man will not be short lived.
Which means that Washington’s Green Book will become smaller and smaller. Mueller will still be wealthy by most standards, but his opportunities for growing wealth, if that is even an ambition, will diminish. As will his ability to (re) grow his reputation as a lawyer and administrator. The power of insider-Washington will diminish by this whole affair, much of it having nothing to do with Mueller, but his ability to circulate within this group is already diminished. As will his social circles diminish. For all I know, he’s wanted to retire to Fiji anyway. But if not, after making the DC circuit for a couple of years, he may change his mind about Fiji.
An interesting study will be to see if Robert Mueller campaigns for anyone in 2020.
With the Mueller investigation finished, and the death rattles of Democrats trying to keep it alive, about to fold, the crimes committed by dwellers of the deep state will come into the spotlight, pushing Mueller even further into the recesses of memory.
Bottom line is that while Robert Mueller gave us all a lesson about the misuse of criminal charges, he actually held true to a firm principle of law and refused to cross that line.
