Mueller Was Never Going to Save Us — And That’s a Good Thing

1973 Political Cartoon

After waiting, Godot-like, for two years, the Mueller report and the nation’s anticipation of its conclusions has reached the endpoint. Filtered through the not-at-all-biased report of AG Barr, Mueller’s handiwork has landed as the most divisive denouement since the Sopranos finale. Not since the great kale shortage of ’16 has there been a such a general feeling of malaise on the left; all that remains is the rending of garments. The right, meanwhile, has unsurprisingly already chosen to weaponize the presumed results of the investigation, with the President, as usual, leading the charge to turn the tables on his reputed accusers. “What they did — it was a false narrative, it was a terrible thing,” Trump said. “We can never let this happen to another president again.” All this without a single page of the report being made public. No matter: in modern America, partisanship can climb Everest before facts can buy climbing boots. Even without the full report, however, (we have, at this writing, 81 words out of hundreds of pages) we can glean certain results.

Firstly, the idea now pushed by the Trumpistas that Russiagate was a lie, a fabrication, a myth dreamed up by an enraged left to nullify the election of an honorable President — is plainly ludicrous. If Mueller was engaged in a witch-hunt, he must have cast his line in the Land of Oz, because he caught an awful lot of witches: 34 individuals, including President Trump’s campaign manager, attorney, national security adviser, the head of the inaugural committee, and multiple campaign aides have been charged or plead guilty to criminal activity. In virtually any other administration, this would not be exoneration but a scandal of historic proportions. Further, while the Administration (and, it should be said, the same Congressional peddlers of the unending and ghastly Benghazi delusion) persists in calling Mueller’s actions unnecessary and biased, recall two facts. First, the Russia investigation occurred because a crime was undoubtedly committed: a foreign hostile power hacked into protected computers targeting Americans in an effort to affect a US presidential election while at the same time launching a social media campaign targeting voters in an attempt to affect the outcome thereof. And second, the investigation into Trump’s campaign associates occurred in no small…