The messy quest to nail Trump
Never before have Democrats invested such great hope in a Republican as they have in Robert Swann Mueller III. The godsend special prosecutor steps forward in all of his eminence-grise, jut-jawed earnestness and accepts the challenge of ridding us of this turbulent tyrant, Donald Trump. And Democrats cheer.
They cheer despite the taint of Mueller’s Republican background. Perhaps the Democrats’ hunch is that Mueller is merely a RINO. And maybe he is.
There’s no disputing, however, the Republicanesque cut of his jib: preppy, Ivy League pedigree (St. Paul’s, Princeton). No-nonsense manner suggesting a corporate executive lineage. And all of this topped off with a righteous, prosecutorial mien — this last feature often a big selling point in GOP circles.
Nevertheless, hope persists among Democrats that Mueller will fulfill his mission — that he’ll one day in the not-too-distant future perp-walk the reviled Trump out the South Portico and head-duck him into a waiting squad car. Democrat and media support for Mueller persist even though it was President Bush No. 2 — said by Democrats and the media to be as dumb as the proverbial fence post — who anointed Mueller director of the FBI in 2001. Mueller served in that sinecure into 2013, longer than any director since J. Edgar Hoover. Mueller’s the new sheriff of Swamp City but hardly a new face there.
The hopes of Democrats seem all the more bucked up by the knowledge that Mueller once commanded a Marine combat platoon in Vietnam and emerged from that fray with a wound and a chest full of medals. Were his mission now to flush Viet Cong out of the bush, its success might be little in doubt. Alas, however, this is an assignment less dependent on gung-ho derringdo than on watch-where-you-step finesse.
The mission is to get Trump — but do it without creating a lot of messes on the side. Already, however, there are messes. And Mueller’s barely just got started.
Was there, in the first place, ever really a Russian hack of Democratic National Committee computers? Or was it actually an inside job?
None other than President Obama himself observed before leaving office that the intelligence community’s conclusions were never actually entirely “conclusive.” And there are knowledgeable people who, after examining such technical details as are now known, say they are 90 percent or more confident the culprit was somebody other than a Rooskie. Among those suggesting so are: William Binney, one-time tech director at NSA and designer of several of its current security programs; Kirk Weibe, one-time senior NSA analyst; Edward Coomis, one-time director of NSA’s Office of Signal Processing, and Ray McGovern, one-time Chief of the CIA’s Soviet Foreign Policy Branch.
They are involved with the gadfly Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Their views have been quoted in The Nation magazine, a publication that’s not by any stretch of the imagination part of the vast rightwing conspiracy. The dependably left-leaning Nation also has quoted a former IBM IT executive and Pentagon consultant, Skip Folden, on the matter. He opines that given the known details of the speed with which the purloined DNC files were downloaded, that is, given the known “transfer rate” of 22.7 megabytes per second, it was “simply unattainable” — downright “impossible” — for the Russians or any other off-site party to have achieved the download in the allotted time span of 87 seconds with the technology available at the time. The caper had to have been done, these guys say, by a DNC insider with a memory key or similar portable data-storage device who had access to the DNC’s system.
Maybe, they add, the culprit was a Bernie Sanders backer steamed over the ham-handed rigging of a primary to favor Hillary Clinton. The embarrassing DNC files (disseminated by WiikiLeaks) confirmed widespread suspicions that the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign were in secret cahoots to tilt the party nomination her way.
Meanwhile, the awkward question remains for hyperventilating Trump detractors to answer: In just what way, exactly, did the disclosure of fully accurate information regarding political skullduggery “undermine our democracy and compromise our presidential election”? Isn’t the widest possible disclosure of information — transparency — the supposed sine qua non of free elections and self-government?
Messy situation. And here’s another one:
The FBI itself didn’t examine the DNC’s servers in the “Russia hacking” probe. It oddly relied on a DNC contractor for such information as it received. Mueller’s old buddy, Big Jim Comey, the recent FBI chief canned by Trump, says the DNC ignored the FBI’s “multiple requests” for an opportunity to examine the DNC servers. The DNC says that’s not true, the FBI never asked, not once.
Hmmm. Messy situation indeed. And early in the game though it is, there’s more.
There’s the messy question of whether any Trump-Kremlin “collusion” — for which there’s zero evidence thus far — could possibly equal the Obama administration’s own now widely reported collusion with the very selfsame dreaded Kremlin. The administration approved the sale of 20 percent of America’s limited uranium mining assets to Rosatom, the Moscow-based Russian nuclear agency. Wide swaths of the news media now exercise remarkable restraint in resisting the temptation to make a big deal out of the matter.
The extraordinary sale was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) — an obscure panel chaired at the time by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s designee. Following the sale’s approval, hundreds of thousands of dollars from parties with an interest in the sale’s approval flowed into Bill Clinton’s bank account in “speech fees.” And tens of millions of dollars from parties benefitting from the sale flowed into the Clintons’ foundation in the form of “charitable” donations. Mere innocent coincidences? Maybe so. But is anybody bothering to check?
The sale surely advanced Russia’s objective of tightening its already firm grip on the global uranium market, as well as enhancing Russia’s influence on the price of the material — a scarce material officially labelled a “strategic asset,” the essential ingredient for nuclear weapons.
Can the Trump-pursuing Mueller ignore the uranium caper without seeming to be a lawman who overlooked a Brinks heist to chase down a shop lifter? Messy situation.
Meanwhile, Mueller’s one indictment so far seems only to add to the mounting messes. The indictment cites former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort on moneylaundering and other charges, allegations having nothing to do with any Russian-Trump collusion. But the indictment also cites — without leveling charges — an unnamed party said to be deeply involved in the Manafort shenanigans. And that unnamed party is reported to be none other than the Podesta Group — a lobbying firm co-owned by Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta.
According to the Mueller indictment, Manafort subcontracted the unnamed Podesta Group and paid it handsomely to lobby for a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian client. The Podesta firm used a phony front group name for its client, all this an arrangement cooked up by Manafort, the indictment says.
If the indictment is angling to make a case of collusion with the Kremlin, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager looks to be right at the center of it, cheek by jowl with Trump’s campaign manager. Very, very messy.
Meanwhile, can Mueller keep the spotlight fixed on Manafort’s alleged shady activities without also shinning the light on Podesta’s?
Nonetheless, the media coverage of Mueller has conferred on him an aura of prosecutorial rectitude, the suggestion that he’s perfectly cast for his designated role of upholder of Truth, Justice and the American Way. Yet, amid the huzzahs and hosannas, there are hushed concerns.
In some of his major, previous investigative productions, he came off as less like Dick Tracey, the ace lawman of the funny pages, and more like Tracey’s bumbling parody, Fearless Fosdick. The L.A. Times managed to make the point in a recent Mueller profile. First there was Mueller’s highly publicized West Coast crusade to take down Hells Angels using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act. Eighteen Hells Angels gangsters were collared, with front pages and newscasts heralding the event and leaks embellishing the drama.
But eventually, after appeals court reversals, hung juries and dismissed charges, Mueller hobbled away with zero convictions. It was a total shut-out win for the tattooed bad-guy bikers. Then there came 9\11 and the follow-up domestic anthrax attacks that convulsed New Jersey and other localities along with Washington.
Mueller was then at the helm of a leaky FBI. With lavish appropriations at its disposal but a dearth of prosecutable evidence in hand, the agency went all out to point the finger of suspicion at military scientist Steven Hatfield. Hatfield sued and won an unprecedented $5.8-million settlement from the FBI, the tab picked up, of course, by the hapless American taxpayer.
Mueller’s FBI then turned its suspicions, gumshoes and leaks on another military scientist. He, alas, committed suicide before a case could be made against him. Another shutout defeat for Mueller. The anthrax probe, despite the hundreds of millions of tax dollars consumed by it, remains a case never proved in court.
The L.A. Times profile also recalled Mueller’s signal contribution to the war on terror: the creation of a brand new FBI Directorate of Intelligence, unveiled with attendant media hullaballoo.
When the FBI’s Inspector General later looked over the directorate’s record, it assessed it as a complete, abject failure and recommended a total overhaul of Mueller’s pet project, starting from scratch.
None of this is to suggest Mueller won’t be able to bring back the trophy he was sent out to bag.
Given the vast array of criminal code misdeeds in the federal government’s prosecutorial arsenal, plus the dodgy environments Trump long inhabited — reality shows, beauty pageants, casinos, garish clubs, real estate hustles, bankruptcy maneuvers, tax manipulations, etc. — the quest to harpoon this Moby Dick seems hardly all that much against the odds.
But big questions loom over the Mueller enterprise. How much other big game will he be willing to overlook in his hunt for Trump? Will public opinion accede to a selective prosecutorial narrative, if that’s the direction Mueller decides to go? Will public opinion be willing to ignore whatever messy situations Mueller himself may ultimately choose to overlook?