You can see where this Mueller thing is going:
to the moment when the Golden Golem of Greatness finally swats down the
political horsefly that has orbited his glittering brainpan for a whole year,
and says, “There! It’s done.”
It
suggests that Civil War Two will end up looking a whole lot more like the
French Revolution than Civil War One. The latter unfurled as a solemn tragedy;
the former as a Coen Brothers style opéra
bouffe bloodbath. Having executed the presidential swat to
said orbiting horsefly, Trump will try to turn his attention to the affairs of
the nation, only to find that it is insolvent and teetering on the most
destructive workout of bad debt the world has ever seen. And then his enemies
will really go to work. In the process, they’ll probably wreck the
institutional infrastructure needed to run a republic in constitutional
democracy mode.
They
got a good start in politicizing the upper ranks of the FBI, a fatal
miscalculation based on the certainty of a Hillary win, which would have
enabled the various schemers in the J. Edgar Hoover building to just fade back
into the procedural woodwork of the agency and get on with life. Instead, their
shenanigans were exposed and so far one key player, Deputy Director Andrew
McCabe, was hung out to dry by a committee of his fellow agency execs for lying
about his official conduct. Long about now, you kind of wonder: is that where
it ends for him? Seems like everybody else (and his uncle) is getting indicted
for lying to the FBI. How about Mr. McCabe, since that is exactly why his
colleagues at the FBI fired him?
Perhaps
further resolution of this murky situation awaits Inspector General Michael
Horowitz’s forthcoming report, which the media seems to have forgotten about
lately. An awful lot of the mischief at the FBI and its parent agency, the
Department of Justice, is already on the public record, for instance the
conflicting statements of Andrew McCabe and his former boss James Comey
concerning who illegally leaked what to the press. On the face of it, it looks
pretty bad when at least one of these Big Fish at the top of a supposedly
incorruptible agency is lying. There are at least a dozen other Big Fish in
there who still have some serious ‘splainin’ to do, and why not in the grand jury
setting?
Nobody
knows where the current Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is in all this — and
“is” may be too strong a word to describe his wraith-like tenure this past
year. He seems less present than the portraits of his dead predecessors lining
the hallway outside his office, considering the lively swirl of allegations all
around him. Well, he did appoint yet another special counsel, an obscure US
Attorney from Utah, John Huber, to evaluate several heaps of FBI dirty laundry,
most particularly the strange and baffling treatment that Hillary Clinton has
received in the matter of the Steele Dossier, the email server inquiry dropped
by Comey, and the 2012 Uranium One incident that abracadabra’d about $150
million (from wealthy Russians!) into the Clinton Foundation coffers while she
was Secretary of State. Mr. Huber is charged to follow up anything the
Inspector General discovers to be a possible breach of the law.
But
it’s finally back to Mr. Mueller, the zeppelin-sized horsefly circling the head
of state. There was that Russia thing that set off the awful commotion in the
FBI, which arose first in the charge that the newly-appointed National Security
Advisor had a couple of conversations with the Russian ambassador during the
presidential transition period. The President-elect’s furious adversaries
managed to put across the story that American officials are not supposed to
talk to ambassadors from foreign countries, which is about the most absurd
proposition imaginable — except in a land where school kids are taught nothing
about government or history. Anyway, Mr. Flynn was not even indicted for that,
but rather for supposedly lying about it to a delegation of interrogators from
Mueller’s office. My guess is that Mr. Trump will sack Mr. Mueller when the IG’s
report comes out and the shady machinations that brought Mueller onto the scene
are revealed in full. The #Resistance will lose its avatar and impeachment will
become the sole campaign issue for November 2018.