The Narrative is dead! Long live The Narrative!
That’s
what played on CNN, NBC, and The
New York Times yesterday as they struggled to digest the
parting meal Robert Mueller served to the RussiaGate lynch mob: a nothingburger
with a side of crow-flavored fries. Mr. Mueller was careful, though, to leave a nice red poison cherry on top
with his statement that “…while
this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also
does not exonerate him.”
Mr. Mueller, who ought to know better,
could not be more in error on that too-fine-a-point. The official finding that
no crime was committed is, ipso
facto, an exoneration, and to impute otherwise is a serious breach
of his role in this legal melodrama.
Prosecutors are expressly forbidden to
traffic in defamation, aspersion, and innuendo in the absence of formal
charges. So, it will be interesting to hear what Mr. Mueller has to say
when Jerrold Nadler reels him into the House Judiciary Committee, as inevitably
he will, to do to some ‘splainin.’
What
actually happened with RussiaGate? A cabal of government officials colluded with the
Hillary Clinton campaign to interfere in the 2016 election and, failing to
achieve their desired outcome, engineered a two-years-plus formal inquisition
to deflect attention from their own misconduct and attempt to overthrow the
election result.
The
Cable News characters, quite a few of them lawyers, were litigating the living
shit out of the story on Sunday night in their usual spirit of obdurate rank
dishonesty. For instance, Jeffrey Toobin, who plays Attorney General on CNN,
went off on the infamous 2016 Trump Tower Meeting in which the president’s son,
Donald, Jr., met with Russian lawyer Natalia V. Veselnitskaya. Toobin omitted to mention that
Ms. Veselnitskaya was, at that very time, on the payroll of Fusion GPS, Hillary
Clinton’s “oppo” research contractor. In other words, Trump Junior was set up.
That
was characteristic of the collusion that actually occurred between the Hillary
campaign, the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the NSA, the UK’s MI6 intel agency, and
the Obama White House, striving to prevent the election of a TV reality show
star, and to disable him afterwards — also of the news media’s role in the
whole interminable scam of RussiaGate. Their fury and despair were as vivid the
night of March 24, 2019, as on November 8, 2016. And now they will attempt to spark off a sequel.
Rachel
Maddow, for instance, struggling to maintain her dignity after two years
playing Madame DeFarge on MSNBC, tried to console her fans with the prospect of
Mr. Trump getting raked over the coals by the DOJ’s Southern District of NY
prosecutors for crimes as yet unpredicted — really, whatever they might find if
they turn over enough rocks in Manhattan. Perhaps she doesn’t know how the
justice system actually works in this country: we prosecute crimes not persons.
In places like Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, you first choose a
person to eliminate and then fit them to a crime. If no crime can be found, one
is easily manufactured. In the USA, a predicate crime is required before you
can launch a prosecution. Perhaps the actual Attorney General, Mr. Barr, will
advise the avid staff of the Southern District of NY how this works.
There remains also, the rather sweeping
panorama of misconduct and probable crime among the government (and former
government) players in the agencies mentioned above. Does the
full Mueller Report mention, for instance, that the animating document claiming
that Trump colludedwith Russia
was manufactured by Mrs. Clinton’s employees? And that this document was used
time and again improperly and illegally to prolong the inquisition? How could
Mr. Mueller not acknowledge
that? And if not, what sort of investigation was this?
You
are forced to ask: did Mr. Mueller play an honorable role in this epic,
multilayered scandal? And is Mr. Mueller himself an honorable character, or
something less than that? I believe we’ll find out. The other team is coming to bat now — and just in
time for MLB’s opening day, too. The Mueller report has been a shocking
disappointment to the so-called “resistance,” but what about the
as-yet-unreleased DOJ Inspector General’s report on these very matters? Or the parallel
investigation of federal prosecutor John Huber, who is charged specifically
with looking into the malfeasance of the RussiaGate investigators? Or whatever
action the Attorney General himself launches in the wake of all this? Or
whether Mr. Trump finally declassifies the mountains of documents behind the
simple failure to find him guilty of any crime?
My favorite college professor and
mentor, David Hamilton, once put
a curious question to us when we were vexing him for some reason now forgotten:
“Why,” he asked, “Did Achilles drag Hector around the city of Troy three
times?”
We twiddled our cigarettes and pulled
our chins.
“Because he was just that pissed,” he
said.