Why Mueller failed to denounce the corrupt "so-called" president
From The New Yorker;In response to:
Why the Mueller Investigation Failed
President Trump’s obstructions of justice were broader than those of Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton,
and the special counsel’s investigation proved it. How come the report didn’t say so?
By Jeffrey Tobin
June 29, 2020
Robert Mueller submitted his final report as the special counsel more than a year ago. But even now—in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and the Administration’s tragically bungled response to it, and the mass demonstrations following the killings by police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others—President Trump remains obsessed with what he recently called, on Twitter, the “Greatest Political Crime in the History of the U.S., the Russian Witch-Hunt.” In the past several months, the President has mobilized his Administration and its supporters to prove that, from its inception, the F.B.I.’s investigation into possible ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian government was flawed, or worse. Attorney General William Barr has directed John Durham, the United States Attorney in Connecticut, to conduct a criminal investigation into whether F.B.I. officials, or anyone else, engaged in misconduct at the outset. Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has also convened hearings on the investigation’s origins.
The President has tweeted about Mueller more than three hundred times, and has repeatedly referred to the special counsel’s investigation as a “scam” and a “hoax.” Barr and Graham agree that the Mueller investigation was illegitimate in conception and excessive in execution—in Barr’s words, “a grave injustice” that was “unprecedented in American history.” According to the Administration, Mueller and his team displayed an unseemly eagerness to uncover crimes that never existed. In fact, the opposite is true. Mueller had an abundance of legitimate targets to investigate, and his failures emerged from an excess of caution, not of zeal. Especially when it came to Trump, Mueller avoided confrontations that he should have welcomed. He never issued a grand-jury subpoena for the President’s testimony, and even though his office built a compelling case for Trump’s having committed obstruction of justice, Mueller came up with reasons not to say so in his report. In light of this, Trump shouldn’t be denouncing Mueller—he should be thanking him.
The events that led to Mueller’s appointment began shortly after Trump took office, when he met several times with James Comey, the director of the F.B.I. Over dinner at the White House, on January 27, 2017, Trump said that he expected “loyalty” from Comey—specifically, as he would later make clear, he wanted an announcement from the F.B.I. that he was not under suspicion for misconduct with Russia during the campaign. At the time, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser, was being investigated for lying to the F.B.I. As Comey later testified, on February 14th, at a meeting in the Oval Office, the President told everyone else to leave, then asked Comey to drop the investigation of Flynn. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump said. “He is a good guy.”
Comey declined either to publicly clear Trump of wrongdoing or to close the investigation of Flynn, and the President resolved to fire him. On May 8, 2017, Trump told Rod Rosenstein, who had recently been confirmed as the Deputy Attorney General, to write a memo describing Comey’s performance as the F.B.I. director, in particular his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private e-mail. The following day, Rosenstein submitted the memo and Trump fired Comey. ...
Why the Mueller Investigation Failed
President Trump’s obstructions of justice were broader than those of Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton,
and the special counsel’s investigation proved it. How come the report didn’t say so?
By Jeffrey Tobin
June 29, 2020
Robert Mueller submitted his final report as the special counsel more than a year ago. But even now—in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and the Administration’s tragically bungled response to it, and the mass demonstrations following the killings by police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others—President Trump remains obsessed with what he recently called, on Twitter, the “Greatest Political Crime in the History of the U.S., the Russian Witch-Hunt.” In the past several months, the President has mobilized his Administration and its supporters to prove that, from its inception, the F.B.I.’s investigation into possible ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian government was flawed, or worse. Attorney General William Barr has directed John Durham, the United States Attorney in Connecticut, to conduct a criminal investigation into whether F.B.I. officials, or anyone else, engaged in misconduct at the outset. Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has also convened hearings on the investigation’s origins.
The President has tweeted about Mueller more than three hundred times, and has repeatedly referred to the special counsel’s investigation as a “scam” and a “hoax.” Barr and Graham agree that the Mueller investigation was illegitimate in conception and excessive in execution—in Barr’s words, “a grave injustice” that was “unprecedented in American history.” According to the Administration, Mueller and his team displayed an unseemly eagerness to uncover crimes that never existed. In fact, the opposite is true. Mueller had an abundance of legitimate targets to investigate, and his failures emerged from an excess of caution, not of zeal. Especially when it came to Trump, Mueller avoided confrontations that he should have welcomed. He never issued a grand-jury subpoena for the President’s testimony, and even though his office built a compelling case for Trump’s having committed obstruction of justice, Mueller came up with reasons not to say so in his report. In light of this, Trump shouldn’t be denouncing Mueller—he should be thanking him.
The events that led to Mueller’s appointment began shortly after Trump took office, when he met several times with James Comey, the director of the F.B.I. Over dinner at the White House, on January 27, 2017, Trump said that he expected “loyalty” from Comey—specifically, as he would later make clear, he wanted an announcement from the F.B.I. that he was not under suspicion for misconduct with Russia during the campaign. At the time, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser, was being investigated for lying to the F.B.I. As Comey later testified, on February 14th, at a meeting in the Oval Office, the President told everyone else to leave, then asked Comey to drop the investigation of Flynn. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump said. “He is a good guy.”
Comey declined either to publicly clear Trump of wrongdoing or to close the investigation of Flynn, and the President resolved to fire him. On May 8, 2017, Trump told Rod Rosenstein, who had recently been confirmed as the Deputy Attorney General, to write a memo describing Comey’s performance as the F.B.I. director, in particular his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private e-mail. The following day, Rosenstein submitted the memo and Trump fired Comey. ...