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Robert Mueller, the One Weird Trick

Jeff Ditzler
@TheLostDutchman
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Robert Mueller, the former FBI director best (and most recently) known for his investigation into supposed Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in 2016, died on March 21. Until Donald Trump was elected, Mueller was the epitome of an establishment law enforcement figure, attending prep school and Princeton, volunteering (to his immense credit) as a Marine officer in Vietnam, and rising to director of the FBI just before 9/11 and into the Obama administration. I will leave it to those with more knowledge of Mueller’s career to judge the validity of the praises and criticisms of Mueller last week. I’d like to point out one strange aspect of his final act: the left-wing cult of personality that grew up around him and his investigation.

There were prayer candles. There were parody Christmas carols. There were souvenir T-shirts and superhero cartoons (the latter involving Michael Avenatti, who, to be fair, makes Mueller look impressive by comparison).

For the left in 2017 and 2018, Mueller represented the hope for liberals that the Trump administration would be, not just stymied by losing Congress, not just voted out in the next election, but negated. Mueller’s team would prove, once and for all, that Russia had installed Trump into office and that the 2016 election, so disturbing to the left, could be ignored as illegitimate. Trump’s appeal could be dismissed as entirely a product of foreign interference, and the Democratic majority could continue going from strength to strength without having to contend with a new political reality. The Democrats thought they had solved politics, or at least presidential elections; Mueller would let them believe that again.

We are in a fairly evenly divided country (only one presidential election in the twenty-first century has had a gap in the popular vote of more than five percent, after five such elections in a row from 1980 to 1996), where both parties’ base sees the other as a threat, and each election is billed as the most important in our lifetime. Both parties, then, are looking for the one silver bullet that will prove the other side’s victories to be illegitimate and hand them a decisive victory to break the stalemate. For liberals in 2017-18, it was the Mueller investigation; at other times, it was the 2000 election or Diebold machines in 2004. For the right, it was Obama’s birth certificate or alleged fraud in the 2020 presidential election. For extremists on both sides, it’s 9/11 trutherism and Zionist conspiracies.

As long as our polarized politics are at an impasse, people will look for the “one weird trick” to break it. Cringy cults of personality around FBI agents will probably be among the less harmful consequences.

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Discussion (6)

  • ctlaw@ctlaw

    When Mueller testified, he denied knowing what Fusion GPS was.

    He either:

    1. lied about not knowing it;
    2. was almost completely uninvolved in the investigation except to lend his name; and/or
    3. had gone quite senile at that point.

    Some of these can coexist.

    If #3, does anybody reasonably doubt that #2 was also at play and there was a widespread conspiracy to initiate and maintain this sham?

  • Old Bathos@OldBathos

    The left favors Iranian mullahs, Hamas, Illegal alien rapists, child traffickers and murders, Latin American drug cartels, the Castro regime, Somalian welfare fraudsters and anyone else hostile to American interests but mostly those opposed to Trump in particular. So idolizing Mueller turned out to not be much of a stretch.

    The left is now about the sensibilities of poorly educated single young woman and female-adjacent nominal males, hence the consistently hysterical style of marrying contradictory positions. See,

    compactmag.com

    Open link

  • Just Yarob@Yarob

    Trumpists like to pretend the Muller investigation was a failure because it didn't nail the orange imbecile (it also didn't clear him), but this is not the case. It documented extensive communications between Russians and members of Trump's campaign and various of their associates. "The investigation resulted in charges against 34 individuals and three companies, eight guilty pleas, and a conviction at trial." Mueller was an honorable man, not a term anyone has ever used to describe Trump.

    Wikipedia:

    Dozens of ongoing investigations originally handled by the Special Counsel's office were forwarded to district and state prosecutors, other Department of Justice (DoJ) branches, and other federal agencies. The following (in alphabetical order) were indicted during the Mueller investigation:

    13 Russians implicated in election interference: Mueller's team indicted thirteen Russian citizens, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), Concord Management and Consulting and Concord Catering with conducting social media campaigns about the U.S. elections. Twelve of the Russian defendants, who were alleged to be members of the Russian GRU cyber espionage group known as Fancy Bear, were charged in June 2018 with hacking and leaking DNC emails. The other Russian indicted, who was not a direct employee of Fancy Bear, was Russian business tycoon Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was alleged to have served as the financier for the organization. The US government dropped all charges against Concord Management and Consulting and Concord Catering in March 2020. In November 2019, Time magazine reported that it was "unlikely that any of the Russians will ever face a trial in the United States, but the charges make it harder for them to travel overseas".

    Michael Cohen, Trump's personal lawyer, pled guilty to making hush payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal in violation of campaign finance laws, and was convicted for several unrelated counts of bank and tax fraud.

    Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who had been appointed as National Security Advisor by the incoming Trump administration, was dismissed from his position and later pled guilty to making false statements to FBI investigators about his conversations with Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition.

    Rick Gates, former Trump Deputy Campaign Chairman, was indicted along with Paul Manafort in October 2017 on charges related to their consultation work with pro-Russian political figures in Ukraine. The charges were dropped after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States for making false statements in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.

    Konstantin Kilimnik, Manafort's business partner in Ukraine, was indicted for witness tampering at the behest of Manafort; Kilimnik is suspected of working for Russian intelligence.

    Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign chairman was found guilty on eight felony counts of tax evasion and bank fraud, pursuant to his earlier lobbying activities for the Party of Regions of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich. He later pled guilty to conspiracy to defraud and obstruction of justice; in total, he was sentenced to over seven years in jail in February 2018.

    George Papadopoulos, Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, was convicted for making false statements to the FBI.

    Roger Stone, a longtime Trump advisor who had met with a Russian person offering to sell derogatory financial information about Hillary Clinton, was indicted on seven charges of lying to Congress and witness tampering. He pled not guilty. The jury subsequently found him guilty on all seven counts.

    Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer with the global law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, he pleaded guilty to one count of making a false statement to investigators while answering questions about Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.

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