Don’t blame Mueller

Yesterday’s appearance confirmed what we already knew about Special Counsel Mueller and his report: yes on President Trump’s obstruction of justice, no exoneration on either obstruction or conspiracy with the Russians, whose help the Trump campaign openly welcomed.

Some are disappointed. I’m not. No one should have expected this taciturn and self-controlled lawyer, a life-long Republican, to eviscerate the President.

But what he did is more than enough to begin an impeachment inquiry. Speaker Pelosi is holding back until she is certain of bipartisan support in the House and perceives an inkling that some Republican Senators might be amenable. That will only happen if public sentiment turns against Trump, which it manifestly has not yet. He is at the peak of his popularity, even if the peak is low. Pelosi is as savvy a political operator as exists on The Hill today. She is more interested in beating Trump in the 2020 election than in helping him turn out his base with an impeachment inquiry.

Mueller was interesting on the question of the President’s credibility. He hinted that lack of credibility was among the reasons he did not subpoena Trump–what light could a committed liar shed on the facts?–along with pressure to complete the investigation. We all know where that pressure was coming from. I might have preferred that Mueller force testimony from the President and catch him perjuring himself. That is what got President Clinton impeached. But to expect that of the super-cautious Mueller would be wrong. Unlike Ken Starr, he is not a perjury trap kind of guy. He stuck to his mandate.

The action now will shift in two directions: counterintelligence and financial investigations, the latter also in New York State. Mueller was unequivocal in calling out the Russians not only for interfering in 2016 but for continuing to do so up to the present, and intending to do so through 2020. His message was clear: you haven’t done enough to prevent it. Senator Majority Leader McConnell claims that a few hundred million dollars in grants to the states is a sufficient response. That amounts to less than $10 million per state. It’ll surely go far.

The President’s financial shenanigans are both obvious and obscure. Deutsche Bank, the only one prepared to loan Trump money after his bankruptcies, is under investigation for multiple malfeasances. It’s hard not to imagine that Trump’s real estate business was recycling Russian oligarchs’ ill-gotten gains, with the help of Deutsche Bank. We don’t yet have the outcome of a serious investigation, but there must be good reasons why Trump has gone into Federal court to block New York State from getting his tax returns.

Mueller did his job: he gathered incontrovertible evidence of Donald Trump’s unfitness for office. The problem is the country, which Trump has succeeded in dividing so profoundly that close to half of voters would let him shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, as he claimed in 2016:

America needs to set this right, either by impeachment and conviction or by electoral defeat. Neither course of action is Mueller’s responsibility.