Robert Mueller

In the pantheon of Trump adversaries, Robert Mueller may rank at the very top. Everything about Mueller – his rectitude, his formality, his blueblood ancestry, his lifelong marriage to his high school sweetheart – was anathema to Trump who has sought, as far as possible, to disestablish the Washington establishment. Yesterday, Trump engaged in a round of gloating over Mueller’s death at age 81, declaring on social media that it couldn’t have come soon enough: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” Gee whiz. No crocodile tears from him for the G-Man who had devoted his life to public service. “It is clearly wrong and unchristian behavior,” Republican Rep. Don Bacon wrote. It should, however, come as no surprise.

The tenure of Christoper Wray as FBI director represents a missed opportunity.  After the problematic directorship of James Comey, Wray’s appointment by President Donald Trump on May 9, 2017, was welcomed by most current and former agents as well as the American people, who wanted the Bureau restored to its position of trust. With a ten-year term and the principal malefactors of the Russian collusion farce already fired, Wray was in a position of strength.   Under the Mueller/Comey cabal, the bureau culture had changed from that of a law enforcement agency to an intelligence mindset. That’s what led us into the ugly morass of the Russian collusion narrative and ensuing fiascos.

This week’s Durham report is as close as we’ll get in our lifetimes to proof that the Deep State, working in concert with the mainstream media, exists.  The final 306-page report was written by former US attorney John Durham, who was chosen in the aftermath of the Mueller report to examine the FBI probe known as “Operation Crossfire Hurricane.” Durham in this final report provides the only comprehensive review of what came to be called “Russiagate” and shows how close our democracy came to failing at the hands of the Deep State.  We now know the FBI took disinformation produced by the Russians and used that to justify spying on the Trump campaign.

As usual, Elon Musk cut to the chase with a tweet that's both funny and accurate: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1619770090530181120 Pretty good, isn’t it? And do note the little rainbow in the background for the the sexually exotic. Musk’s tweet was in response to the revelation last week (hat tip to the great Matt Taibbi for ferreting through the garbage to retrieve it) that a shadowy group called “Hamilton 68” had been doing exactly what the title of Musk’s imaginary Golden Book says: accusing anyone and anything they don't like of being, or being influenced by, a Russian bot.

Another week, another silver bullet misses Donald Trump. Once more we suffered through the same endless roll of waves of crimes, accusations, near-indictments and just bad words to which we'd become accustomed during the Trump presidency. We went from "Trump has classified material under lock and key at Mar-a-Lago" to a group of people paying $1,800 to fly a banner reading "ha ha ha ha" over the resort to mock a Trump staying 3,000 miles away in New York. On cue, the regulars on MSNBC and CNN brought out their running-dog former CIA and FBI officers to tell us tick-tock, the walls are closing in, this time it will stick, Trump is going down, he'll be in jail before he runs again for office. If we can't stop him with the electoral system, we'll use the judicial system. This. Is. The.

Let's connect the dots between John Durham, Russiagate, the FBI, and Hillary Clinton. They strongly suggest the Clinton campaign ran a sophisticated, multi-prong coordinated intelligence operation against Trump with either the active or tacit support of the FBI. In the case of prong one, the dossier, the Clinton campaign hired MI6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The hiring was through its law firm, Perkins Coie, which hired Fusion GPS, which hired Steele to hide the funding source. The use of the law firm as a cutout allowed Hillary to deny that she'd funded the dossier, and the media to claim for a year or more that it was actually the Republicans themselves who paid for it.

Dr Anthony Fauci has exhibited plenty of behavioral red flags over the past year. Don’t believe me? Google ‘Fauci magazine covers’. The results say it all. My favorite was an InStyle cover from last July where the ‘The Good Doctor’ was posing by a pool. The Daily Beast described the cover in slobbering detail: ‘His black rimmed square sunglasses reflect a sun ray back into the camera’s eye. His blue and white button-up is undone at the neck and his jeans fit tight. It’s as if Fauci is playing Daniel Craig playing Roger Stone in an inevitable biopic.’ Can we get a wellness check on these writers, who are drooling over an elderly bureaucrat sitting in a folding chair wearing Dwight Schrute-style sunglasses?

The 2020 election has provided fertile ground upon which Republicans can spend the next four years doing to Joe Biden what the Democrats did to Donald Trump and George W. Bush. For four years, Democrats and their media allies trumpeted every claim, no matter how baseless or crazy, that Trump’s 2016 election win was illegitimate and fraudulent. Despite zero evidence that so much as a single vote was interfered with, Democrats peddled the hoax that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to elect Trump. Even after the Mueller investigation exonerated Trump and his campaign from the collusion canard, Democrats, led by the shameless Adam Schiff, continued to allege collusion. Their simple goal was to undermine and delegitimize the Trump presidency.

The romantic plans of a Kazakh bodybuilder named Yuri Tolochko have become one more casualty of the coronavirus pandemic. He was going to marry his ‘fiancée’, Margo, a silicone sex doll, in March, but they both agreed on the need to delay. ‘My baby supported me on this. We are determined and our mood is good.’ His Instagram feed depicts their domestic idyll: a bald, muscle-bound man gazes adoringly at a pneumatic blonde who, it must be said, stares back somewhat blankly. You might already know this if you get your news from Russian outlets like RT — Russia Today — or Sputnik. Their websites have an unerring eye for the human-interest stories that make for irresistible clickbait.

Rod Rosenstein’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee was quiet, calm, almost bemused. But the tale he told was devastating — to the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Mueller investigation. It destroyed three years of media narrative about ‘Trump-Russia’ collusion. It’s obvious now why Senate Democrats want to kill all future hearings on the topic. They lack the votes to do it, but it’s the thought that counts. Testifying under oath, Rosenstein laid out a series of fundamental problems plaguing the entire collusion investigation. Actually, he did even more.

Anyone who has children understands the importance of teaching them to say 'sorry' when they’ve done wrong. Apologizing for causing harm to others teaches our young to be empathetic. Being able to say sorry helps knit the fabric of society together. Otherwise, our social contract would devolve into petty squabbles and endless lawsuits.Alas, in the last few decades, as America has become more and more engaged in a cold civic war, we appear to have lost the ability to be contrite, especially in politics.We now know unequivocally that there was no substantial basis for the investigation of Donald Trump, his campaign, and those associated with him for Russian collusion.

One of the mantras for interpreting the nature of Donald Trump has always been to take him ‘seriously, but not literally’. When this maxim was first introduced in September 2016, the advice was clearly useful. Journalists and pundits were in a constant state of outrage over his every utterance. The daily deluge of Trump jokes, wisecracks, obviously figurative exaggerations, and ALL CAPS tweets were incessantly ‘fact-checked’ in the most tedious fashion by members of the media who hated Trump. One illustrative example would be when Trump accused Barack Obama of being the ‘founder’ of Isis. In short order, the fact-checking brigades sprung into action to clarify that Obama had not in fact literally founded Isis.

The Trump campaign named the Washington Post in a libel suit on Tuesday over two articles the paper published last year claiming that the campaign tried to conspire with Russia. The first article, published June 13, asserted that the campaign ‘tried to conspire with’ a ‘sweeping and systematic’ Russian attack on the American electoral system, while a second article published on June 20 questioned ‘who knows what sort of aid Russia and North Korea will give to the Trump campaign, now that he has invited them to offer their assistance?

‘Roger Stone is the worst person to ever walk the face of the Earth,’a middle-aged man in a suit said to no one in particular in the green room at WJLA, a local ABC station, in Washington, DC. I, for one, could think of more than a few people who are probably worse than Stone, but opted to keep my mouth shut to avoid ramping up tensions before the show even started. It turns out my efforts were for naught, because I ended up on a panel with a deranged woman who was aghast at the notion that anyone could believe nine years is a terribly long sentence for someone convicted of a non-violent crime. Stone was found guilty in November 2019 on charges of lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstruction of a House investigation.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Crime in Progress is, inadvertently, the cruelest book ever written about the American media. Its authors, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, are the two former Wall Street Journal reporters who founded the DC-based consultancy Fusion GPS. In 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign paid them to use their former media colleagues to push a conspiracy theory smearing her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. The crime is still in progress. To help top-notch journalists market the fantasy that one of the world’s most familiar faces was a secret Russian spy, Fusion GPS co-ordinated with the FBI to forge a series of ‘intelligence reports’.

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. More official reports, reprimands and (probably) indictments are to come in the Great Get Trump imbroglio of 2016 to 2019. But it is not too early to begin an autopsy of the greatest political scandal in American history. The patient is dead, dead, dead, and the last doctors in the room are the pathologists. The lawyers crowding the corridor outside the operating theater are interested not in resuscitating the corpse but in distributing and gorging upon its assets.

Call it the Art of the Seal. When he spoke before several hundred youthful supporters at Tuesday's Turning Point USA Teen Action Student Summit at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, Donald Trump delivered a rousing talk with a large presidential seal looming behind him on a jumbo-tron. There was only one problem: the seal was fake, the creation of a 46-year-old NeverTrump Republican named Charles Leazott who is a graphic designer living in Richmond, Va.  His puckish seal was loaded, as the Washington Post noted, with phony symbols, including a Russian imperial eagle that is holding a wad of cash in its right talon and golf clubs in the other. Instead of 'E pluribus unum,' the seal states '45 es un titre — '45 is a puppet.'No one seems to know how it happened.

Robert Mueller’s appearance before two Congressional committees today was something close to a disaster for the Democrats. The former special counsel was halting, hesitant, at times unsure of himself or even confused. He looked weak and his testimony was weak. It often seemed as if there was some truth to the story broken by Cockburn in The Spectator USA that Mueller might be suffering from the early stages of dementia. I was watching CNN, where there was a slowly dawning horror about what seemed to be happening. Their anchor, Jake Tapper, said: ‘There were times in the hearing when he was sharp as a tack but there were times – we can’t avoid it – when he was not.’ Sharp as a tack, like the word ‘spry’, is something you say about the elderly and the infirm.