Robert Mueller

On Thursday CNN reported that Donald Trump was taken aback that his nominee for attorney general William Barr and special counsel Robert Mueller are old chums. ‘I have known Bob Mueller for 30 years,’ Barr said during Senate testimony on Tuesday. ‘And I have the utmost respect for Bob and his distinguished record of service.’ Now Barr’s statements are about to create much bigger problems for him. Barr unequivocally affirmed, in response to a question from Sen. Lindsey Graham, that it would be a crime if the president sought to tamper with the testimony of a witness: ‘yes, under an obstruction statute. Yes.

Individual 1 is at it again. This morning, he went to the old reliable: ‘AFTER TWO YEARS AND MILLIONS OF PAGES OF DOCUMENTS (and a cost of over $30,000,000), NO COLLUSION!’ But the filings yesterday from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and federal prosecutors in New York indicate that this is an unintentionally self-deprecatory statement. For once, Trump is being far too modest about his abilities. He and his fellow colluders were colluding so much that they have already helped rack up no less than 192 criminal charges. So perhaps Individual 1 should take a step back for a moment from frenetic tweeting to admire his greatest handiwork before it collapses entirely.It’s the very sweep of his schemes that is likely to prove his undoing.

‘Totally clears the President. Thank you!,’ Donald Trump tweeted, following the Southern District of New York’s sentencing filings for Michael Cohen, which recommended prison time for the lawyer. And Donald Trump isn’t mentioned by name in the 40-page document – but things aren’t shaping up too well for whoever ‘Individual-1’ is. Per the filing: ‘During the campaign, Cohen played a central role in two similar schemes to purchase the rights to stories – each from women who claimed to have had an affair with Individual-1 – so as to suppress the stories and thereby prevent them from influencing the election...

Will wonders never cease? Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III is recommending that General Mike Flynn serve no jail time. Isn’t that nice of him? Of course, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III first destroyed Mike Flynn’s career and essentially pauperized him through legal fees (‘the process,’ as they say, ‘is the punishment’). In making his recommendation, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III cited Gen. Flynn’s ‘substantial assistance’ in the long-running soap opera that is his campaign against the president of the United States. The centerpiece of that ‘special assistance’ are the 19 interviews with the Office of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III for which Gen. Flynn sat.

The Founding Fathers, in their wisdom created a constitution with a separation of powers. President Trump woke up this morning to the reality that one half of a co-equal branch of government – the Congress – is now in the hands of the opposition party. In normal times, this would mean the usual Washington gridlock, the constitution having been designed to be deliberately inefficient. But these are not normal times. The President’s former campaign chairman, deputy campaign chairman, national security adviser, and his personal lawyer are all awaiting sentencing on various charges. The President himself is under investigation, accused of being the creature of a hostile, foreign government.

On Tuesday, American voters will give the president his first official performance review. There will be no opportunity to tell Donald J. Trump ‘You’re fired!’ in the reality TV verbiage he relishes – that will have to wait two more years – setbacks for the Republicans in Congress will inevitably be interpreted negatively for The Donald, who has pulled out the stops exhorting his loyal fanbase to the polls on November 6. But will it happen? American political history is filled with stern midterm rebukes for presidents, especially Democrats who get ahead of their skis like Bill Clinton in 1994 or Barack Obama in 2010, when their party lost 54 and 63 seats in the House of Representatives, respectively.

Does Robert Mueller have a secret sex life? A Republican activist named Jack Burkman, who previously touted the conspiracy theory that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was assassinated by members of the Deep State, has apparently been investigating the past life of Trump’s chief investigator. His aim was to ferret out misdeeds by the G-man whose true interest was supposed to be the G-spot. The amateurish plot against Mueller fizzled out fairly quickly, but it has caught the interest of the FBI. It seems to have centred on a former female paralegal who knew Mueller at the Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro law firm in 1974, though not very well, by her own accounting.

This morning Matt Drudge tweeted, ‘A segment on Fox News this morning where hosts laughed and joked their way through a discussion on political impact of terror was bizarre. Not even 48 hours since blood flowed at synagogue? Check your soul in the makeup chair!’ A new Gallup poll indicates that one week before the midterms, a number of voters may also be checking out from supporting Donald Trump. His numbers dropped from a 44 per cent approval rating a week ago to 40 per cent. Trump has made the elections a referendum on himself, which means that he has bet the house, so to speak, on whether or not the GOP retains the Senate and House. If it does, he emerges as America’s strongman.

Robert Mueller is getting stoned. Not in any corporeal sense, I hasten to note. Rather, his investigation appears to be focusing on any ties that the Trump campaign may have had to the voluble former Nixon operative Roger Stone. Like Michael Cohen, who once proclaimed that he would take a bullet for Donald Trump, Stone is now noisily professing his loyalty to the president. ‘The special counsel pokes into every aspect of my social, family, personal, business and political life, seeking something — anything — he can use to pressure me, to silence me and to try to induce me to testify against my friend Donald Trump,’ Stone declared in a recent video. ‘This I will not do.

So Rudy Giuliani finally got a job from Donald Trump. The former mayor of New York was one of the few establishment Republican figures to back Trump early in his run for president. His support was enthusiastic, and he broadcast it forcefully and repeatedly during the campaign. He thought it would lead to a plum post in a Trump administration—he had his sights set high, on either secretary of state or attorney general—but he was rebuffed. Now he’s got a job, though it’s one almost no one else in the country wanted: personal legal counsel to the president.

Throughout the course of the inquiry on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, White House lawyers have attempted to drill a message into the president’s head. It is a simple one: whatever you do, don’t go after Robert Mueller personally or suggest in any way that you will shut down the investigation.  You can go after the probe’s integrity, attack the congressional Democrats making political hay over the probe, and push your own counter-narrative about the silliness of it all, but leave the special counsel alone. It is smart, conventional advice that most conventional politicians would take into serious consideration. But Donald Trump, to state the obvious, is not a conventional politician. He does not respond well to being told to be restrained.

Robert Mueller, the former Director of the FBI and special counsel in the soap opera that is the Russia collusion investigation, has been on the case for ten months now. His team of attorneys and Washington prosecutors has interviewed dozens of witnesses, scanned hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, sent an unknown number of subpoenas to members of Donald Trump’s campaign for information or testimony, and is in the process of scheduling an interview with President Trump himself. Through it all, Mueller’s camp has shown impressive self-discipline; unlike Kenneth Starr’s inquest against President Bill Clinton two decades ago, the special counsel’s office is keeping its work in-house.