What could Mueller have done differently?
CNN says it’s all over, Barr has done what he was hired to do and protected President Mob Boss for the next year and a half. David Leonhardt at the Times says Mueller blew it.
It’s now clear that he mishandled the end of the Russia investigation.
Mueller naively trusted that William Barr, the attorney general, would act honorably and patriotically, as well, and let Barr decide how to handle the initial release of Mueller’s report. Barr, of course, wrote a letter that misled the public about what was in the report, creating a perception that the investigation cleared President Trump.
“For 27 days, the debate over Mueller’s findings was twisted by Barr’s poisonous distortions that implied a full exoneration of President Trump,” as The Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne wrote yesterday. Mueller himself has since complained to Barr about the letter.
And Barr doesn’t give a shit, because he got what he wanted to get.
What could Mueller have done differently? He could have recognized that Barr wasn’t trustworthy, given that Trump had nominated him for the attorney general job largely because Barr had expressed hostility to Mueller’s investigation. Mueller could then have acted accordingly.
He could have insisted that Barr release a summary written by Mueller and his team. Mueller may not have had the statutory power to insist on such a release, but he did have the actual power. If Barr had refused, Mueller could have made clear that his own summary would leak to the press, in short order.
But he didn’t.
Barr and the Trump administration have staked out the legal position that anything that rankles the president — congressional oversight, press coverage, the Mueller investigation itself — is illegitimate, writes Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick. “It’s Nixonian in scope to imply that anything Trump wants to do in order to push back against the media and protect his reputation is legal and justified,” she writes.
Neal Katyal, who wrote the special counsel regulations, offers a more optimistic take in The Times. He argues that Barr’s failure to defend his spin under congressional questioning is evidence that the system is working. “Barr’s deeply evasive testimony on Wednesday necessitates and tees up a full investigation in Congress,” Katyal writes.
I hope the reality is more Katyal than Barr.
I guess Mueller fell into a sort of projection trap that honest people often fall into (I have fallen into it myself several times in my life). He assumed that other people who were holding important offices requiring integrity would have the same integrity he did. He didn’t impute questionable motives to his superiors. In short, he assumed Barr would act in the way that he would.
This continues to be our fatal weakness. Believing, against all evidence, that there’s anything normal about dealing with a psychopathic administration.
If even Bob Mueller can’t see this, there’s no hope.
Iknklast—exactly right. Reverse projection of one’s own normal-range morality onto the character disordered. There’s no excuse for it at this point. None.
What else could Mueller have done differently? Decided to test precedent and policy by indicting a sitting U.S. president. By interpreting past courtesy as a hard limitation on his abilities, he made this into a game of chicken, which Trump has won by sheer brazenness. Grr!!
Huh. I had blithely assumed that Mueller had no choice in the matter because the very idea of letting Barr do it was so obviously stupid.
I did wonder why he didn’t give his own summary of the report to the press, though.
Latsot, as I understand it, the law dictates that the Special Counsel submit his report to the AG, who then releases a summary at a minimum. Mueller would be in deep shit if he started releasing the report or bits of it.