Was Mueller Intimidated by Trump’s ‘Witch Hunt’ Lie, or Just Too Naïve to Handle Such a Crafty Villain?

It is a common theme in superhero stories that the villain has one great advantage over the champion of truth and goodness. That is, the fact that the hero is often greatly restricted by having to strictly follow the rules, while the bad guy not only isn’t, but also knows the protagonist’s very limited, paint-within-the-lines, game plan.

In many ways, this is an instructive manner to view the battle between Special Counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump. A conflict which yesterday was officially won, in extremely ugly fashion, by Trump, who, in my view, was very clearly the anti-hero in this analogy.

The primary takeaway from the report, at least for most of the non-newsjunkies in our population, will be that Trump was exonerated on “collusion” and there was no real conclusion on obstruction of justice, but who really cares about “obstruction,” if there was no “collusion,” right? Attorney General Bill Barr’s reputation might have been significantly harmed, and some people may have been reminded of what a lying louse Trump is, but, for the most part, the president will emerge from the rumble of the report unscathed.

This is NOT the result which is warranted by the overwhelming, and largely underplayed, factual record in the report. So, if the superhero lost to the villain, even with his superpower of truth at nearly full strength, what is the explanation for this humiliating defeat?

Well, we should stipulate that the power of truth as a weapon in our society, at least in part thanks to Trump, has never been weaker. There were also circumstances somewhat beyond the hero’s control, like, for instance, impossibly great expectations for how high the hero was supposed to fly, which were created, at least in part, by an overzealous news media.

But with all that said, at least some of the blame has to go Mueller himself. I had warned for months before the report that many Trump critics were going to be profoundly disappointed when they finally discovered that Mueller wasn’t really Superman, and it turned out that, in many ways, he was much more like Clark Kent.

To be fair, the report is extremely well researched and produced, with loads of extremely significant information organized in a compelling fashion. However, if justice, which is not going to be done here, was Mueller’s ultimate goal, he made several missteps which played right into Trump’s hands.

It is now utterly laughable that Trump spent well over a year claiming, without a shred of evidence, and for obvious strategic reasons, that Mueller was on a “witch hunt.” If anything, the report and its aftermath are far more consistent with the theory that Mueller actually wimped out after having Trump pretty much dead to rights. (Or, as Trump himself thought, “fucked.”)

There are many instances in the report where Trump is clearly guilty and, even after making the case factually, Mueller weakly claims there just wasn’t enough evidence to make a determination. Two which struck me personally were the issues of Trump suborning Michael Cohen’s perjury on the Moscow project timing, and Trump ridiculously claiming in his written answers that he did not recall if he knew about the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russian operatives.

Mueller’s burden of proof throughout most of the document is so high that it seemed to set the precedent that as long as a president is smart enough to dodge a live interview, and says they don’t remember in written answers, that they are legally in the clear from any investigation. Even in the way the report’s conclusions downplay the level of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia was extremely generous to Trump, and opened the door widely for the president and his specially-chosen attorney general to claim, misleadingly but decisively, that there was “no collusion.”

But Mueller’s biggest mistake was not forcing Trump’s hand on whether he would do the live interview which the president promised “100%” that he would do. Mueller almost makes it sound like he was so afraid that Trump would shut down the entire investigation if he fought that battle that Mueller effectively gave Trump exactly what he wanted by shuttering it himself, preventing, by his own weird standards, several of the very viable obstruction episodes from reaching the level of theoretically chargeable.

As a by-the-book prosecutor, I totally get that Mueller needed to not only be exceedingly fair, but also refrain from doing anything which even remotely created the appearance of inequity. But Mueller bent over SO far backwards to appear to be extremely impartial to Trump, that it makes one wonder if Mueller was not, at least subconsciously, intimidated by the “witch hunt” mantra, in much the same way that then President Obama went easy on Trump during the 2016 election because the GOP nominee was absurdly claiming that the election was “rigged” against him.

This is where Trump benefits greatly from his wicked ways. Because he was publicly attacking Mueller so viciously, and trying to remove him by hook or by crook, Mueller likely became even more hesitant to do anything which could seem to show prosecutorial bias, which, ironically, wasn’t supposed to be an issue for him since he is a life-long Republican.

Since absorbing the idea that a Marine war hero would get intimidated by a draft-dodging middle-school bully is inherently troubling, there is also the possibility that Mueller was simply naïve. It certainly seems that he reacted that way with Barr, who clearly, just as I predicted, used Mueller’s trust of him against the special counsel by contriving the report’s rollout to maximum benefit of his new boss.

It is well worth noting that Mueller was not with Barr at his highly controversial press conference, and that the attorney general got clearly agitated when asked about his absence. Maybe Mueller is saving all of his ammo for when he testifies to Congress about the report, but if that is indeed the plan, it is very likely to be too little, too late, to save the day.

[featured photo via Getty Images]

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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