Yesterday afternoon I wrote about Trump and Brexit merely as a mental break from the depressing news; the cosmos was deep into nothing but Trump, Barr, Mueller, and the former's at least partial exoneration. I desperately needed something uplifting by comparison, so I wrote instead about the collapse of two once-great nations.
But I'm still mired in the inescapable epic of Donald J. Trump, Attorney General William Barr and Special Counsel Bob Mueller. For two years we've watched on the screen and read in B & W mounting evidence of Trump Inc.'s multiple ties with Russian intelligence, shady hackers and WikiLeaks' mediation, in addition to evidence of the president's nearly countless obstructions of justice.
Yet in less than two days, Barr both read Mueller's evidentiary submission (of possibly immense length) and wrote a four-page, single-spaced letter to Congress, neatly disclosing that all, after all, is well: The astoundingly criminal Mr. Trump is blameless. This came as even bigger news than the facts that Donald had spooned with Vladimir and has lied about it repeatedly ever since.
"The investigation led by Robert S. Mueller III found no evidence that President Trump or any of his aides coordinated with the Russian government’s 2016 election interference, according to [Barr's] summary," writes the Times, and "Mr. Mueller’s team drew no conclusions about whether Mr. Trump illegally obstructed justice, Mr. Barr said, so he made his own decision…. [He] determined that the special counsel’s investigators had insufficient evidence to establish that the president committed that offense" (although the report "also does not exonerate him" of obstruction).
We're free to take politically appointed Barr's word for it, or we could read Mueller's report for ourselves — if, that is, Barr wanted us to read it, which he doesn't. And then there's the issue of Muller's own bar, which is exceptionally high. All accounts of his prosecutorial past relate that lacking evidence of a suspect's culpability beyond any reasonable doubt, Mueller will not proceed. Hence his submitted report could be chock full of reasonable guilt; perhaps 1 or 2 dolloped percentages of doubt obviated stronger and more determined language from the special counsel's office.
All the world knows that Donald J. Trump is a mobster, including ties to organized crime both here and abroad. And he didn't stop being a mobster by simply descending Trump Tower's escalator in June of 2015. Quite aside from the rhetorical violence of his presidential campaign, during his two years as POTUS Trump has consistently displayed the behavior of a degenerate, unrepentant "family" don, which makes this Times passage laughable: "Barr’s letter [to Congress] said that the Mueller report identified no actions that … 'were done with corrupt intent.'"
It was the same corrupt intent that compelled Trump to lie yesterday about Mueller's bottom-line report: It was a complete and total exoneration, he said to reporters before departing his Caponelike Florida palace. He just can't help himself, and the reason is simple. He's a criminal.
I wrote last week that "from other federal and state prosecutors will come charges of tax evasion, charitable foundation fraud, money laundering, and God only knows what. Who needs collusion?" That rather consoling thought still holds. Very few hoodlums peacefully leave this world in their bed at home, Meyer Lansky-style. Trump is likely to prove no exception. His decades of racketeering, mobsterism, and abuse of the innocent will catch up to him, and soon. If he doesn't spend the last years of his wretched life in prison, he'll at least spend them in state and federal courts, battling criminal and civil charges.
Trump is known to love chaos and personal anarchy. Well good for him. Because despite Mueller's disappointing report (as far as we know), he's still facing plenty of both.