The Silence of Bob Mueller
In the film "The Bridge on the River Kwai," based on a French novel, the commandant of a World War II Japanese prison camp in Burma orders British POWs to build a railway bridge across the River Kwai in order to connect Rangoon & Bangkok. The British POWs purposely do sloppy work in an attempt to sabotage the construction, but the main character, Lt. Col. Nicholson -- who is the senior British officer among the POWs -- wants to show the Japanese that the Brits are superior to the Japanese. He orders a couple of British engineers in the POW group to design a better bridge in a better place, then orders his men to build the bridge right, which they do. Just as the POWs complete the bridge, a group of British & American commandos parachutes in to plant explosives with the intention of destroying the bridge at the moment a group of Japanese dignitaries will cross it in a celebratory inauguration. Nicholson sees the detonation wires & tries, unsuccessfully, to stop the explosion.
Bob Mueller is beginning to seem a lot like Nicholson. As the President* of the United States runs amok on a daily basis, undermining the Constitution and its established institutions, degrading the Congress, the courts, the free press & human rights, Bob Mueller plugs along on his super-secret mission, releasing as little information as possible, thus hamstringing the Congress (especially now that a Democratic majority in the House could do something about President Run-Amok). Mueller's latest filing, 800+ pages condemning bit player Paul Manafort, does little or nothing to carry the story forward. While the country tumbles under Donald Trump's corrupt, authoritarian, right-wing regime, we find out Manafort is a "hardened" career criminal, something we already knew. And in the larger scheme of things, so what?
We are told that, like Lt. Col. Nicholson, Bob Mueller is an exemplary, by-the-books leader who is methodically building a perfect structure. Not a bridge, but a series of air-tight criminal cases. Right. Against an ambitious twerp named George Papadopoulos. Against a young Dutch national named Alex van der Zwaan. Against Rick Gates, Michael Cohen (on an SDNY referral) & Roger Stone. Against Russian hackers who never will face trial. The only person Mueller targeted -- as far as we know now -- who held a position of power within the U.S. government was Michael Flynn, and by the time Mueller obtained a guilty plea from him, Flynn too was a private citizen. Against Donald Trump., the leader of the criminal ring? Bupkis. Indicting the mob boss -- the one miscreant who holds great power -- would be wrong.
Bob Mueller received his appointment in mid-May 2017. It is impossible to believe it has taken him nearly two years to find evidence against Donald Trump, especially since Trump himself has so often volunteered that evidence and sent out pointers to even more criminal and corrupt activities. One could make a credible argument that Mueller is constrained by the special counsel's mandate. Or that he's trying to give us sneak peaks in his court filings. Isn't Mueller a citizen first, before he is special counsel? And if those sneak peaks are meant to be directional markers, why are Mueller's court filings so heavily redacted?
Lately I've been hearing, from Andrew McCabe, among others, that Bob Mueller loves investigating. Digging into the evidence to prove his case is Mueller's thing. Investigation is his milieu. He's a stickler for the rule of law. Well, that's very nice. Proving the British were superior to others was Nicholson's purpose. Building a better bridge was his method. Look how that worked out. While Mueller builds his cases against bit players, Donald Trump is expanding his criminal enterprise. While Mueller fiddles, the Trumpster fire is burning bright.
Bob Mueller owes us an indictment; if not a criminal indictment, then a sweeping indictment of Trump's conspiracy to turn the U.S. presidency into a personal fiefdom in which Mueller's vaunted rule of law is being employed as nothing but a means to punish Trump's perceived enemies.
It's high time to break your silence, Bob Mueller.
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Reader Comments (9)
Oh, Mrs. McC, don't worry!! We all know what happened with Lt. Col. Nicholson, who had a definite case of Aspergers. He remains oblivious until the last possible moment, when shot, he says, "What have I done?" and falls dead on the detonator, and the baddies are done for.
All we have to do is wait for the shots to be fired and for things to explode and everything will work out for the best in the end. I know this because I saw the movie, right?
On the similarities between life on the River Kwai and the Potomac:
Understand and share your impatience and why you drew the sharp analogy between the Mueller investigation and the River Kwai bridge project. It is too easy for some personalities to like the trees so much that they have no interest in seeing the forest, a defect carried to dramatic extreme in that memorable movie.
Nice as the analogy is, I would hope it founders on this difference. The batshit crazy British officer was so wrapped up in proving British superiority that he was willing to help the enemy. I can't see how Mueller's respect for law and its purpose will allow him to help the Pretender, who is the law's antithesis.
But you said it so well you worried me, nonetheless.
At this point, Mueller's "report" feels like an all or nothing. He either hammer into pieces the criminal enterprise abetting the presidunce*, or swipes up the minority players and crosses his fingers for electoral salvation for the country. I'm betting on door number two.
After seeing how many illegalities have been going on in Washington right next door to the FBI, CIA, et al., regarding money laundering, illegal foreign lobbying, overt bribery a.k.a. domestic lobbying, complete disregard of emoluments, dark money straw donors, unenforced campaign finance laws...I've come to see this moment as an inflection point similar to Obama's arrival right in the midst of the massive Wall Street/banking fraud that risked throwing our entire economy into another Great Depression. Obama had the best possible negotiating position, with the entire nation behind him, to hammer Wall Street, break up the banking racket and stick a knife into the heart of "too big to fail". We all know how that turned out, Obama being the great statesman, institutionalist, and beholden to Washington influence. He proclaimed water under the river, look forward not backward, build up don't tear down. Uplifting ideas at the worst possible moment. Obama turned poodle when we needed a man eating tiger.
Now we have Mueller, as Marie mentions, with his deep Washington creds and love for institutions. Unfortunately kicking Agent Orange out of the oval office would set up a terribly turbulent institutional earthquake, with unknowns as far as the eye can see. I've mostly lost faith in whatever report he does for two reasons: (1) Muller has shown himself profoundly tepid in reaching into the White House's inner circle.
At first, everyone said interviewing Drumpf through a pre-prepared questionnaire was preposterous, unthinkable, never gonna happen. If he doesn't sit down with Mueller, he'll see him in court. Never happened.
Kushner sits at the heart of many investigative nodes, and yet he seems hardly a suspect, despite reportedly purjuring himself before Congress. No visible pressure in the right hand man? What gives?
Ivanka doesn't seem to have a storm cloud near her angelic blonde hair, not even worthy of an interview, apparently because female.
Drumpf spawn Junior also reportedly perjured himself in front of Congress, but Mueller won't even make him sweat, leaving him to rant and rave like Daddy on Twitter to all his shallow, moronic supporters. If Mueller and Weissman really wanted to get to the truth of what happened between Putin and his Puppet, a serious national emergency, then they'd be squeezing his very implicated family members one by one and all at once, shaking them down til all their ill-gotten nickels and pennies scattered on the floor.
And finally (2) because of the long term bromance he apparently holds with his new boss, Mr. Barr.
All the talking heads discussing Barr focus solely on how much "report" he will allow others to see. An important point, for sure. But hardly anyone talks about his arguably most consequential hit job he's pulled off for Team Republicans in Washington: the mass pardoning of all the key Iran Contra players. I'm convinced he took the job for that main reason. Not so much to protect Drumpf, though that is part and parcel to his goal.
He came back to Washington to save the GOP brand, or at least whitewash a hefty portion of its dirty underbelly festering since the last days he left office. When everyone goes home one year for the holidays, he'll help pardon everyone he can, priority to all GOP operatives. He'll do his damnedest to erase Republican links to Russia to the extent possible, including their newest and most corrupt kingmaker Drumpf. Some fat cat donors will thank him with untraceable rewards for his service to the Party, and he'll sink back out of the limelight as soon as the coup is complete.
And going back to the main point, Mr. "Law and Order" Mueller has made Mr. "pardon clear criminals" Barr a great family friend, going to family weddings and sharing the same vision of stabilizing conservative Washington, though both do it selectively in their own methods.
@Ken Winkes: The problem is that Mueller is already helping the Pretender by holding evidence against Trump close to his (Mueller's) vest. Before now -- 21+ months into his investigation -- Mueller should have given the Congress & the public a clear roadmap to Trump's high crimes & misdemeanors. Many of the bells Trump has rung while Mueller kept his nose out of it cannot be unrung. And to one extent or another, those bells toll for all of us.
@safari: Well said. The fix is in.
Brilliant analysis as usual. This has been my opinion for quite some time. Absent an indictment, at least a sealed indictment, I don't see how Mueller's extraordinarily protracted investigation can be used to reverse Trump's deeply embedded claim that there has been "no collusion," it's all a "witch-hunt" and that he has done nothing wrong. Mueller is no Ken Starr. NYT profile suggests he will submit his report and walk away; no interview, no book. And there probably shouldn't be, but I don't see how his report brings our nightmare to an end. Hope I'm wrong.
Major federal cases regularly take 3 or more years to get to trial. I've seen cases far less serious than this take 6 years to get into court. I thought this was understood at the outset. Maybe people are just getting impatient and conveniently forgetting. Just because we feel like it should be done doens't mean Mueller is dragging his feet. By normal DoJ standards he's been working very quickly.
LTC Nicholson did not just want to show the Japanese how great the British were. He also saw (believed) that his men were becoming rabble without proper leadership and pride in work.
He was also nuts.
And in the end it was someone else's job to blow up the bridge. Even a half-ass bridge would have served the Japanese war aim. Either way, solid or tempo, it was a target.
So ... who's job is it to blow up DiJiT's bridge? Could it be ... Congress?
@Patrick: Yes, of course. Mueller's completing his job would be far less urgent if the House had not completely abrogated its oversight responsibility for two years. Mueller's charge, after all, is to concentrate on "others" involved in the Russian election-meddling scandal and apparently not to indict Trump even if he is implicated.
One can reasonably argue that it isn't "fair" for Mueller to be shouldered with the responsibility of outting Trump's misdeeds, but it also hasn't been fair that the press has done much of the heavy lifting in this regard. It often appears to me -- and I haven't tracked it so I'm not sure -- that Mueller's team has gotten about half its leads from press reports.
The urgency of action is necessitated by Trump's own actions in office. It took Ken Starr a long time (4 years maybe) to produce his explosive report, but there wasn't any particular urgency to it. While it's not impossible that Clinton would have continued diddling with interns, once Matt Drudge & Michael Isikoff got the story out, it seems likely that Clinton would have left the interns alone. Meanwhile, since he was famously so good at "compartmentalizing," he was able to continue doing his job competently. Had he resigned, a Gore presidency probably would not have much changed the course of Clinton's administration.
But Trump is another matter. He does awful things daily. I'm not suggesting mike pence would be a good president. But despite his prejudices, he probably would have more closely adhered to the "norms" we have come to expect. He probably would have listened to and/or read intelligence reports, followed the law within quasi-reasonable guidelines, done much less to alienate allies & kowtow to dictators, etc., and would have been far, far less impulsive. Could pence have ordered a troop pullout in Syria? Yes, so could any president. But pence would not likely have done so in a tweet without consulting the Pentagon. Would pence have shut down the government for nothing, then stomped his feet & declared a fake national emergency? I doubt it. Would pence, a former Congressman, have repeatedly made end-runs around Congress? Probably not any more than previous presidents.
When others -- like Congress -- fail, someone has to step up to the plate. In this case, it appears to me Mueller is the designated hitter. I'd like to see his at-bat.