President Trump, checking in from Argentina, had the best response possible to the “bombshell” Mueller news of the week, which was that Michael Cohen was pleading guilty to lying to Congress about a real estate deal the Trump Organization was trying to do in Moscow.
“Oh, I get it!” wrote Trump on Friday. “I am a very good developer, happily living my life, when I see our Country going in the wrong direction (to put it mildly). Against all odds, I decide to run for President & continue to run my business-very legal & very cool, talked about it on the campaign trail…Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia. Put up zero money, zero guarantees and didn’t do the project. Witch Hunt!”
That really is what this amounts to. Actually, no, it’s even less damning than that. Mueller isn’t charging anyone with running a business, he’s charging Cohen for not being fully forthright about running that business. And that’s the Mueller investigation in a nutshell. As Trump said the other day, this is an investigation in search of a crime. And if Mueller can’t find any crimes, he’ll just prosecute case after meaningless case where he can find some discrepancy between what an individual said and what really happened – even if the subject itself is trivial, like the proposed building of Trump Tower Moscow.
The Mueller investigation – nay, the entire Trump/Russia investigation – is built on a foundation of sand. There’s nothing there. So, in order to justify the millions spent on this witch hunt, Mueller is determined to file charges and extract plea deals wherever he can find them. Whether or not these charges actually pertain to the subject at hand – collusion – is immaterial at this point. Mueller has invested too much money and too much of his own reputation in this thing to walk away, wipe his hands, and admit that this was all for naught. He has to claim some scalps, and he doesn’t care how many lives he must ruin to do so. Nor does he apparently care about the damage he will do to our democracy in the meantime.
In remarks to reporters on Thursday, President Trump expressed confusion over why the Trump Tower Moscow revelation could possibly matter.
“There would be nothing wrong if I did do it,” he said. “I was running my business while I was campaigning. There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won, in which case I would have gone back into the business, and why should I lose lots of opportunity?”
So far, at least as it relates to the central reason for his investigation to exist, Mueller has not uncovered one shred of a crime committed by anyone in Trump’s orbit. No crimes other than ones he himself created by initiating the investigation in the first place. His case against the President is nonexistent and his inquiry needs to come to an end before more innocent lives are destroyed.
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