There are any number of oddities connected with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments of 13 Russian individuals and three organizations for improper involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Our vote for the most intriguing, though, is that barely three days after the announcement of the indictments – clearly a most significant turn in perhaps the most consequential public issue in several decades – the overarching issue of “collusion” seems to have disappeared without a trace. One no longer hears or reads about it.
Why is there no analysis of Trump supporters’ claim (and Trump’s too) that Mueller exonerated the Trump campaign of any notion of “collusion” by finding any American involvement to have been “unwitting”? Surely, if Mr. Mueller had evidence to the contrary, he would not have jumped the gun to indict the Russians. So doesn’t that mean the Mueller investigation is over? After all, it’s hard to imagine that he would have indicted these Russians parties if there were also American parties involved.
Interestingly, after weeks of daily press releases, we have also stopped hearing about the dueling memos between Republican Congressman Nunes and Democratic Congressman Schiff over the infamous Steele Dossier. Will the Schiff/Democratic draft ever see the light of day as did the initial Nunes draft? The bickering has stopped. Certainly we have stopped hearing about the Democratic campaign having initially commissioned the Steele Dossier from a Russian source – a potentially very serious matter.
Stopped also are calls from Republicans that Hillary Clinton, former FBI Director Robert Comey, and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch be indicted over alleged improprieties in the Hillary Clinton/personal server investigation.
Not to put too fine a point on it, it appears that the Russian indictments are empty gestures. There is not a prayer that any of the indicted Russians will ever be tried in an American court as the Russian government will never extradite them. So there is no way to get information on Americans from them by threatening ever greater charges being lodged against them. More fundamentally, they will never even be questioned by American authorities, so how can evidence against Americans for conspiring with them ever be obtained and a case made?
So what point were Messers. Mueller and Rosenstein making by handing down these indictments? For one, we suggest they wish to portray the Mueller investigation as a successful effort in documenting a serious threat to our society: Russian cyberwar against the U.S. And this the indictments do in spades. For another, it allows Mr. Mueller to claim that he did not stray from his original mandate of investigating Russian involvement in the election. For still another, it allows President Trump to claim that there was no evidence of “collusion” as he has maintained from the outset.
Presumably Mr. Trump might be inclined take a few steps back given his apparent vindications and the Democrats will follow suit given the vulnerabilities of Comey/Clinton/Lynch, and perhaps even Barack Obama, if the investigations continue apace. And the final piece would be the president’s desire to avoid further low-hanging fruit investigations of his family and also end talk of his having obstructed justice in his alleged conversation with Mr. Comey about General Flynn.
With the pressure for confrontation eased, perhaps all the madness will go away, the thinking might have gone. The silence of the Democrats and Republicans may mean that the process is already in place. Just a thought.