BYRON YORK: Retrospective: Mueller and the fatal flaw of the Trump-Russia affair.
So as Clinton and her aides pushed the collusion narrative, with the help of an enthusiastic press, campaign officials were also being briefed on the newest, freshest allegations from Steele.
The problem, of course, was that the allegations were not true. Steele also gave his reports to the FBI, which tried to verify them “line by line,” according to former FBI general counsel James Baker. It did not succeed. Nearly three years later, the Mueller report failed to corroborate any of the dossier’s serious allegations. It was wrong at best, a fraud at worst.
The public did not know what was happening behind the scenes. All they heard — if they watched cable TV — was collusion, collusion, collusion. After the election, the allegations consumed reporting on the Trump transition and then the Trump presidency — especially after the dossier was published in its entirety in January 2017, following the decision by the nation’s top intelligence chiefs to brief President-elect Trump on parts of it.
After that, each new revelation that appeared in the press — Flynn, Manafort, Trump Tower, Michael Cohen, all of it — appeared in the context of collusion. Ordinary events became shady scheming against the backdrop of Trump-Russia collusion.
As that was happening, Mueller was trying and failing to establish that collusion ever occurred. From interviews with various players in the investigation, it now seems clear that by the end of 2017 Mueller knew that he could not establish conspiracy or coordination. That part of his investigation effectively ended when 2017 did.
Yet Mueller continued his probe for more than a year, mostly focusing on obstruction allegations. Collusion as a topic of investigation might have been dead and gone by that time, but the fact that the Mueller investigation was still going on kept the collusion narrative alive. And that fed the public perception that events Mueller secretly knew were not part of a collusion scheme were still in some way suspicious.
By letting that happen, Mueller played a partisan role. Related: Mueller Just Proved His Entire Operation Was A Political Hit Job That Trampled The Rule Of Law.
And a friend on Facebook comments: “It is somewhat difficult to feel at ease in a republic wherein federal prosecutors feel comfortable pronouncing sentences of not not guilty. There has been so much talk since a Tuesday evening in late 2016 about the importance of civic norms, and much of it has been correct. Well, this is one too — and a big one.”
Yes, the “norms and civility” crowd has done more to undermine our institutions than Trump. By a huge margin.