The real upshot of Donald Trump’s confidential memo to Robert Mueller: it didn’t work!

| 8:15 pm EDT June 2, 2018
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Now that Donald Trump’s confidential memo to Special Counsel Robert Mueller has leaked publicly today, we’re seeing an understandable amount of attention being paid to Trump’s stunning and authoritarian legal overreach. The memo essentially insists that Trump is an untouchable Emperor or King who is free to break any law he wants, because he’s not bound to them. Here’s the part that’s getting somewhat overlooked today: the memo didn’t work!

If you’re a regular Palmer Report reader, you know how very rarely I use exclamation points in my writing – but this is the key point we all need to be shouting about. Back in January, Donald Trump tried to intimidate Robert Mueller into scaling back the Trump-Russia investigation. Trump specifically threatened to do everything from fire Mueller, to pardon everyone being investigated by Mueller. But that was five months ago. Mueller hasn’t backed down one bit. Guess what Trump has done in response?

Nothing at all. These threats made by Trump were empty ones. Mueller called his bluff, and Trump didn’t do a thing about it. In fact half of Trump’s legal team has quit since then. Trump hasn’t tried to fire Mueller, both because he knows he probably can’t get away with it, and because even if he did, it probably wouldn’t stop the investigation. Trump hasn’t tried to pardon the suspects either, for the same reasons: it probably wouldn’t fly, and even if it did, it probably wouldn’t work.

We’ve seen Donald Trump nibble around the edges. He spitefully and wrongfully fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who had little to do with the investigation, seemingly just to take out his frustrations at not being able to fire anyone relevant to probe. He’s pardoned various random people just to flex his muscles, but he hasn’t dared pardon anyone involved with Trump-Russia. We’ll see what happens now that this memo is public. But the real upshot here is that, five months after he sent it, Trump’s memo gambit has been a total failure.