Robert Mueller takes a big new swing in Trump-Russia scandal

| 9:45 pm EDT October 8, 2018
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It’s not that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been quiet lately; it’s that he only “speaks” through his actions, and they weren’t getting much if any media coverage during the Brett Kavanaugh debacle. Now it turns out Mueller is making news in a big way – and his latest move strongly suggests that he’s looking to dismantle the Putin regime as part of his plan to dismantle the Trump regime.

Recently we brought you the story of how Robert Mueller is seizing Paul Manafort’s apartment in Trump Tower. It turns out that’s just the beginning. Manafort’s primary financial benefactor over the years was a Kremlin oligarch named Oleg Deripaska. Now, according to the New York Post, Mueller has begun seizing Deripaska’s assets as well. There’s a reason why this is such a big deal.

First, the timing is rather easy to parse here. Robert Mueller has been targeting Paul Manafort for more than a year, which means that he’s also been targeting Oleg Deripaska for just as long. But now, just three weeks after Manafort struck a cooperation deal with Mueller and began immediately spilling his guts in proffer sessions, suddenly Mueller has found himself armed with enough evidence to seize Deripaska’s assets in the United States. In other words, Manafort sold out Deripaska to Mueller. Will a billionaire cry himself to sleep over losing a property that’s worth just tens of millions? No. But this is presumably just the start. And this may indeed be all about Donald Trump.

Why is Robert Mueller going after the assets of a Russian oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin? For one thing, it might teach the Kremlin a lesson about meddling in future U.S. elections. But it would also seem to send a rather clear message to Putin that he and his allies are going to get torn to pieces unless they give up on the Donald Trump experiment and allow him to sink of his own accord. Between the seizure of the Trump Tower apartment and the Kremlin property, it also sends a message to Donald Trump that asset seizures are very much on the table here – including his own.