Welcome to the alternate universe “Mueller Time”
For the better part of two years, we’ve all been waiting for what’s been popularly dubbed “Mueller Time.” We watched Special Counsel Robert Mueller land indictment after conviction against Donald Trump’s inner circle, dropping concrete hints at every step of the way that Mueller had uncovered a massive Trump-Russia conspiracy. Then Mueller turned in his final report, and William Barr told us that it was one big nothingburger.
Since that time, nothing has made any sense. How could Mueller’s mounting and publicly visible evidence of collusion somehow have translated into no collusion? How could the blatant felony obstruction of justice committed in plain sight, by Donald Trump and too many of his underlings to count, not have added up to criminal charges for anyone? At least a dozen people in Trump land could have been indicted for obstruction based on what’s taken place in public alone.
This has all been beyond bizarre, like a Twilight Zone episode that suddenly stopped at the height of its absurdity, only for the narrator to announce that everything we’d just watched hadn’t actually been on our screen. It’s like we’re all suddenly in the episode instead of watching it. But we are about to begin getting some resolution to the madness this week.
William Barr says he’ll release a redacted version of the Mueller report this week. Barr has shown that he’s willing to lie about the report to make Trump look good, so we should be expecting redactions aimed at protecting Trump as much as possible. This means Trump and his team should be looking forward to this release, right? But yesterday, ABC News reported that the Trump regime is concerned that “there is significant concern on the president’s team about what will be in this report,” specifically with respect to obstruction of justice.
Aha. This tells us that the Mueller report is so horrifyingly awful for Donald Trump, even a hack like Barr can’t redact enough of it to make Trump look good. More specifically, it sounds like Barr is planning to release a bunch of the obstruction stuff, in the hope it’ll give him cover for never having to release the collusion stuff. This alone suggests that the collusion stuff is the real dirt – and that Barr was simply lying when he claimed that Mueller found no collusion. Then again, we already knew that based on Mueller’s publicly available court filings alone.
