Robert Mueller’s good day
We learned a variety of things from today’s Inspector General report. The FBI was indeed out of control during the election, in its craven and baseless pursuit of Hillary Clinton. There never was any Hillary Clinton email scandal. James Comey’s decision making process is inexplicable, and he never should have had the job that he had. Various other people screwed up too. But there’s only one relevant upshot in here to the Trump-Russia investigation, and it’s one that’s largely being overlooked, because it’s one of omission.
This IG report pulled no punches and took everyone to task. If you breathed wrong, you’re in this report, and you’ve been condemned for it. It’s that thorough. You know who didn’t face any meaningful criticism in this report? Robert Mueller. Yes, the report was primarily focused on the FBI’s investigation into the phony Hillary email scandal, which was long before Mueller was appointed. But that’s the whole point: all the screw-ups were before his time, and none of those screw-ups help Trump at all.
The closest Trump can claim to a victory here is the confirmation that two FBI agents personally disliked Donald Trump. But their text messages reveal that they also disliked Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. These two agents were being inappropriate, but they weren’t being biased; they seemed to hate everyone involved. Besides, their anti-Trump texts were first reported by the media a long time ago, and it didn’t help Trump then. It won’t help him now.
The bottom line is that, on a day in which just about everyone in the Department of Justice took in on the chin for reasons big and small, Robert Mueller and his team are more or less the only ones who didn’t. Not only does today’s IG report prove once and for all that the FBI and DOJ were never plotting against Donald Trump, and that some of them were plotting against his opponent, it also makes Mueller look great in comparison. This will only help his credibility as he moves into the prison phase of the Trump-Russia scandal, starting with Paul Manafort’s arraignment tomorrow, followed by Michael Cohen.
