Robert Mueller reveals he knows he has this one in the bag

| 9:10 am EDT August 1, 2018
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Various legal and political pundits have opined this week that the Paul Manafort trial is a must-win for Special Counsel Robert Mueller. They’re right, of course. Mueller needs a guilty verdict in order to justify his continued criminal prosecution of everyone involved in the Trump-Russia scandal. If Manafort were to be acquitted, Donald Trump would use it as a basis for trying to show Mueller the door. So how is Mueller handling this “must-win” trial?

He’s not even there. That’s right, according to multiple reporters who are on hand for the Paul Manafort trial, Robert Mueller isn’t even in attendance. Why? For one thing, it’s a sign that he hired the right prosecutors, and he’s come to trust that they’re fully up to the task. But this runs deeper. This is the only trial that Mueller has going on right now. He could be there, leading the prosecution, or at least supervising, if he felt it were necessary.

In other words, Mueller knows he has this one in the bag. He’s concluded that his time this week is best spent pushing the Trump-Russia investigation forward in other directions. This is a guy who crosses every “t” and dots every “i” yet he’s come to the conclusion that the Manafort trial is headed the way he needs it to be headed. That tells us a lot.

Robert Mueller isn’t interested in cautiously playing things safe. If he were, he’d have been at today’s kickoff of the Paul Manafort trial, if only out of an overabundance of caution. That’s not how this is going to go. Mueller has spent all this time setting up the Manafort case as a surefire winner, and so he’s aggressively moving on to the next phase instead of nervously waiting around for permission. Look for that aggression to ramp up as things move forward.