It’s Mueller time
More than a year after shocking and impossible election results revealed that Donald Trump really did conspire with Russia to rig the election in his favor, more than half a year after Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to take over the criminal investigation into the Trump-Russia scandal, and nearly three months after we first learned of Trump’s people being arrested for their roles in the scandal, we’re about to finally get there. We can already see that this is going to be a startling, surprising, chaotic, and historically high stakes ending point.
Mueller has signaled that he wants to interview Trump within the next few weeks. That means he already has everything he needs to nail Trump, at least on the obstruction angle, and perhaps on other criminal angles as well. Proving culpability in the coverup is usually quicker and more efficient than proving culpability for the original underlying crime. It was after all, obstruction of justice that took Richard Nixon down before anyone had managed to prove that he was the orchestrator of the Watergate scandal to begin with; that part came later.
In the past twenty-four hours alone we’ve learned that Mueller has conducted interviews with James Comey (no surprise), Sally Yates (no surprise), Jeff Sessions (not all that surprising), Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats (a bit more surprising), and CIA Director Mike Pompeo (far more surprising). In the next few days we’ll likely learn about even more such interviews. Mueller is clearly putting this all out there for a reason. Not only is he plotting his endgame, he’s revealing at least portions of it for all to see.
Why? You’d have to ask him. But we’ll find out soon enough. We’ve been waiting a long, long time to reach this point. Pessimists on our side, and optimists on Donald Trump’s side, never thought the Robert Mueller investigation would get this far. Yet here we are, staring at the home stretch. We knew Mueller had Trump nailed the minute he handed a sweetheart deal to Michael Flynn. Now we’re finally going to see what the endgame looks like. Trump can’t win this; it’s merely a matter of how he chooses to lose.
