Robert Mueller keeps scoring big wins against Donald Trump – and yes it still matters
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has had quite an impressive string of victories, in court and otherwise, over the past month as he gears up to begin dropping the big hammers in Donald Trump’s Russia scandal. But now that a Supreme Court seat is in play, some observers – even some strong voices in the Resistance against Trump – are asking if it still matters. The answer is that it does, now more than ever. Here’s why.
In case you’ve missed it amid all the chaos of late, Mueller keeps racking up wins. After he convinced a federal judge to lock up Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort in jail for the duration of his trial, he then convinced the judge to reject Manafort’s motions for dismissing the charges and dismissing the most crucial evidence. This means Mueller is almost certain to win if it goes to trial, and Manafort is locked in a cage unless he cuts a plea deal against Trump. But this is just the start.
Yesterday Robert Mueller and Michael Flynn filed a joint request to delay Flynn’s sentencing by two months. This means that Flynn is still fully cooperating with Mueller, and more importantly, that Mueller is still finding Flynn to be highly useful in the case he’s building against Donald Trump. Mueller has succeeded in hauling in enough of Roger Stone’s associates to testify against him before a grand jury that an indictment is essentially guaranteed – meaning Stone’s arrest is coming. And this is before getting to the various mainstream media reports that Michael Cohen is about to cut a plea deal with the SNDY, which would benefit Mueller’s case against Trump greatly. So again, why does this still matter?
Donald Trump has never had a magic wand for stopping Robert Mueller from closing in on him. Trump can’t get away with firing Mueller or with trying to pardon everyone involved, and even he knows it, or he’d have tried it by now. And even if Trump does manage to put an ally on the Supreme Court, while it’ll devastatingly shift the ideological alignment in his favor, there is little to suggest that it would give him a 5-4 majority on procedural matters such as whether he can pardon himself.
So even as the stakes for America’s future are growing significantly higher, nothing has changed about the fact that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is closing in on Donald Trump. Mueller wouldn’t have come out of retirement to take the job unless he believed he could succeed in making Trump answer for his crimes. If you believe that Mueller is smarter and more clever than Trump is, then you have to expect that Mueller’s plan will work. With more on the line than ever, Mueller’s investigation – and the wins he keeps notching – are more important than ever.
