Nothing is stopping Robert Mueller now
This week Special Counsel Robert Mueller had a grand jury indict Roger Stone on charges that also incriminated Donald Trump. Then he had the FBI arrest Stone. Now Stone is facing criminal trial. This is how things are supposed to work, of course. But if you’ve been listening to some of the worst fear mongering over the past few months, you might have ended up seeing Stone’s arrest as a miracle.
For the past two months, we’ve been hearing about how Donald Trump’s appointment of corrupt Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker was going to prevent Robert Mueller from being able to indict or arrest any more people. But that clearly didn’t happen. For the past month we’ve been hearing about how Trump’s government shutdown was bringing a halt to grand juries and putting the FBI out of business. That clearly didn’t happen either. And of course we’ve been hearing from the start about how Trump was going to magically pardon his people before they could be arrested. That also didn’t happen.
There are a couple reasons for this. First, Donald Trump is focused on the wrong things, and he’s going about them in ways that don’t help his cause. He gained nothing by trying to sabotage the FBI in various manners that were never going to impact the Trump-Russia investigation. He also gained nothing by waiting until Mueller was nearly at the finish line before finally trying to make changes at the DOJ. And if he thought his shutdown was going to stop the investigation, he failed to realize that every government entity involved was going to prioritize its remaining resources to make sure Mueller could keep working.
The second reason is that Robert Mueller knows what he’s doing. He’s been to this rodeo before. He used a similar bottom-up strategy to take down John Gotti and the leaders of Enron. It takes time, but it works. If you’re guilty, Mueller’s tactics are just about unbeatable, even if you know what you’re doing – and Trump clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing. Mueller has been flying solo all this time, and he’s got this far. Now the Democrats have the House, meaning his job just got a whole lot easier. Nothing is going to stop him now.
