What the heck are we supposed to do now?
Earlier today, Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff claimed that Special Counsel Robert Mueller went so far as to write up a criminal indictment against Donald Trump for obstruction of justice, before changing his mind and scrapping the whole thing. Mueller’s office is claiming that no such indictment document exists. This means we have a real problem on our hands.
The trouble is, we don’t have any good way of finding out what really happened here. You can each decide who you want to believe or disbelieve, but there are only a few possibilities here. The first is that Mueller wrote up the indictment, changed his mind, and is now lying about it in the hope of preventing the public from knowing that he pulled his punches. The second is that Michael Wolff made this whole thing up to sell books. The third is that some third party has gone to great lengths to deceive Wolff.
Again, I’m not placing my bets on any one of the above three scenarios; I’m merely pointing out that one of them has to be true, and none of them are good. It’s not even clear which is the worst of the three. On some level you hope it’s true, because if this indictment document against Trump becomes public, it’ll help boost the argument in favor of his ouster. On the other hand, it would mean that Mueller is engaged in a coverup about his own actions, which would bring about all kinds of other problems when it comes to his report. It would then raise the question of whether Barr is somehow forcing Mueller to cover it up, which would in turn raise questions about whether Barr prevented the indictment from being issued.
The upside is that we may get some answers before much longer. The Guardian says it’s seen the Trump indictment documents that Michael Wolff got his hands on. His book is set to be published next week. That means these indictment documents should become public soon, and hopefully someone can parse them and figure out if they’re real or fake. Then we can go from there. But what a mess this has become.
