The big pile-up at Robert Mueller’s finish line
We’ve been waiting all year for Michael Flynn to cut a plea deal, because we know he has the goods to take Donald Trump down. Trump knows it even better than we do, which is why he’s spent all year trying to avoid the scenario in which Flynn ended up cutting a deal. Flynn got a comically lenient deal, meaning that he’s turned over enough rock solid evidence to take Trump down. Yet now, as we approach the finish line, suddenly the entire thing is being portrayed as a failed train wreck.
I’ve lost count of how many headlines I’ve seen this week, the majority of them from news outlets that lean left, declaring that all hope is now lost. Why? That part is not being made clear. All the media can seem to tell us right now is that, because Mueller got his man and has everything he needs, everything is about to go terribly wrong. There are the headlines, based on no evidence whatsoever, insisting that Mueller is about to get fired. They told us this the last five times Mueller made a breakthrough in the case. But the “firing” narrative isn’t even among the most absurd claims.
There are headlines this week insisting that because Flynn only pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, there is therefore no evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy. Oh, no, that’s the opposite of how this works. Flynn got to plead to a single reduced charge because he gave the damning goods on everyone else above him, including Trump. That’s the only way these things work. And yet the media, on the left and right, suddenly doesn’t want to admit that this is how plea deals work in conspiracy cases.
We are in tricky times. There’s no more apt metaphor than the fact that the arch villain in all this, Donald Trump, is suddenly morphing into an even more grotesque state in which he can’t even speak without slurring his words. Who knows how he’ll respond to his own impending demise? But that’s the whole point. We always knew there would be a big pile-up once Robert Mueller approached the finish line. We’ve spent all year just hoping we could even get to this point. We’re arriving at precisely where we hoped to be. Now is not the time to get pessimistic about our chances. After all, the media spent all year pretending we’d never get this far.
