Time to step up Bob
by digby
Dahlia Lithwick is right in this piece in Slate. She starts by going over all the ways in which Barr denigrated Mueller in his testimony yesterday:
It wasn’t just that Barr denigrated Mueller as a “political appointee” or dismissed his March 27 letter as “snitty,” and thus clearly the work of underlings. It wasn’t just that Barr implied that Mueller was either too timid or too incompetentto come to a conclusion on the question of whether Donald Trump had obstructed justice. And it wasn’t just that Barr suggested that since the entire Mueller probe had been proven to be “based on false accusations,” it was illegitimate, which certainly suggests that Mueller devoted two long years to a—you guessed it—witch hunt. Presumably, from now on, if the president decides any legal investigation is “based on false accusations,” he can just go ahead and impede it, a framing that makes a hash of everything Mueller sought to do. When pressed Wednesday on Mueller’s bona fides, Barr snapped that “Bob Mueller is the equivalent of a U.S. Attorney. … His work concluded when he sent his report to the attorney general. At that point, it was my baby.” This is not how you talk about a colleague you respect.
All true. And this piece was written before we saw the even more scathing insults hurled at Mueller by WH counsel Emmet Flood.
It’s clear that the White House and their supine minions in the DOJ have decided that Mueller must be destroyed. As I wrote earlier, I’m sure this is largely at the behest of Trump himself. It’s how he operates.
Lithwick argues that Mueller is going to have to climb down from his pedestal and engage in the fight:
Mueller, a lifelong Republican, has tried—probably harder than any public figure in the Trump ambit—to avoid doing anything that would draw him into the tractor beam of bullying, name-calling, and soapy melodrama that are the final resting place for anyone who involves himself with this president. Where lesser men have attempted to split the difference, compromise at the margins, and to persuade themselves that they were still doing noble work despite allowing Donald Trump to use and exploit them, Mueller simply never engaged, even when the president was attacking him by name. It was an elegant dance, along the invisible seam of public and private, institutionalism and self-protection. This studied restraint rested on Mueller’s unwavering assumption that if he trusted the fact-finding process of the investigation and the machinery of the Justice Department, he might come out the other side intact.
Well, any hope that Barr the institutionalist or Barr the defender of the Justice Department or Barr the believer in truth-seeking processes was going to help Robert Mueller thread this impossibly small needle was vaporized conclusively this week, and now, as my colleague Mark Joseph Stern argues, Robert Mueller is going to have to talk. Efforts to speak through his filings have proved futile in the hands of someone willing to twist and compromise Mueller’s own words until they mean the very opposite of what they originally established. And now that the rift between these two old friends and colleagues has been laid bare, the only person who can do anything about it is the person who has practically made a religion of keeping his head down.
Mueller has a narrowing path along which he might hope to salvage his own words and his own work from the attorney general, who seems to have taken custody of Mueller’s “baby” and then unabashedly attempted to tell us all that the baby was actually an accent lamp all along. Nobody has been more voluble than I have about Mueller’s right and inclination to quietly do the work, then step aside. But if he doesn’t step into the limelight to say out loud what he has written, and proved, and corroborated, and supported (with evidence Barr seems never to even have inspected), his entire effort will only serve as confirmation that those of us who still believe in systems and investigations and truth are all a bunch of chumps.
I don’t envy Robert Mueller. As the one and only character in this endless gothic saga who has managed to remain untarnished by the president’s highly contagious lack of principle, I take no pleasure in arguing that he will now have to engage. His silence and doggedness should have spoken louder than words. But in the hands of someone as bent on politicizing his efforts as William Barr, his silence and doggedness have now been weaponized against him. The special counsel cannot just live amid the heroic metaphors anymore.
I have no idea if he will do it. The report shows that they had uncovered tons of probable cause to believe Trump obstructed justice and made it very clear that he betrayed the country, if not criminally, by welcoming the Russian government sabotage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. So, it’s fair to say that he does not believe Trump did nothing wrong.
However, he is one of the few remaining “institutionalists” in the Republican party so it’s not impossible to believe that if he’s called to testify, he will keep to the old fashioned credo “never complain never explain,” just give a dry recitation of his report and then ride off into the sunset content to let history make its judgment on his legacy. He’s the only one Barr has said he will allow to testify … which makes nervous.
On the other hand, he has seen counterintelligence evidence. It’s possible that even if he doesn’t act out of his own ego that he will see this as a matter of patriotism.
There are very few heroes in our politics, particularly these days. So, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Mueller may end up being just like the rest. But if he isn’t, he’s going to have to step up in a big way, now.
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