By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot, a play in which two men sit around and wait for someone who
never shows up, has been claimed by just about everyone: Freudians, Christians,
existentialists.
Who’s right? I haven’t a clue.
But I have lived, all of us have lived, through a similar
tragicomedy (a word Beckett added to the subtitle for the English version of
his play). We’ve been waiting for Mueller. And waiting.
For some, the waiting is the hardest part. But by
historic standards, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been working at a
blistering pace. Kenneth Starr’s investigation into the Whitewater scandal
wasn’t fully closed down until 2001. It started in 1994. The average running
time for special investigations is 904 days. Tuesday marked the 650th day since
Mueller was appointed.
Most independent counsels take a year to file their first
criminal charges, if they file any at all. Mueller hit that milestone a little
more than five months in, and he has racked up more than 30 other indictments
or guilty pleas since then.
And yet, for the “get Trump media” (as Alan Dershowitz
and others call it), it’s never enough. Whenever news breaks in the probe, or
when news doesn’t break, for that matter, the response tends to be the same:
“Remember, we don’t know what Mueller knows.” Watch CNN or MSNBC for a few
minutes and someone will say this — gleefully when the news is already bad for
Trump, reassuringly when the news is disappointingly good for Trump.
“Always keeping in mind that Mueller knows so much more
than he has shown,” former CBS newsman Dan Rather told CNN’s Don Lemon. “If you
think [Michael Cohen’s guilty plea and Paul Manafort’s conviction] was a shock
to our democratic system, just stay tuned. Because the other things Mueller is
working on, and sooner or later we’ll find out what they are, is going to make
yesterday pale by comparison.”
Well, what if it doesn’t? One of the reasons we keep
hearing that “Mueller knows more” is that he has delivered less. For all of the
drama and the embarrassments, Mueller has yet to file a single charge on the
core allegation that justified the launch of the probe in the first place — the
allegation that Donald Trump “colluded” with Russia.
Sure, the gaudy remoras that attached themselves to
Trump’s hide have had a rough time of it. Manafort, who made a career of
colluding with horrible regimes, may never have another meal not thwacked from
a large spoon onto a prison tray. Roger Stone may join Cohen in the Stoney
Lonesome as well. And obviously, Trump has made things worse for himself by
seeming like he’s got a lot to hide.
But it looks more and more likely that Mueller’s dance of
a thousand veils will end with . . . more veils. The Mueller obsessives want
him to be a deus ex machina who delivers irrefutable grounds for impeachment
and I-told-you-sos. But that Mueller may never arrive. He may never even say a
word about it in public at all.
That’s in part because the Russia piece of his portfolio
is under the rubric of a counterintelligence investigation, not a criminal one.
This means he’s under no obligation to file any public report at all. He could
submit a report to the newly confirmed attorney general, Bill Barr, but Barr
can reveal whatever he wants to the public, assuming the president says it’s
OK. Or he can reveal nothing at all.
But waiting for Mueller to prove himself a savior may not
pan out, for the simpler reason that he can’t find what doesn’t exist. To say
that Trump was morally capable of colluding with Russia is not the same thing
as saying that he did.
If you listen very closely to former FBI deputy director
Andrew McCabe, there was never hard evidence of Trump’s colluding beyond the
president’s weird statements and behavior in response to the Russia probe. The
problem is that you don’t need an international conspiracy to explain why Trump
says and does weird things — unless you’ve already decided he’s guilty.
That’s why this tragicomedy will not come to an end with
the end of the Mueller probe. The audience, on both sides, had already decided
what it was about when they entered the theater.
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