A Special Prosecutor In Count Dracula's Crypt: UPDATED, 9/27/20

 

"Privatize It Now!"

Trump As Count Dracula:

A bygone battle cry
against the ACA repeal attempt, 
from an old protest sign

<Artwork: The Squawker>

Reckoner's Note, 9/22/20: I honestly didn't expect a huge amount of traffic when I wrote the following original post below, although the Count Dracula metaphor struck me as the perfect one for the oft-ballyhooed investigation of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller. 

By the time he'd closed up shop, and finally testified in Congress, I suspect a lot of people weren't paying much attention anymore, Old news, right? A few people went to jail, but not President Donald Trump, so what did it matter? If Mueller didn't bring down Trump, someone else would. Or, at least, so the popular wisdom at the time held.

Well, honestly, the answers are direr than most of us dare to imagine, which is why I'm revisiting my original post, followed by appropriate conclusions.

<i.>

As a House of Representatives committee finally heard from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, we here at Ramen Noodle Nation sat back, sighed aloud, and began playing that ever-popular parlor game of...what if? What if? 

We now invite you to imagine an alternate reality, a parallel universe, that takes place in Bram Stoker's beloved classic Gothic novel, Dracula. Specifically, imagine Donald Trump as the Count, and Mueller as his arch-nemesis, the vampire hunter...Van Helsing. We begin in a setting familiar to countless horror movies.

Van Helsing arrives at the Count's singular crypt, identifies his coffin, and raises the familiar implements of his trade -- the hammer and stake -- high above his head. Suddenly, his eyes dart around, he takes a deep whiff, and then sighs. He puts the hammer and stake down, and walks slowly out of the crypt. On arriving back in downtown metropolitan Transylvania, Van Helsing does not dare breathe a word to anyone about what he was doing, or why he slipped the stake back in its shoulder bag.

Less than an hour later, Dracula rises from the grave, and embarks on a spectacular raid. The body count ticks up quickly, as the people who haven't locked their shutters and doors pay the ultimate price. At the local casualty ward, corpses pile up by the tens, twenties, thirties, until the chroniclers lose track of the tally. Still, faith remains high in Van Helsing, who has been doggedly trailing the Count for months.

"Mein Gott, vat is happening here?"

"Is Dracula sending us a message to..."

"Surely, if Van Helsing had known, if van Helsing would have come across him, he would have put a stake right through Dracula's dirty little blackened heart!"

"Ja, if only we could be sure of that, eh?"

Still, popular feeling runs high, especially at the casualty ward, and the morgue, where shocked families are reeling from the impact of Dracula's latest killing spree. The undertakers hover closely behind them, with one-page sheets of coffin sizes and measuring tape at the ready.

A press conference is called at the Transylvania Town Hall. Van Helsing stands solemnly at the dais, the city fathers arrayed behind him, as the reporters shout their questions. 

"Herr Van Helsing, what did Count Dracula know, and when did he know it?"

"Was Jack The Ripper colluding with the Count in any way? Is the Ripper a foreign national of some kind?"

"We understand there were numerous sightings of the Count, in and around his crypt, before the latest rampage. How is it, Herr van Helsing, that you and your associates failed to tally these numerous sightings? Wouldn't you have acted, if you'd known about them in time?"

Finally, the Transylvania Times's respected senior correspondent gets to ask the million dollar question everybody's waited to hear: "Herr Van Helsing, you've had Dracula in your sights for nearly a year. Many of his associates, like Renfield, are languishing in the castle dungeon, awaiting their day in court. Yet we hear that you could have gotten Count Dracula last night. is this true? If so, why didn't you act?"

Van Helsing sighs, furrows his mighty brow once more, and checks to make sure his garlic necklace is firmly in place. "Ja, mein Freund, it is all true. That rumor is true, every syllable of it. But even so..." The reporters begin to murmur, then growl.

The famed vampire tracker sighs, furrows his brow yet again, and mops it once more. He has been heaving rivers of sweat all night, and needless to say, he hasn't slept a proverbial wink.

Van Helsing grips the podium. Knowing what's coming next, and how the press corps will react, he steels himself to deliver the remainder of his response. "To have driven a stake through the heart of a creature so manifestly wicked, well -- it would have been unfair. I had to give him a fighting chance. After all, he is Count Dracula, and for all his dark doings, I must respect his office and his position. That was my rationale for leaving him sleeping in his coffin." 

The murmurs rise to a fever pitch now, but are soon drowned out in a cascade of shouts, muffled oaths, and obscure Eastern European curses. 

Seeing that the game is now up, his royal commission now apparently clouded forever, Van Helsing backs slowly away from the podium, shouting back in return: "That's it for now, gentlemen. No more questions! No more questions!" 

<Up Close And Personal...

Artwork: The Squawker>

<ii.>

I always suspected that the Mueller investigation felt too good to be true, even as its first bombshells began dropping. The most telling signs lay in the flood of pop culture portrayals, trinkets and memorabilia, from simple memes (Mueller as Superman), to coffee mugs (Mueller as Paul Bunyan), cross-stitched tributes (MAGA, as in, "Mueller Ain't Going Away"), earrings bearing his craggy, square-jawed visage, and so on. 

In hindsight, Robert Mueller's emergence became a template for his supporters' deepest hopes and wishes. "He gives me reassurance that all is not lost," super-fan Alicia Barnett told MSNBC, in explaining why she named her 10-week-old puppy "Mueller," because she saw the same attributes that she attributed to him (strong, quiet, mysterious) in her dog. It's not hard to understand the powerful gravitational pull that Mueller's appointment exerted on the minds of Americans racked by the Trump era, and all the anxieties that have accompanied it.

Mueller's appointment neatly fits the template of American exceptionalism, and rugged individualism, the same ethos that drove Trump over the finish line -- "I alone can fix this" -- the same go-it-alone appeal of figures like Batman, Superman, and the Lone Ranger. On one level, the official outcome seemed to reflect that ethos, resulting in 34 criminal indictments, including several of Trump's campaign associates (Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, George Papadoulous) and personal lawyer, go-to guy and "fixer," Michael Cohen.

Yet it was hard to escape the nagging tang of disappointment when Mueller finished in 2019, and handed over his final report to Attorney General William Barr. Twenty-six of the 34 indictments went to Russian nationals, who'll presumably never set foot in an American court. Other key decisions left more unanswered questions. Why didn't Mueller try harder to pin down the money trail? Why didn't he try to question Trump personally, or his offspring, about their various dealings, alleged or not, with Russian business and political interests?

Well, now we found out last week (see links below for further detail). Mueller backed off a deep dive into Trump's finances -- "the issue was simply too incendiary; the risk, too severe" -- or questioning Trump's entitled daughter without portfolio, Ivanka, on the grounds that "hauling her in for an interview would play badly to the already antagonistic right-wing press." (Now there's an oxymoron, right? I thought 95% of them are propagandists.)

This, despite evidence of Ivanka's presence at that now-infamous Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr., and other Trump campaign officials, where a Russian delegation offered to spill dirt on his Democratic presidential rival, Hillary Clinton.

Andrew Weissman, who worked on the Mueller team, claims that his boss feared the right-wing media machine ("look how they're roughing up the president's daughter") and also, it seems, the Orange Menace himself, because he didn't want to be caught "enraging Trump." All in all, a remarkable judgment of a man whose 12-year tenure as FBI Director (2001-13) began only a week before one of its most tumultuous periods, the 9/11 attacks. 

<The Reckoner>

<iii.>

Yet, judging by Weissman's new memoir, Where Law Ends, President Trump's regime apparently managed what suicide bombers flying airplanes could not: scare the nation's former top cop off the money trail, a tactic that might have proven more fruitful than the plodding, 1996-era script that Mueller followed so scrupulously (scoop up the minnows, get them to flip, reel in a bigger fish, get him to flip; trouble was, Manafort, the latter fish, didn't follow the script). These paragraphs from Bloomberg's article sum up the issue well:

"There is abundant and damning evidence of the Trump camp’s coziness with Russia before, during and after the 2016 campaign. That coziness continues to this day. But we still lack a complete understanding of what incentives Trump has had for persistently kowtowing to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"Following the money, and determining the extent to which Trump is financially beholden to Russia, would have answered one of the lingering mysteries of Trump’s tenure and clarified why the president has been so cavalier about compromising national security and allowing elections to be corrupted."

Or, as former Trump henchman Steven Bannon so eloquently puts it: "This is all about money laundering. Their path to [expletive] Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr. and Jared Kushner. … It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner stuff.” 

Let that sink in a moment, seeing as Bannon's now charged with the same thing. When an ex-fink who swam in Trump's particular orbit tells you, "Look under that rock," you might want to try it. You'll find that it doesn't bite. God forbid, you might even find what you're after.

But Mueller couldn't bring himself to lift any of those particular rocks, as Weissman writes: "We would have subpoenaed the president after he refused our accommodations, even if that risked us being fired," he wrote. "It just didn't sit right. We were left feeling like we had let down the American public, who were counting on us to give it our all."

<The Reckoner>

<Coda: The Mouse Who Blinked>

I feared that outcome, long before Weissman's book hit the shelves this week. I didn't find it accidental that, the louder that Trump and his entourage roared, the quieter that Mueller and his team squeaked. Ironically, though, for all the complaints that Trump and company raised, Mueller hardly seemed to fit the stereotype of the proverbial bug-eyed witch hunter, with a towering inferno on his shoulder, and some axe to grind.

Mueller seemed ill-suited to play such a role, an impression that his Congressional interview highlighted for me last year. Sticking fiercely to his famously opaque, zigzagging brand of Mueller-speak, at times, the former special prosecutor struggled to deliver those lines as precisely as he'd always done, looking every inch of a 75-year-old man worn out by decades of public service.

Contrast Mueller's final, tepid appearance on the national stage with the sharper, laser focused approach of Trump's current New York legal nemeses, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., or Attorney General Letitia James, who don't seem to jump when someone named Trump says, "Boo!" To be fair, they're operating without the constraints that Mueller labored under -- specifically, the arcane Department of Justice policy that forbids any indictment of a sitting president.

Mueller also seemed especially wary, given his status as someone reporting to somebody else more powerful (initially, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein). Even so, Mueller took on a task that required him to do certain things, like following the money, and getting to the bottom of things. He didn't do either of them. Yes, a more aggressive posture might have gotten him fired, which highlights why the government can't be counted on to investigate itself. 

Still, how hard would it have been to mobilize public opinion, given the superhero status that he enjoyed for so long, and the antipathy that Trump and his cohorts generate so effortlessly? Shouldn't Mueller have relished that kind of fight? As Abraham Lincoln once pointed out, "Public sentiment is everything." Evidently, he didn't. We'll never know for sure, because he didn't  even try.

At the least, as some of Mueller's associates pointed out, he could have released his final report himself, instead of trusting someone like Barr not to bury it, and misstate its findings. But Mueller didn't do that, either, leaving the public hanging, with many, many loose ends left untied.

Will they ever get tied up? That task is probably best left to James, or Vance, but let's avoid the massive superhero buildup this time, until the final returns come in. Ultimately, the American public isn't the biggest loser in Mueller's failure of nerve. It's the rule of law, and the so-called guardrails we've counted on to protect ourselves from Trump and his henchmen-- checks and balances that are taking a real beating, as I write.

And this is why I'm revisiting the story because we're talking about amoral people who have shown, over and over, they will do whatever it takes to win. And make no mistake, working 24/7 to put chains -- financial, legal, physical, it doesn't really matter -- on those who defy them. 

All the mindless goldfish blinking, clicking and zooming that the online world encourages won't make that fact any less urgent, so now is not the time to relax our vigilance. Because, based on what we're seeing so far, the final conclusions that we can draw from this episode are anything but comforting. -- The Reckoner

Links To Go (Maybe Tomorrow,

Maybe Some Day, Trump And His Kin
Will Wear An Orange Jump Suit):

Bloomberg Opinion:
Mueller Failed To Follow Trump's Money Trail:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-09-23/mueller-failed-to-follow-trump-s-money-trail

MSNBC:

Mueller Folk Hero Memorabilia:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/mueller-folk-hero-memorabilia-necklaces-candles-baby-onesies-pet-names-n985291

Yahoo News:
Mueller Didn't Investigate
Trump's Finances Or Question Ivanka Trump...
https://news.yahoo.com/mueller-didnt-investigate-trumps-finances-110846598.html