Robert Mueller

"Mueller had long been an enabler, intentional or not, of the corruption he was tasked to investigate. He headed the FBI from 2001 until 2013, doing little to stop the criminal behavior carried out by operatives from his own political party. When Paul Manafort was indicted by Mueller in October 2017, for example, it was for crimes he had committed in the early 2000s. Why did Mueller not arrest Manafort earlier? If Mueller was so aware of the danger of this transnational crime syndicate that he gave a speech warning it would destroy democracy in 2011, why did he do so little to stop it—and why did he not speak out when Trump began receiving classified information during his campaign? At best, Mueller was guilty of negligence—but in 2017, negligence seemed a forgivable sin given the stakes and the competition. Negligence was a step up from moneylaundering or treason or rape. The country was willing to overlook negligence and naivete in return for someone willing to root out the rot." "Those who treat this as a game seem to not grasp—or care—that ordinary Americans have been caught in the crossfire and that Manafortposes a public safety threat. At the time of Manafort’s sentencing, I was in disbelief that Mueller’s team could not see this outcome coming, and it has made me wonder whether, in fact, they did, and found it acceptable. I remember looking at a photo of Mueller heading to church in spring 2019, shortly after Barr had issued a misleading summary of his probe, and wondering what kind of god this man could believe in to allow his countrymen such preventable pain. We were living in Mueller’s America. One nation, under God, collateral damage. There were other egregious errors. Manafort crony Rick Gates was also given loose travel restrictions and even had the destination of his future travel plans announced . This seemed asinine, given that Gates was both a flight risk and a potential assassination target. Eventually, the Mueller team realized this and gave him travel restrictions and tracking. The “Mueller is playing 3-D chess” analogies began to take off at this point among those desperate for a rationale for why Mueller’s team were making rookie errors. Some pundits liked to claim that Mueller was doing a classic mafia roll-up, where he would go easy, nab the low-level players first, and then arrest the key instigators all at once. That illusion was shattered when Mueller ensured that Michael Flynn walked free in fall 2018, at least so far."