In Year Two, Mueller Is Wading Into a Bottomless Pit of Trump Sleaze
By Jonathan Chait
@jonathanchait
May 17, 2018
8:37 am
The unambiguous message emanating from the White House is that Robert Mueller has been at this a year, and it’s time for him to pack it in — or, perhaps, for his investigation to conclude in some other, less voluntary way. “We are going to try as best we can to put the message out there that it has been a year, there has been no evidence presented of collusion or obstruction, and it is about time for them to end the investigation,” says Rudy Giuliani. It’s quite strange that the official Trump line puts so much weight on the evidence Robert Mueller has publicly presented, given how tightly Mueller has held onto the secrets of his investigation, and how deliberately its public indictments have proceeded.
If his investigation had been leaking some of its revelations, we would have a lot more information about what Mueller has found. But, then, if that were true, the leaks, rather than the lack thereof, would probably be the rationale for ending his probe.
What Mueller has found can only be guessed at. The publicly accessible evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia is extensive. I summarized the highlights of that evidence two weeks ago, but even since then, more evidence has appeared. A White House official reported to the Senate Judiciary Committee that, while working for the Trump campaign, he had received an email that Russia had damaging information on Hillary Clinton, and that other members of the campaign would almost certainly have been copied on it. The official, John Mashburn, did not save the email, and Senate investigators could not find it. But Mashburn has no imaginable incentive to fabricate such a detail, and an extremely strong incentive not to offer up such a confession. His testimony adds to a broader picture in which many people working for Trump potentially knew the Russians were working covertly on their behalf.
It is true, however, that Mueller has swept up a wide array of crimes that may be secondarily related to collusion with Russia, but are not direct acts of abetting Russian election interference. He has charged Paul Manafort with money laundering, and several other figures with making false statements to the FBI. When federal agents raided the home and office of Trump fixer Michael Cohen, it signaled a new phase in the investigation, homing in on a rapidly spreading web of alleged financial misdeeds by Donald Trump and his associates.
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https://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/robert-mueller-probing-trump-money-laundering-collusion-russia.html