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babylonsister

(171,049 posts) Sun May 5, 2019, 12:18 PM May 2019

Dahlia Lithwick: Mueller Can't Get Away With Silence Anymore

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/robert-mueller-william-barr-rift-mueller-must-speak.html

Mueller Can’t Get Away With Silence Anymore
The rift between the special counsel and Attorney General William Barr is too obvious to ignore.

By Dahlia Lithwick
May 02, 20191:58 PM

For almost all of the story of To Kill a Mockingbird, Boo Radley is nothing more than a metaphor. He’s a mysterious, shadowy figure who can be pressed into service to symbolize any number of literary tropes, but despite the importuning of primary characters who only want Boo to come out of his house, he only does so when he’s ready, and when it’s necessary.

Robert Mueller has been, for more than two years, a metaphor. He’s been the guy whose firing would have signified the pick-up-a-brick moment for millions of Americans, he’s been the caped superhero coming to save us all, and he’s also been the shadowy Clark Kent, toiling away in dorky obscurity, refusing to engage with whatever it is that corrupts even well-meaning public servants who must interact with Donald Trump. For two years, Mueller has defied all public longings and expectations and demands, instead allowing his indictments, his report, and his words on paper to speak for themselves. But like Boo Radley, it’s now time for Robert Mueller to come out.

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But it’s not just that. At the most basic level, Barr has distorted Mueller’s actual work product, including his polite and confidential and lawyerly letter asking (twice) that Barr correct his inaccurate summary of Mueller’s careful report. It’s a letter that Wired’s Garrett Graff, who wrote a book about Mueller, described thusly: “I’ve read just about every word Bob Mueller has ever said publicly or published. He’s written precisely one letter like the angry one he sent to Barr: It excoriated Scotland for letting the Pan Am 103 bomber out of prison.”

With the rollout of the report and Wednesday’s charged testimony, Barr betrayed Mueller the institutionalist not once but twice, first by warping years of his team’s painstaking investigative work in order to control the media narrative, and then by denigrating Mueller’s March 27 letter as the work of a “snitty” staffer, as opposed to a sober and deliberate bit of caution from the special counsel quietly asking that his work not be appropriated for political ends.

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.

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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. Like Boo Radley, Mueller needs to come out.