We Know a Lot About What Robert Mueller Is Doing. We Also Know Nothing at All.
Looking for clues in the actions of D.C.’s second-most-powerful man.
By Cristian Farias
September 24, 2017
8:30 pm
There’s a temptation to treat every revelation about Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential election, every breadcrumb about its progress, as the missing piece bringing us closer to the undoing of the Trump administration. That’s been the norm since May, when the Department of Justice appointed Mueller as special counsel to lead a wide-ranging investigation that, in time, has featured everything from early-morning raids to grand-jury subpoenas to document-preservation requests that have kept Donald Trump, his associates, and the White House on edge.
Mueller himself is a black box — as in, he’s barred by law and his own professionalism to say anything publicly about the probe. But if his actions were judged by the pace of news about what he and his team of prosecutors are up to, it wouldn’t be a stretch to think he’s on the brink of the next Watergate. In one particularly busy week in September, the American public got a jolt from a series of bombshells about Mueller’s tactics, some of them so sensational that even MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow acknowledged on air the word bombshell may be losing meaning. The biggest one came from CNN, which reported that Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, was the subject of not one but two foreign-surveillance warrants, each empowering federal investigators to wiretap him for set periods both before and right after the election.
Disclosure of secret surveillance of a U.S. citizen is itself a stunning development — the information is classified, and the very existence of a warrant suggests to the public that its target may be a foreign spy. The implications are simply too damaging to linger out in the open. And with no record that Manafort has been charged with a crime, at least none that has been made public yet, it’s no wonder that publishing this information drove him to push back, Trump-style, as if the investigation were a grand liberal witch hunt. “It’s unclear if Paul Manafort was the objective,” Jason Maloni, Manafort’s spokesman and himself a grand-jury witness, told The Wall Street Journal about the reported surveillance. “Perhaps the real objective was Donald Trump.”
Compound this with the August reports that federal agents executed a no-knock warrant of Manafort’s Virginia home one early July morning, and a later New York Times piece indicating that Mueller all but threatened Manafort with an indictment following the raid, and the perception that we’re waiting for the biggest shoe to drop in the Russia inquiry seems inevitable. But Manafort, in the grand scheme of the sprawling Russia investigation, is only one player in a long list of characters and events in Mueller’s sights. To turn his troubles into an expectation that something big is coming flies in the face of how complex, white-collar federal investigations work. And the reality is that this particular investigation is proceeding alongside an even more complex counterintelligence probe into Russian electoral interference that Mueller is also leading. And that both of those investigations are tethered to a third one into Trump, the president, arising from what Stephen Bannon, his ousted chief strategist, has called the gravest mistake in “modern political history”: the firing of FBI director James Comey. In Bannon’s telling, Mueller wouldn’t have a job as Washington’s second-most-powerful man had it not been for his boss’s folly.
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