We fight on.
swamp diary
Week 67: The Mueller Rumor Mill Is Working Overtime
As Labor Day approaches, the mythic deadline looms for the special counsel to finish the job.
By JACK SHAFER
September 01, 2018
The waiting is the hardest part, Tom Petty sang through his nose in 1981, predicting the agony of anticipation that has settled on Washington journalists this Labor Day weekend like a smoggy August warm front.
We’re waiting for the rumored Roger Stone indictment to come down, and so is he. We’re waiting for the charges that might be filed against Don Jr. We’re waiting for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to deliver his collusion and obstruction report to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. We’re waiting for Rudolph Giuliani’s counter-report to the Mueller report, which is almost finished even though Rudy hasn’t seen Mueller’s work. We’re waiting for Paul Manafort’s second trial, which starts on September 24, and aren’t sure whether to be happy or blue about his plea deal falling apart.
We’re waiting to see what new fur balls the Michael Cohen prosecutions will cough up, and we’re waiting to see whether a November red tide will spark the impeachment machinery to life and activate the dozen-and-a-half investigations of Trump world that Axios says the Democrats have dreamed up, wish-list style, on a spreadsheet. We’re waiting for Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear: Trump in the White House. (One measure of our towering anticipations: It has been decades since anybody looked forward to a Woodward book.)
We’re waiting for President Donald Trump to find new boundaries to melt with his indignation and fury. (“I view it as an illegal investigation,” the president insisted to Bloomberg this week.) We’re waiting for him to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions. We’re waiting for him to fire Rosenstein. (At his Thursday rally in Indiana, he threatened to take charge of the Department of Justice and the FBI.)
Most of all, we’re waiting for him to fire Mueller.
Not that we’re impatient for news, mind you. Well, not that impatient. Journalism requires reporters to look down time’s tunnel to map out the many possibilities a breaking story might take, so in weeks like this, when the news seems incremental, it’s only natural for us to use our periscope into the future. We’ve had difficulties enough writing accurately about the present, I know, but cover the future we must.
Of all the Trump countdowns currently ticking down, the most pressing is the timing of Mueller’s report. Department of Justice guidelines recommend that prosecutors avoid filing charges or taking other investigatory measures close to Election Day, so as to avoid contaminating the vote. A rule of thumb suggests (but in no way requires) a 60-day buffer between hot prosecutorial action and an election. Today, we’re 65 days away from the midterm elections, and the closing window prompted Trump attorney Giuliani to tweet a suggestion, again, to Mueller this week to hurry up.
At least Giuliani was consistent for once. Speaking to Fox News Channel last week, Giuliani was more precise about the timing. “If it isn’t over by September, then we have a very, very serious violation of the Justice Department rules, and he shouldn’t be conducting one of these investigations in the 60-day period,” Giuliani said, reiterating the hurry-up idea he circulated in May.
Everybody in Washington who can read a chyron has an opinion on Mueller. And they’ll share it. Some insist that he’s a by-the-book sort, a duty first, rule-following automaton who never saw a guideline he wouldn’t follow. Others say he’s an independent cuss who will deploy his report when it’s ready, ignoring the nonbinding guidelines. Journalists love leakers, but they love Mueller even more because he doesn’t leak, which allows them to map their speculations on him and write epic paragraphs about his stony character like this one. He’s the sphinx of southwest Washington, and he remains unmoved by the Trump’s lawyers’ expectations. Some of us are old enough to remember that Trump attorney Ty Cobb predicted almost a year ago that Mueller would soon end his probe. “I’d be embarrassed if this is still haunting the White House by Thanksgiving and worse if it’s still haunting him by year end,” Cobb told Reuters, proving that he’s at least as bad as a reporter at the art of crystal gazing. “I think the relevant areas of inquiry by the special counsel are narrow.” Cobb, given his reputed ancestry, should know as well as anyone that, like a baseball game, there is no time limit on the work of a special prosecutor.
Trump’s lawyers have a lot of moxie to suggest that Mueller shift his investigation into higher gears. As Bloomberg News noted, the president’s attorneys have been dickering over the conditions of a Trump interview for almost nine months, a dispute that is still not resolved.
I suspect that what Trump and his legal team fear almost as much as the complete Mueller report dropping just before the midterms is the continued drip-drip-drip of its allied and sibling investigations in New York (Cohen) and in Washington. This week, Sam Patten, a lobbyist associate of former Trump campaign director Paul Manafort, pleaded guilty to failing to register as a foreign lobbyist. He also told prosecutors that he had arranged for the purchase of four tickets to Trump’s inauguration with $50,000 of a foreign oligarch’s money. Foreigners are prohibited by law from giving money to inauguration organizations.
The New York Times surmises that the oligarch who supplied the money was Serhiy Lyovochkin, a member of the Ukrainian parliament. The purchaser of the ticket was Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a Russian political operative believed to have ties to a Russian intelligence agency. Kilimnik worked with Manafort and was previously indicted in the Mueller probe, the New York Times reported.
This is the first time foreign money has been discovered flowing into a Trump political operation. Did the president know about it? Was the money used to compromise him?
We’ll just have to wait to find out.
Excuse my 'Strine.
