The Sleazy Case Against Mueller’s Probe

In the matter of Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump-Russia connection, administration apologists make three significant claims in an effort to discredit the former F.B.I. director’s work. Let’s have a look at them:

  1. First, they insist that the intelligence dossier compiled by British ex-spook Christopher Steele that’s one basis for the F.B.I.’s own investigation has been discredited or is at best uncorroborated. In the same vein, they claimthat Fusion GPS, the research firm that helped pay Steele for the dossier, is little more than a “sleazy operator.”
    • Fusion’s credibility, client list or aggressive tactics are irrelevant. Fusion brokered the dossier but Steele produced it. What’s relevant is his credibility, the reliability of his sources and the truthfulness of their claims.
    • Bill Browder, the anti-Putin campaigner who is an outspoken critic of Fusion, calls Steele “a top-class person whose reputation is beyond reproach.”
    • At least one of Steele’s possible Russian sources was found dead and three others were charged with treason, suggesting, as one Wall Street Journal news account noted, that the Kremlin was cleaning out the moles who had betrayed its hand in last year’s election meddling
    • After this column went to print, The Times reported that Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page met with Russian government officials in a July 2016 trip to Moscow, something he has long denied. This further confirms another claim made in the Steele dossier

  2. This brings us to the second anti-Mueller contention, which is that his indictment of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort for tax fraud connected to his political work in Ukraine, along with news of the guilty plea entered by Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos for lying to the F.B.I., is merely evidence of the slimness of the special counsel’s case.

    • The nonchalance about Manafort’s illicit ties to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine is almost funny, coming from the same people who went berserk over China’s alleged meddling on behalf of Democrats in the 1996 presidential campaign.

    • But if nothing else, the Manafort indictment underscores the Trump campaign’s astonishing vulnerability to Russian blackmail.

      Did that vulnerability explain the campaign’s bizarre intervention (denied by Manafort) to soften the Republican Party platform’s language on providing help to Ukraine?

    • Since when did conservatives suddenly become conveniently bored with getting to the bottom of Russian conspiracies?

  3. .. Yet how else was Steele supposed to investigate allegations of Russia’s ties to the Trump campaign except by talking to Russian sources with insight into the Kremlin? If Clinton was the beneficiary of the Kremlin’s designs, why did it leak her emails? And why would Putin favor the candidate most hostile to him in last year’s election but undermine the one who kept offering improved relations?