Former special counsel Robert Mueller testifies before a House Intelligence Committee hearing in Washington, U.S., July 24, 2019. REUTERS/Jim Bourg
On Friday night, March 20, Robert Mueller — a former U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) special counsel, ex-FBI director and former deputy U.S. attorney general —passed away at 81 after a long struggle with Parkinson's disease. President Donald Trump was quick to celebrate Mueller's death, posting, on his Truth Social platform, "Good, I'm glad he's dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people. President DONALD J. TRUMP."
Mueller was a conservative Republican, appointed deputy U.S. attorney general by President George H.W. Bush and FBI director by President George W. Bush (although Democratic President Barack Obama kept him as FBI director throughout his first term and into his second). But Trump resented Mueller bitterly because of his work as DOJ special counsel for the investigation of Russian interference in the United States' 2016 presidential election.
Mediaite's Colby Hall looks back on the Mueller Report in an article published on March 23, arguing that its findings still serve as a warning about Trump.
"Start with what Mueller actually established," Hall writes. "Russia carried out a coordinated intelligence operation to influence the 2016 election. Russian military intelligence hacked Democratic e-mails and released them through WikiLeaks in strategically timed waves…. The Trump campaign did not simply exist alongside that effort. It engaged with it in ways that are difficult to dismiss…. None of this resulted in a charged criminal conspiracy."
Hall continues, "Mueller concluded the evidence did not meet that threshold. That finding became the foundation for the claim that the entire investigation was a hoax. But that claim only works if you collapse a legal judgment into a factual one — and if you ignore the sustained effort to make that collapse feel inevitable."
After DOJ released the Mueller Report, Hall notes, Trump repeatedly used the phrase "no collusion" — which "does not describe the investigation Mueller conducted."
"The reaction to his death shows how complete that transformation has been," Hall explains. "A lifetime of public service is reduced to a punchline. A documented foreign intelligence operation is recast as a partisan invention. The facts are more stubborn than that."
Hall adds, "Russia interfered. The Trump campaign was not a passive bystander. And calling the investigation a hoax requires ignoring not just Mueller's findings, but those of the Republican-led Senate committee that confirmed them — and then watched quietly as they were erased."
