Whether you thought the two-year, $32 million Mueller investigation was warranted or not, the report promised to establish a factual record that both sides could accept, especially on the explosive charge that Donald Trump had conspired with the Russians to win the American presidency.
It did indeed establish such a record, at great length, after a formidable team of investigators and prosecutors searched high and low for evidence and got extensive cooperation from the White House (but only answers to written questions from the president).
The report explained at the outset that the investigation examined whether contacts between Russians and the Trump team “involved or resulted in coordination or a conspiracy with the Trump campaign and Russia, including with respect to Russia providing assistance to the campaign in exchange for any sort of favorable treatment in the future. Based on the available information, the investigation did not establish such coordination.”
Case closed? No, for many on the left, it’s as open as ever. For them, it’s as if the Mueller probe never happened.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi still likes to say that “all roads lead to Putin.” The allegation that Trump might be a Russian agent is still heard on cable TV. Hillary Clinton still thinks the Kremlin holds compromising information on Trump. The notorious MSNBC analyst Malcolm Nance is still at it, claiming that the Russians have been surveilling Trump since his marriage to Ivana, a Czech, in 1977, and “they now own him.”
The Mueller report is considered wanting because its findings were “based on the available information.” What about all the unavailable information? The notion that there is some cache of incriminating evidence that Mueller and his team missed is hard to credit. This line of reasoning makes the charge that Trump is an agent of Russia essentially unfalsifiable, a classic characteristic of a conspiracy theory.
The fallback evidence for the Russia obsessives is that Trump is acting like a Russia agent. There’s no doubt that Trump believes that, absent political flak back home, he and Russian strongman Vladimir Putin could cut some unspecified wondrous deal. But he’s thought, at times, he could cut a deal with Kim Jung-un and the Taliban, too.
If Trump has disparaged NATO, he also tends to look askance at all international organizations as rip-offs. He has minimized or denied Russian meddling in the 2016 election, but almost certainly because he considers the focus on Russia a way to undermine the legitimacy of his victory (which, in part, it clearly is).