Immediately following Attorney General William Barr’s press conference laying out the conclusions of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, liberals needed a new thing to complain about. If there was no collusion, then what would it be?
They found that reason: Mueller wasn’t given enough slack to fully investigate!
New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait complained Thursday on Twitter, in earnest, that Barr’s press conference was “wildly improper” and that the only reason nothing damaging will come out of Mueller’s report is because there wasn’t even more spying on the president and his associates.
“If there’s no counterintelligence aspect to Mueller’s report, and it’s tightly limited to crimes, then there’s just not that much it can deliver,” said Chait.
On MSNBC, former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal (a weighty enough title to get you booked on liberal cable TV) said that “Mueller’s lane was limited to Russia and obstruction relating to Russia.”
There’s that “limited” word again, which is apparently defined now as indefinite time, money and power to investigate every aspect of Trump’s life, and the lives of his associates, even predating the 2016 campaign.
Here’s the instruction that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversaw the special counsel, gave to Mueller when the investigation started (emphasis mine): “The order authorized you to conduct… any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump and any matters that arose or may arise directly from that investigation.”
That last part is exactly how we ended up with charges related to bank fraud and tax evasion, dating back years before the 2016 campaign.
There was effectively no limit to Mueller’s investigation. It lasted two years, soaked up, by one conservative estimate, more than $25 million, and left a trail of wreckage that, once again, had nothing to do with Trump or his 2016 campaign.
Trump’s opponents are allowed to be mad at the outcome of this waste of time and money. But they’re not allowed to rewrite history.
