Nearly a year ago Alan Dershowitz said on CNN:
I don’t like criminal investigations to start hoping that you have the target, maybe we’ll find the crime. Maybe we’ll find the statute. If we can’t find the statute we’ll stretch the statute to fit the person. That sounds like Lavrentiy Beria and Joseph Stalin. ‘Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.’ I don’t want to ever see that come to America.”
Unfortunately — through no fault of Dershowitz’s, who has done yeoman work — it has come to that, and then some. Robert Mueller, unwittingly or not, has revealed himself to be a loyal follower of Comrade Beria, but unlike the monstrous head of Stalin’s secret police, he does his work in the unique, seemingly sanitized American way we call “process crimes.” Mueller’s watchword might be “Show me the man and I’ll make him so addled I can nail him for lying.” Not as pithy as Beria, but sufficient to put people like Scooter Libby in jail.
And now it’s worse than a mere presidential adviser. As everyone knows, Mueller’s current target is the president himself, Donald Trump. Whoever — in the unending series of leaks that have corrupted our legal system beyond recognition — released the 49 questions Mueller putatively intends to ask the president is of tangential importance. What is important is the nature of the questions themselves — their deliberate fishing expedition-style vagueness that no one could possibly answer correctly (what were you thinking when you….?) — and that Mueller has evidently threatened the president with a subpoena if he does not do so.
If only Comrade Beria had had such power. He would never have dared to subpoena Stalin. But never mind. The frightening part is the timing of this escalation of this endless witch hunt. (Yes, Trump is accurate in his characterization.)
At this very moment the United States is about to enter into negotiations with North Korea and to consider whether to continue the Iran Deal. These issues are titanic, affecting literally billions of people across the globe in an effort to avoid nuclear Armageddon.
But Bob Mueller seeks to distract the president of the United States from giving these issues full attention with his endless investigation that was once about collusion with Russia but is now about obstruction of justice in the investigation of a collusion that never happened.
Comrade Beria lives! Show me a Carter Page and I’ll find you a crime!
Of course it may also be that Mueller and his cohorts more desperately seek to distract from accusations of totalitarian behavior on the parts of the FBI and DOJ in the matter of the FISA court and the Steele Dossier. They fear what’s coming in the inspector general’s report and hope to keep the media pointed in their traditional, hobby-horsical anti-Trump direction, so no one will notice.
Again, this is terrible for the entire world. It is also ultimately terrible for the FBI and Mueller because if half the country continues to believe the president is being railroaded and that justice is hugely biased (why wasn’t Hillary investigated on anything remotely near the level of Trump?), the results will be catastrophic. That word sounds hyperbolic but it isn’t. We could se anything from civil war to social atrophy. Who knows if our country will survive it? My suspicion is that Mueller and his allies have little idea of the degree that they are despised outside the Beltway. They have lived their lives too much within it to know. Everything has become about self-justification. The rest of the country barely exists to them.
Meanwhile in the real world…. Iran, North Korea, the trade deficit with China. The president has genuine work to do for all of us. Is all this distraction worth it? Does it have anything faintly to do with justice — or is it merely politics played at its most socially and spiritually despicable level?
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