Special counsel Robert Mueller was reportedly planning to deliver his report in the Russia counterintelligence investigation as soon as next week and then just as quickly, he wasn't. But as pundits pondered the notion that this might really be it, they were befuddled, perplexed, and even anxious at the prospect of the special counsel delivering anything so definitive with so many strands related to Donald Trump's inner circle still in a tangle of mystery. Those strands include everything from the very central indictment of Trump confidant Roger Stone for lying about his interactions with Russians to Don Jr.'s unforgettable Trump Tower confab with a Russian delegation to the more distant indictment of Paul Erickson, a conservative political operative and boyfriend of the also-indicted Russian spy Maria Butina.
This week's rigorous speculation centered both on what findings would be included in Mueller's report and how much of that report would ultimately be relayed to Congress and made public by Trump's newly installed attorney general, William Barr. If I were a betting woman, I'd guess that Mueller's final determination will certainly lay out impeachable offenses, including an airtight case for obstruction of justice, while perhaps leaving some of the criminal conspiracy threads for another day under another prosecutor. But exactly how much of Mueller's report will ultimately reach lawmakers and the public will be a test of the man now charged with wide discretion over disseminating Mueller's revelations.
Whatever Barr may have done or said to obtain the position he now holds doesn't exactly indicate what he's likely to do. As Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert Caro has observed, the notion that absolute power corrupts absolutely is actually an overhyped axiom. "Power doesn't always corrupt," he offered, after years of studying Johnson. "What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals. When you have enough power to do what you always wanted to do, then you see what the guy always wanted to do." President Johnson, of course, managed to enact some of the most pivotal civil rights laws of the 20th century after having a pretty abysmal voting record on civil rights legislation as a U.S. Senator.
What Attorney General Barr really wants to do with the position he auditioned for with Trump remains to be seen. But Democrats are already girding for battle if necessary.
But what the Trump era has revealed so far about at least some high-ranking officials at our top law enforcement agencies is that, put to the test, they proved to be faithful stewards of the public trust, despite their relative obscurity. For instance, while former Justice Department official Sally Yates may have been a well-known figure in Washington circles, she was virtually anonymous to most Americans until, serving as acting Attorney General, she flat out opposed Trump's Muslim ban as unconstitutional and was quickly dismissed. Later, the public would learn that Yates was also an absolute threat to Trump because she knew about Michael Flynn's clandestine contacts with Russian operatives and put White House officials on notice that he could be compromised.
Former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe appears to have acted with similar heroism. McCabe's tour for his recently released book, The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump, has been an eye-opening reminder of just how perplexing and indefensible Trump's many bizarre behaviors are in his capacity as a sitting U.S. president. By now, we have all been so overwhelmed by the cumulative nature of Trump’s improprieties, such as he and his associates making more than 100 contacts with Russian operatives, that it's difficult to remember what it was like in the beginning. But McCabe's fresh look at certain discreet moments early in the Trump administration prove uniquely haunting after Trump's onslaught of peculiarities has dulled our senses over time.
In the book, for instance, McCabe recalls a moment when Trump told his FBI intelligence briefers that North Korea didn't have missiles capable of reaching the U.S. and insisted North Korea's missile test was a "hoax" because Vladimir Putin said it was. When The Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand asked McCabe to reflect on the interaction, he responded:
So I am in the director’s chair as acting director. My senior executive who had accompanied the briefer to that briefing, who sat in the room with the president and others, and heard the comments, comes back to the Hoover Building to tell me how the briefing went. And he sat at the conference table, and he just looked down at the table with his hands out in front of him. I was like, “How did it go?” And he just—he couldn’t find words to characterize it. We just sat back and said, “What do we do with this now?” How do you effectively convey intelligence to the American president who chooses to believe the Russians over his own intelligence services? And then tells them that to their faces?
That little vignette alone serves as a reminder of how much the public still doesn't know about Trump and his many betrayals of the oath he took to "faithfully execute" the powers of the presidency. And certainly many of us have been expectantly awaiting a Mueller report that would finally lay out all those betrayals clearly and concisely for everyone to see. That's why the idea of an incomplete report—of revelations somehow cut short or deprived of their full conclusion—has continued to be so confounding. But the discoveries that become Trump's undoing are unlikely, at this point, to come from a single source such as the Mueller report. Instead, it's the array of investigations and cases spun off from the Mueller probe that will likely haunt Trump and bury him in the end.
Trump has always viewed the Mueller probe as a distinctly political problem—if he just demonized Mueller and created enough public confusion, he believed he could survive the political event of impeachment proceedings. But whatever political impact results from Mueller's probe, the investigation also launched a sea of criminal inquiries that will likely prove far more unpredictable, unmanageable, and lethal to Trump. It is nearly impossible to look at the tentacles of the investigations stretching into places Trump never even imagined in his wildest and worst dreams and not believe that Trump's criminal enterprise is ultimately doomed.
As former Justice Department official Neal Katyal noted this week, "This is the architecture of our Constitution, which is designed to ferret out high-level wrongdoing through a variety of channels for the American public to see."
In effect, the founding fathers have been playing chess all along against a president who, despite having tapped into a virulent strain of white dissatisfaction that buoys him, has been playing a wild but not necessarily winning game of tiddlywinks. Indeed, even under an ignorant battering ram like Trump, the law enforcement institutions have largely held due to heroic stewards like Sally Yates and Andrew McCabe who have put their country first.
So even if Mueller's final report isn't everything people had hoped, the numerous leads left in its wake are almost certain to pull Trump under. Anything short of that would require a complete and utter breakdown of the nation's legal institutions that, to date, have stayed the course due to the many women and men who, perhaps still unknown to us, have stood in the breach at the perilous moment in history.