When Robert Mueller took the gig with the Department of Justice to lead the silent coup against the Trump administration, things looked great. One hundred percent, or close to it, of the media was reporting different levels and incidents of “Russian collusion.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a close Trump confidant, had recused himself. The deputy AG, Rod Rosenstein, quickly buckled under media pressure to name a Special Counsel where no crime had been found and only an FBI counterintelligence investigation was taking place. No criminal investigation of the president, said the FBI director. Mueller had the chance to overturn an epic election mistake by uninformed American deplorables and be the darling of the swamp for a generation. How could he say no?

That was then, this is now.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men have not found Russian collusion with Trump. Even Mueller likely knows it, because he is now investigating everything but Russian collusion. You do not expand an investigation’s scope because you have found a deep vein of criminality tied to prima facie Russian collusion -- if you did, you would be going deep into that vein.

Every week, more evidence comes out that the Democratic Party computers were not hacked -- something vital to the concept of the Russians stealing those emails and giving to them to WikiLeaks. The fundamental requirement that the Russians stole Democratic emails might have been overturned if the FBI looked at the servers -- which they chose not to do. Who among us would be able to tell the FBI that we do not choose to give them our servers for an investigation? Which is what the DNC did, asserting that their own forensic group would make a finding.

Then the mysterious Seth Rich events play out. Seldom has the character so close to the event in question been so protected by family, media, police, and the FBI from showing possible ties to the critical initiating event.

Who was Seth Rich? He was the young man who appears to have downloaded the Democratic Party emails and given them to WikiLeaks. When he was murdered, the police avoided any deep, comprehensive investigation.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Seymour Hersh, commented in a recorded interview about clear evidence he saw from the FBI that Seth Rich was indeed the person who downloaded the emails -- not the Russkies.

Rich’s family threatened to sue anyone who even hints that they are going to get to the bottom of what happened.

Sean Hannity and Fox News get shut down through threats of lawsuits and the organized Left’s movement to intimidate Hannity's sponsors. Hannity has gone silent on any comments regarding Seth Rich. Why?

Then, on a quiet morning, a progressive magazine publishes a story that appears to tie it all together. The Nation delivers a very comprehensive, well-researched, and certainly nonpartisan study noting that top computer security people from previous administrations, all beyond reproach, used computer forensics to determine that the Democratic Party computers were not hacked -- someone downloaded the emails to a thumb drive. Someone inside -- not likely a Russian.

They discover email metadata regarding the quantity and speed of the sinister download. Conclusion: no server in the country and certainly none outside the country could have downloaded so much information so fast. It is a physical impossibility. However, any thumb drive would meet this speed/data download requirement. And thumb drives require fingers -- and thus an insider did it.

These forensic experts have shown, using physics, not opinions, that the Democratic Party was not hacked; that someone inside downloaded the files and thus there was no Russian interference in this matter.

Scores of threads have been appearing that converge the stories that the Democratic Party emails were downloaded by an insider (not Russians) and that Seth Rich was probably the insider. These threads are getting thicker by the day.

So back to our friend Bob Mueller.

The “Russians stole the emails” narrative is coming apart, removing any underlying support for collusion. Most dangerously, the foundation of the story -- a hack of the Democratic party computers -- is not going to hold up, because, as The Nation notes, physics do not lie. Oops, no initiating event.

What’s an inside-the-Beltway swamp creature to do in this situation?

Trump isn’t likely to fire him -- which would have been a very good way out -- a martyr for truth when there was no crime. The promise of becoming the modern-day Archibald Cox, a dazzling ornament at any cocktail party and a prize on any law firm masthead, is sliding out of reach.

The swamp creatures have faced this problem before and they found a clever solution. They went after Dick Cheney but, nothing there. So they created a crime with his chief of staff -- Scooter Libby. They got Scooter on a made-up crime when they knew who actually did the deed -- and never went there. “There” was the Colin Powell pal Richard Armitage, another swamp dweller.

So where to look for a crime? Where to find a technical violation? Where to find that piece of paperwork that was not properly filed?

Let’s dig into the 30-year portfolio of the man who represented the worst of the worst -- Ferdinand Marcos, Jonas Savimbi, and Viktor Yanukovych, the deposed president of Ukraine.

That’s Paul Manafort, but unfortunately for Mueller, he is cooperating openly with the congressional Russia investigation.

The swamp is not going to let witness cooperation become an obstacle.

Raid his house, knock on his bedroom door on a sleepy morning, scare the heck out of him and his family, and show him the swamp means business. The drama alone makes the story interesting.

So if Mueller cannot get Trump, and if there was probably never a crime because some internal Democratic operative -- likely Seth Rich -- just downloaded the files, well, there’s the Scooter Libby fallback.

If Mueller had anything, his team would perform the honorable leftist action and properly leak it to the Washington Post and the New York Times. Instead, he raids the home of a cooperating witness with the full force and intimidation value of the United States Government.

This is what Mueller does when he has nothing better to leak and nowhere else to go.