Does Mueller Have an October Surprise?
The investigation that was ostensibly initiated to ascertain if the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to affect the 2016 election has been ongoing for twenty-seven months. Seventeen months of which have been in the hands of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his Democrat phalanx of investigators and prosecutors spending in excess of $1.4 million a month.) This prolonged inquisition has produced no evidence or indictments supporting the collusion allegation. Yet the investigation marches on with no end in sight.
But is there, in fact, an end game? Is that end game waiting until late October to impact an election in order to switch control of Congress to the Democrats? Is it to make certain Trump cannot run for re-election in 2020? Or is it both?
The upcoming mid-term election is perhaps the most consequential since 1932 when the Democrats won 97 House and 12 Senate seats, setting in motion the big-government agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt as well as nearly 62 years of Democrat dominance of Congress. Were the current iteration of the Democratic Party to regain control of Congress, the impeachment of Donald Trump would be inevitable. Further, there would be a cessation, perhaps permanently, of any effort to undo the damage inflicted on the nation by Barack Obama and todays unabashedly socialist Democratic Party now steeped in cultural Marxism.
In 1992 a special prosecutor also investigating alleged collusion with a foreign nation by another presidential administration took it upon himself to deliberately impact an election in the last week of a campaign thus assuring the election of Bill Clinton.
The so-called scandal was the Iran-Contra Affair and the President originally in the cross-hairs was Ronald Reagan. The charge: the Reagan Administration colluded with Israel and Iran to sell arms to Iran in an effort to obtain the release of American hostages and divert the proceeds to fund an insurgency in communist Nicaragua in an alleged violation of an arcane amendment to a spending bill. The unwritten objective in the investigation was to permanently damage Reagan’s popularity and legacy as well as undermine his potential Republican successor in the election of 1988.
Lawrence Walsh, appointed in 1986 as Independent Counsel, spent six years and $75 Million (adjusted for inflation) leaving no stone unturned in his attempt to ensnare Reagan but he failed to discover any evidence of criminality on the part of the White House. Yet Walsh refused to end the investigation instead he pursued other administration officials during Reagan’s last two years in office and throughout the entire four years of the Bush administration.
Larence Walsh in 1960, as Deputy Attorney General
Given six years and an unlimited budget, Walsh, in the manner of the monomaniacal Inspector Javert in Les Misérables, indicted six former Reagan officials on dubious and evergreen perjury and obstruction charges-- none served any prison time and all were later pardoned. Two others, Oliver North and John Poindexter, were convicted on a number of counts, but both had all convictions overturned on appeal.
There was never anything after six years of painstaking and dogged investigation linking the then Vice-President George H.W. Bush to the Iran-Contra Affair.
In June of 1992, a presidential election year, Walsh indicted Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s former Secretary of Defense, on two counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice. In September, the obstruction of justice count was dismissed for technical and jurisprudence reasons. Yet, on October 30, 1992, four days before the election, Walsh filed a reindictment of Weinberger on one count of making a false statement.
In the reindictment Walsh included, for the first time, notes from Weinberger’s diary that briefly mentioned George Bush’s attendance at a meeting that appeared to contradict something Bush had previously said, but not in a way that was meaningful or had any legal significance. Further, the reindictment was filed after the statute of limitations had expired, as a judge later ruled, and should never have been filed or made public.
In late October 1992 the polls were tightening dramatically pointing to a Bush victory despite the presence of Ross Perot. In a suspicious turn of events, on October 28th, Bill Clinton reversed his campaign tactics and began to aggressively accuse George Bush of being an inveterate liar and maliciously untrustworthy. Not coincidentally, two days later the reindictment of Weinberger and the fleeting mention of Bush in his diary was made public.
That same evening during a live appearance on Larry King’s show Bush was confronted with the Weinberger reindictment reference and his supposed prevarications as King had pre-arranged for George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s communications director, to call into the show. Thus, the story was national front-page news the next day.
As C. Boyden Gray, former White House Counsel to George H.W. Bush wrote (hat tip: American Conservative):
The media and the Clinton’s seized upon the indictment to bludgeon Bush. The Associated Press claimed the indictment “contradicted President Bush’s claim he never knew that arms were being traded for hostages in the Iran-Contra affair or that two Cabinet members were opposed to the deal.” In the New York Times, Anthony Lewis pummeled Bush, asking. “How does George Bush live with the knowledge of his disregard for the truth,” The indictment monopolized the news the weekend before Election day, and Bush’s upward trend in the polls came to an abrupt end.
Lawrence Walsh disingenuously feigned cluelessness in his memoirs attempting to convince others that he thought the Bush reference in Weinberger’s diary would not be newsworthy but that he, as independent counsel, was astonished how his inadvertence changed the course of history by affecting the outcome of an election.
Fast forward to today. Based on his insistence that Trump testify in what is obviously a perjury trap, the innumerable leaks emanating from Mueller’s office, the conviction of Paul Manafort on unrelated charges and the coerced guilty plea by Michael Cohen again on unrelated charges, Robert Mueller appears to have a much greater animus toward Donald Trump than Lawrence Walsh toward Ronald Reagan or George Bush.
While Reagan was disliked by the Washington Establishment (Bush less so), Trump is loathed not only by the Washington Establishment but by almost the entirety of the media/entertainment complex. During the Bush presidency the mainstream media leaned overwhelmingly Democratic, however, 40% of the coverage of George Bush was generally favorable as compared to just 10% with Donald Trump.
Therefore, Mueller has at his disposal a veritable army of like-minded foot soldiers prepared, on a strategically timed basis, to promote leaks, false stories and innuendos as well as the fine print in any indictment or plea bargain.
Two week or less before November 6, 2018, Mueller can do what Walsh did and imbed an implication of wrongdoing by Trump in an indictment or, as has already happened, a plea bargain, such as the Michael Cohen coerced guilty plea vis-a-vis legal campaign contributions. Which was done solely to implicate and embarrass Donald Trump.
Further, Mueller’s henchmen could, in collusion with the many willing accomplices in the Democratic Party and the media, plant a series of dubious leaks and incriminatory insinuations about Trump or his campaign. There would not be enough time for the Trump administration to successfully refute the incessant media drumbeat of scandal as every Republican candidate for Congress would be forced to answer for the charges. Thereby shifting the advantage to their Democrat opponents.
The fact that Mueller did not wrap up the investigation prior to Labor Day of 2018 and displays no intention of doing so in the near future insinuates the very real possibility that he or his dyed-in-the-wool Democratic prosecutors may well make a play in October to rid the nation of Donald Trump and the Republican Congress. There is little doubt that this strategy has been thought of and is being contemplated by the diehard anti-Trump cabal within the Ruling Class.
Therefore, if the Mueller team has not issued a final report on alleged Russian collusion by the middle of September, Donald Trump, the individual Republican candidates as well as the Republican National Committee must go on an unbridled offensive relentlessly alerting the citizenry to the very real possibility of sabotage and collusion by pointing to history and the behavior to date of the Mueller inquisitors.