How Robert Mueller outsmarted Vladimir Putin
Outsmarting Donald Trump is about as difficult as outsmarting a petunia. If Trump had any idea what he was doing, he wouldn’t be in a situation where his approval rating is in the toilet, his National Security Adviser has cut a plea deal against him, and his campaign chairman is about to go on trial. So of course it’s no surprise that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is running circles around the comparatively hapless Trump. What’s impressive is that Mueller just outsmarted Trump’s puppet master Vladimir Putin.
We may never know precisely what Putin was planning to do with the summit that he arranged with Trump for next week in Helsinki. But one way or the other, it’s not difficult to parse that Putin was looking to find some way to help save Trump’s presidency from the Trump-Russia scandal that’s rapidly consuming it. But now the summit has become something very different altogether.
Mueller has indicted a dozen Russian government hackers for allegedly stealing Democratic Party secrets during the election and passing them along to Roger Stone, WikiLeaks, and a Republican Congressman. The clear implication is that Stone passed those secrets along to the Donald Trump campaign, meaning that the Trump campaign was in fact cheating by relying on secrets stolen from the opposing campaign. This is now officially Watergate, but with treason. Now the Trump-Putin summit takes on an entirely different context.
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will still sit down in private and plot whatever it is that Putin is trying to accomplish at this point. But the media coverage of the summit will be all about the fact that Russia rigged the election for Trump, and so that’s how most of the public will perceive it as well. In fact, even though it was scheduled before the indictments were handed down, the summit will largely be seen as an underhanded attempt by Trump and Putin to fend off the worsening scandal. This was not at all what Putin was hoping for. It is, however, precisely what Mueller was aiming for.
