Robert Mueller wins again
Over the weekend we saw Saturday Night Live assemble one of the most star-studded sketches in the show’s history, lampooning most of the major characters in Donald Trump’s various criminal scandals. Everyone from Ben Stiller’s version of Michael Cohen, to Scarlett Johansson’s version of Ivanka Trump, to Martin Short’s version of Dr. Bornstein, to Kate McKinnon’s version of Rudy Giuliani, to the real Stormy Daniels, was in the mix. Guess who was missing?
Nowhere in this sketch was Special Counsel Robert Mueller. There’s a reason for that. In the real world, Mueller is hammering away as aggressively as ever. He’s moving in for the kill against Roger Stone. He’s using the Paul Manafort trial to subpoena nearly three dozen witnesses, some of whom will panic and flip before the trial even arrives. Mueller is even interviewing Trump’s closest pals, like Tom Barrack, about how the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to rig the election. But for all of this, when it comes to the quasi-reality show known as mainstream political media, Mueller isn’t the focus – and that’s a good thing.
SNL portrayed a pair of FBI agents listening in on Michael Cohen’s phone calls to Donald Trump. This rang true. After all, in the real world, it was the FBI who raided Cohen’s office under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Robert Mueller smartly put the Cohen case in someone else’s hands, so he can continue focusing on Trump-Russia while Donald Trump and his surrogates are stuck focusing on Trump-Cohen, which is not perceived as having anything to do with him.
So how does this add up to Robert Mueller winning? Plenty of observers thought Donald Trump would never sit idly by and allow the Feds to dismantle his close personal ally Michael Cohen, yet that’s precisely what’s happening. Who’s Trump even supposed to fire, the acting U.S. Attorney for SDNY? Trump doesn’t even know that person’s name. The point is that Trump and his goons are chasing their own tails, and largely leaving Mueller alone, even as Mueller continues to slice and dice them.
