Muddying The Waters

The Trump Administration’s attempts to discredit the investigation into Russian meddling adds to the suspicion that the President knows more than he has admitted to.

- Paul Thomas

It takes doggedness to keep questioning behaviour when the perpetrators insist there’s nothing questionable about it and proceed to do it again even more brazenly.

What tends to happen is that the question gets asked less frequently, even as it becomes more urgent. Which is the case with the following: if “Russiagate”, for want of a better shorthand term, is what President Donald Trump and his acolytes claim – fake news, a hoax, a witch-hunt, a conspiracy orchestrated by the Democratic Party and implemented by the deep state to thwart the will of the people – why go to such lengths to discredit and curtail the investigation? Why not let it run its course, secure in the knowledge nothing will come of it, and reap the political benefit when it turns out to have been a frame-up all along?

Imagine: after a relentless investigation cum-fishing expedition spanning almost two years, special counsel Robert Mueller drops his findings but they land not with a bang but a whimper. Bear in mind that expectations have risen with each passing month and we’re way past the point at which technicalities and obscure infractions, even if they rise to the level of criminality, will amount to a satisfying denouement. Trump has got away with so much that used to be unthinkable and the speculation of grievous misconduct, up to and including treason, has become so feverish that anything short of a bombshell will be deemed a let-down, if not a nothing-burger. Then the backlash will begin: this is what we tore ourselves apart over?

The reckoning would be brutal. A Trump speechwriter might deploy the words of Arthur “Bomber” Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command, who quoted the Old Testament Book of Hosea when promising that Germany would pay a terrible price for its 1940-41 bombing offensive against population centres: “They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”