The Mueller search for a crime, any crime that would hurt Trump

Victor Davis Hanson:

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Although that Mueller mandate of collusion was never formally defined, much less explained as a criminal offense, the media salivated at the idea that Mueller’s whiz kids nonetheless were going to find it and no doubt thereby usher in impeachment.

Now we have gone from melodrama to bathos.

The supposed high drama of election sabotage has descended into leveraging Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen and then outsourcing him and his baggage to federal prosecutors. The FBI, having seized from his home and office his stealthily recorded and secret tapes of his own alleged lawyer-client conversations with Trump, now hope to find therein something, anything, untoward with which they can accuse and damage the president.

Paul Manafort is to be exposed for what most already knew he was, a high-flying wheeler-dealer and influence-peddler along the lines of his Clintonite doppelganger, Tony Podesta. Mueller’s team at some point presumably will embarrass Trump concerning his Cohen-arranged hush deals about an alleged fling a decade earlier with a playboy bunny.

What was billed as an investigation into high intrigue with the Kremlin, has now devolved into questions surrounding one Stormy Daniels and Paul Manafort’s blue lizard jacket. Quite a come down.
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Mueller originally was appointed due to the contrived leaks from the Steele dossier—a misnamed document that was more likely cobbled together by Glenn Simpson and his wife of Fusion GPS for purposes of destroying Donald Trump’s candidacy and then presidency. Mueller must have analyzed carefully what amounts to this font of his entire investigation. And yet his team has so far shown no interest in whether their own foundational document was used fraudulently to obtain FISA warrants.

Mueller’s lawyers show little concern for whether Christopher Steele himself colluded with Russians to find his dirt, or whether Hillary Clinton’s hiring of Fusion GPS and Steele constituted a sort of Russian collusion in and of itself—or whether Steele was mostly a fraud whose distant espionage past was seen by the creative writers at Fusion GPS as useful window dressing in efforts to peddle and seed the fictitious dossier as the work of serious spooks.

Much less does Mueller worry whether John Brennan, former CIA Director, improperly seeded the dossier to various agencies to ensure it reached the media before the election, or whether FBI Director John Comey lied about its pivotal importance in obtaining a FISA warrant, or why Bruce Ohr, the fourth highest official in the Justice Department, before and after the election, was meeting with a fired Christopher Steele—supposed severed from FBI support—to pass along his further gossip and dirt to the FBI, fueled by the suppressed fact that Ohr’s wife was working with Steele and was a Fusion GPS operative intent on seeing her “research” fertilized in the right government agencies to delegitimize Trump.
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It appears that Mueller has pinned all his hopes on extorting testimony from people like Manafort, Flynn, and Papadopoulos.  He has thrown in a few indictments of Russians who are unlikely to ever be tried.  His whold gambit is looking like a scam at this point.