The Robert Mueller investigation into candidate, then President Trump looks like it is desperately clutching at straws. Essentially, the whole thing appears driven by the need to find some reason why Trump won the election, and Clinton lost it. The most favoured theory assiduously investigated by Mueller was The Russians, those most skuldugerists of skulduggery were to blame.
For our money, we would put nothing past Vlad the Impaler. After all he has killed Russian emigres in the UK using a deadly poison. Yes, there appears to have been an attempt made to discombobulate the 2016 US election. Vlad's "virtual army" apparently attempted to create social unrest, violence, and then break down of law and order in the US. It was an attempt neither to favour Clinton nor Trump--but rather to heighten tension and social unrest. Hence the Russian operatives hyped up "virtual" movements like Black Lives Matter, whilst at the same time promoting those protesting the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials. You can only hype up both sides if your goal is destabilization. That seems the most likely objective, and it had some limited temporary success.
Vlad, of course, is operating a rogue state. It's only the size of Russia that prevents that country being correctly fingered as a vast criminal conspiracy. If Kim Jong Un had acted as Russia has acted (and continues to act) North Korea would have been declared a rogue state. Oh, wait--it has been so declared. Which is to say that Russia is equally corrupt, if not worse in many ways, yet it gets a free pass because it happens to have a seat on the UN Security Council, and it has a nuclear arsenal.
So, nothing would surprise us when it comes to Russian malpractice in US politics.
What is somewhat surprising is the ongoing attempt of the Clinton campaign to link Trump in with Vlad and paint him as being under Vlad's malign influence. This appears to be dirty politics on the part of the Democrats more than anything of substance. Mueller's investigation has attempted assiduously to find some causal connection between Trump and Russia and has failed dismally thus far.
Time to move on to other forms of Trumpian malevolence. The Democrats and the Washington establishment have begun to focus their attention upon a "data mining" company based in the UK, which shopped itself to various campaigns in the United States. It offered the promise of using vast electronic databases to persuade voters to support whomever. Now Mueller wants to know whether Trump was complicit in this nefarious activity. Give us all a break. The Special Investigator is looking more lame and more desperate by the day.
Here is a brief recitation of the "scandal":
If you believe what you read, the Cambridge Analytica story is a blockbuster. It is a tale of intrigue and data breaches and manipulation on a mass scale, the sort of thing ripped from the type of paperback spy thriller you discard without a thought after a plane trip — except real. But if you ask anyone from the world Cambridge Analytica tried to inhabit — the highly competitive world of data consulting — about what Cambridge was offering campaigns, the story that emerges is very different. It is transformed into a story about our increasingly credulous media — apparently incapable of understanding how Facebook, the very entity that drives so much of their traffic, actually works — and how journalists are eager to believe the worst about anything, even humdrum data mining, in the age of Donald Trump.The longer Mueller stays around digging up nothing much, the more the electorate will swing in behind Trump. The whole enterprise must now be teetering on the edge of being labelled as a judicial persecution. Mueller is on a fishing expedition, but he has a useless net, and the fish are swimming right through its holes. The longer he persists the more Trump will be seen as a victim of nefarious prejudice.
“This is the real world, not a spy novel. And in the real world, what Cambridge Analytica was promising simply doesn’t work,” said Republican data consultant Patrick Ruffini. “Their role was downgraded on every major campaign they’ve worked on, including the Trump campaign and the Cruz campaign, when it was clear they couldn’t deliver on what they were selling. These concerns were well known in Republican circles prior to 2016.” . . . .
“Cambridge Analytica is completely inept,” another Republican campaign consultant said. “I refused to hire them because after the sales pitch in the lovely British accent, Nix couldn’t sufficiently answer any questions or satisfactorily back up any of his fanciful claims. I concluded that he was a snake oil salesman incapable of helping anyone win or lose an election.”
The unfortunate situation here is that the latest rube to buy this snake oil appears to be special counsel Robert Mueller, firm in his commitment to investigating whatever’s trending on Twitter. According to ABC News, his probe has already been asking questions and intends to investigate the relationship between Cambridge Analytica, the Republican National Committee, and the Trump campaign. . . .
Tim Miller, a Republican campaign consultant who worked with Jeb Bush in the 2016 cycle and has done work with Facebook, said the firm’s work simply didn’t live up to their promises. “The people I respect in campaign circles didn’t respect Cambridge, didn’t view them as real,” Miller said. “The Cruz campaign had the best data-focused campaign that we’ve seen, and they barely used Cambridge for that. The standard Republican operating procedure turned out to work much better. I’ve said every negative thing in the world about Brad Parscale and Jared Kushner, but they had a very successful and innovative approach to Facebook and they pushed Cambridge aside.” . . .
With the façade of Russia collusion crumbling away, a new conspiracy theory is needed to explain why Hillary Clinton isn’t president. It can’t possibly be that her nomination and her campaign — itself dependent on a massive data-driven social media targeting effort and even an internal algorithm named Ada — was simply wrong about the country, requiring a reorientation and reevaluation of the Democratic Party’s processes and priorities. No, there must be some other explanation. . . . [Ben Domenech, The Federalist.]
The Republicans appear to be playing this about right. They are (we expect) privately hoping for two things: that Mueller continues to investigate anything that moves with respect to Trump, on the one hand, and that he continues to come up with chump change, on the other. It is the best political outcome for Republicans by far. Trump ends us being not the villain, but an innocent victim. Voters tend not to like that kind of thing.
Meanwhile the Democratic establishment is finding that its ammunition, upon which it appears to have staked its political and electoral fortunes, is actually a load of old blanks from Dad's Army days. We can just see the breathless headlines coming up in October, 2025: "Robert Mueller Opens Up New Line of Inquiry Into Trump Malfeasance". "Democrats Applaud the Ongoing Investigation". "Bipartisan Support for Continuing Investigation Remains High." It will still be stumbling and bumbling along well after Trump has left office at the completion of his second term. Mueller by this time will be investigating the pattern of pigeon droppings on the White House driveway, because it has been alleged their patterns represented a secret semaphore between Trump and Russia.
As Yogi Berra is reported to have said, "When you are in a hole, stop digging."
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