As the days since Mueller’s latest indictment have passed, the failure of his investigation to make any claim of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia has begun to sink in, even amongst some of Donald Trump’s most bitter enemies.
That Special Counsel Robert Mueller is becoming rattled because of the growing criticism of his investigation by Republicans in Congress and because of the legal action Paul Manafort has recently brought against him, is strongly suggested by his frankly very strange decision not just to subpoena Steve Bannon but to subpoena Steve Bannon to give evidence before a Grand Jury.
It is difficult to understand the logic of this step if Mueller is carrying out a serious investigation.
As is now becoming the way as the Russiagate scandal unravels, confirmation of the collapse of one of its central pillars – the claim of proof of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign which some have claimed to see in the meeting in Trump Tower in June 2016 between the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Donald Trump Junior – has slipped out in the most covert way possible.
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Early this morning the viscerally anti-Trump news media especially in Europe filled with headlines following the ‘revelation’ that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has used a Grand Jury to issue subpoenas in the Russiagate inquiry.
No European state has anything similar to a Grand Jury – Britain did away with the device long ago – and Europeans in my experience have no understanding of it. That led to a rush of assumptions that Mueller was on the verge of bringing charges against someone.
The story of the meeting between Donald Trump Junior and the lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya on 9th June 2016 has now taken a further twist with the disclosure that the lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin accompanied Veselnitskaya to the meeting.
Some sections of the media are trying to find something sinister in Akhmetshin’s presence at the meeting. He is being called a ‘lobbyist’ working on behalf of Russian interests to oppose the Magnitsky Act and a “former Soviet counter-intelligence official”.
Akhmetshin is a US citizen.
A consistent pattern of the Russiagate affair is that the New York Times or the Washington Post “expose” what is presented as some dark and terrible twist to the story of Donald Trump’s connections to Russia.
The rest of the news media and the Democrats in Congress following up by greeting the “revelation” with a mixture of enthusiasm and feigned horror.
The days and weeks pass, it turns out that nothing of importance has been “exposed” and that the “revelation” is not so dark or terrible after all.
At that point it quietly drops out of the news.
