Michael Wolff is probably lying again to sell advance copies of his new book, but at least his newest lies don’t require the complete suspension of readers’ disbelief.
The Guardian on Tuesday reported that Wolff’s upcoming book “Siege” — a sequel to his sensational Fire and Fury — says that special counsel Robert Mueller drafted up documents that would have indicted Trump for three counts of obstruction of justice.
A spokesperson for Mueller’s office has denied that the documents “exist,” without ever addressing whether maybe they ever had existed in the past, say, before an incinerator received their paper shredder remnants.
If Wolff’s claim were to prove anything, it’s that Trump was right. The special counsel wasn’t an innocent fact-finding mission set up to restore the integrity of our justice system. It was a politically motivated persecution.
The document drafts, according to the Guardian’s reporting of Wolff’s book, “spelled out what Mueller considered to be the overriding theme of Trump’s presidency: the ‘extraordinary lengths’ taken ‘to protect himself from legal scrutiny and accountability, and to undermine the official panels investigating his actions.’”
Sure, Mueller and his team maybe thought every single one of those things but, as concluded in the actual product from the two-year investigation, the facts time and time again served as an impenetrable wall shielding Trump from any charges. The president’s oversight of the Justice Department gives him the authority to hire and fire whomever he pleases. And, not that it makes any difference to House Democrats, Mueller found no initial crime! The whole purpose of setting up a special counsel was to determine whether the Trump 2016 campaign coordinated with Russia to influence the election. The report explicitly said it didn’t find any evidence that it had. So, what was Trump obstructing if there was nothing that needed justice?
Much like Wolff did in his first book, his fun little narrative is meant to do nothing but run out of steam before converging neatly with the real world.
“Ultimately,” says the Guardian’s story, Mueller “concluded he could not move to prosecute a sitting president.”
Talk about a cliffhanger!
Based on his track record, there’s no reason to believe Wolff’s tale isn’t entirely made up. He did it with one brilliant piece of fiction before. But if this particular bit about the special counsel is true, Mueller has to be hoping no one can prove it.
