Perspective: JurisprudenceWhat the Mueller Investigation Was Always About
In the partisan warfare that dominated last Wednesday’s hearings, we’ve forgotten the point: Our elections are under threat, and the president doesn’t much care. Robert Mueller was originally charged with investigating Russian efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election and that only secondarily was he tasked with figuring out whether the president had obstructed justice by impeding that investigation. The whole point of the Mueller investigation and report is that Russia hacked an election, that it is right now hacking the next election, and that this is a threat to national security and the long-standing American experiment in representative democracy.
In the end, one of the major questions special counsel Robert Mueller faced when he testified before house committees on Wednesday was whether his investigation should have existed at all. Over and over, as the day chugged on, Mueller was asked why he had investigated the president in the first place if the outcome—that Mueller’s team would not indict a sitting president—was a foregone conclusion.
Dahlia Lithwick writes in Slate that here is the problem with that narrative: It obscures the reality that Robert Mueller was originally charged with investigating Russian efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election and that only secondarily was he tasked with figuring out whether the president had obstructed justice by impeding that investigation. The whole point of this sad affair—lost entirely on a Law & Order nation intent on seeing the Mueller investigation end with Trump in handcuffs on the White House lawn—was that Russia hacked an election, that it is right now hacking the next election, and that this is a threat to national security and the long-standing American experiment in representative democracy. On this one point, Mueller was emphatic: “They’re doing it as we sit here, and they expect to do it in the next campaign,” Mueller told the House Intelligence Committee. Indeed that, and not the commission of specified crimes, was always meant to be the special counsel’s yardstick.
