Trump Celebrates Mueller’s Death. Of Course He Does.

The former FBI Director and Trump-Russia Special Counsel has died at 81.

Robert Mueller, the former FBI Director and Special Counsel who investigated Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, died yesterday at age 81 after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. Within hours, the President of the United States posted this on Truth Social:

“Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”

A man who dodged the Vietnam draft with bone spurs is celebrating the death of a man who volunteered to lead a rifle platoon in combat, took a bullet, and earned the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. That alone tells you what kind of president we have. But it tells you so much more than that.

Trump’s rage at Mueller — even in death — is the rage of a man who has never accepted his own culpability. Not in the Russia conspiracy. Not in the obstruction. Not in any of the cascading criminality that has defined his public life. And it is precisely that refusal — that pathological inability to accept accountability — that has delivered us the presidency we have today.

A lawless presidency where corruption isn’t a scandal but a business model. Where wars are mercenary operations. Where you cannot trust a single word from the White House. Where citizens exercising their constitutional rights are attacked in the streets. Where the Department of Justice has been turned into a weapon against the president’s enemies and a shield for his friends.

Mueller saw this coming. His investigation produced 34 indictments. Twelve GRU military intelligence officers. Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort — who was sharing internal polling data with Russian intelligence while running Trump’s campaign. His deputy Rick Gates. His advisor Roger Stone, who coordinated with WikiLeaks. His National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. The investigation documented the DNC hack, the WikiLeaks publication operation, the Russian troll farm, and ten instances of obstruction of justice by the president himself.

And yet Mueller was set up to fail from the beginning — in two critical ways.

The first was his mandate. Rod Rosenstein’s appointment order confined the Special Counsel’s investigation to “links between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” Russia. Only Russia. But what we know now — from the Epstein files, from congressional investigations, from reporting by journalists who refused to let the story die — is that the operation to install Trump was never just Russia. It was a multiplex of enemies of democracy: Russia, yes, but also Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and a network of oligarchs, operatives, and intelligence assets that crossed every border. Mueller’s team investigated some of these threads. They found them. And they were told those threads were outside their scope. The most comprehensive criminal investigation of a sitting president in American history was constrained to one slice of a much larger conspiracy.

The second was William Barr.

Barr may be the most underappreciated villain in this entire story. Before Mueller’s 448-page report ever saw daylight, Barr released a four-page “summary” that distorted its findings so thoroughly that Mueller himself took the extraordinary step of writing to Barr to say it “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of his work. By the time the actual report was released — weeks later, heavily redacted — the narrative was already set. “No collusion, no obstruction.” A lie, but an effective one.

And this was not Barr’s first cover-up. It wasn’t even his second.

In 1992, as Attorney General under George H.W. Bush, Barr orchestrated the pardons of six Iran-Contra officials — burying evidence of presidential involvement in one of the worst constitutional scandals in American history. The New York Times’ William Safire gave him the name that stuck: “Coverup-General Barr.”

Then came Epstein. When Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in 2019, Barr made a show of recusing himself from the review of the 2008 sweetheart deal — the deal his own Justice Department had brokered. Epstein died in federal custody on Barr’s watch. The cameras malfunctioned. The guards were asleep. No one was held accountable.

Iran-Contra. Epstein. Mueller. Three of the most consequential scandals in modern American history. One man at the center of burying all three.

Key witnesses like Felix Sater — the Russian-born, mob-connected businessman who brokered the Trump Tower Moscow deal with the Kremlin and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen — was highly compromised by Russia and the US. Mueller only discovered his key witness was also deeply tied to the FSB, it turned a key investigative node into a conflicted swamp. To Mueller’s credit he sidestepped what could’ve resulted in an embarrassing trap

Mueller didn’t fail. He was failed — by a system that confined him to investigating one tentacle of a multi-headed conspiracy, and by a fixer attorney general who made sure even that narrowed investigation never reached the public intact.

Now Mueller is gone. He can’t testify. He can’t clarify. He can’t defend his work. And the man he investigated is dancing on his grave from the Oval Office — proving, one more time, that the investigation was never a witch hunt. It was unfinished business.

The wheels of justice turn slowly, Mueller once believed, but grind exceedingly fine. The grinding isn’t over.

Read my full analysis from when Mueller submitted his report: