WAPO: Trump's impotence on the Mueller investigation is driving him batty
Nice trolling, WAPO...
In case it isn’t clear, that’s the president of the United States telling the attorney general to shut down an investigation into the president’s campaign and its cooperation with a hostile foreign power, along with other crimes that have already been uncovered. It’s spectacularly inappropriate, to be sure. But more than anything else, what Trump is demonstrating is his own impotence.
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To a degree, they’re correct in that his tweet isn’t a direct order, no matter how laughable the idea may be that Trump’s word choices are “careful.” On many occasions, Trump has made it clear that he would like to see special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation shut down, and that he wishes Sessions would do it in order to protect him. He has said that if he knew Sessions would recuse himself from the investigation — which Sessions had no choice but to do, as a high-ranking official of the Trump campaign who had his own contacts with the Russians, contacts he was less than forthcoming about — he would never have made him attorney general.
But it’s important to keep in mind how helpless Trump is right now. Sessions isn’t going to fire Mueller, because he has recused himself from the investigation. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversees Mueller, isn’t going to fire him either. While the president could fire Sessions and then replace him with someone who would fire Mueller, that would be difficult to do, as Trump may already understand.
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So all Trump is left with is the ability to rant and rave about how unfair the investigation is to him. That’s not nothing, particularly since he gets a gigantic assist in that effort from Fox News and the rest of the conservative media. His own fate may ultimately be a political question more than a legal one, decided not in a courtroom but in the 2020 election and perhaps in the impeachment process. So public opinion matters a great deal.
But that’s not enough for Trump. He doesn’t just want to convince his own supporters that the Mueller investigation is illegitimate, he wants to use his own power to reach out and crush it. But he can’t. And it’s driving him nuts.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/08/01/trumps-impotence-on-the-mueller-investigation-is-driving-him-batty/
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