Conrad Black: "Mueller’s Got Nothing"

His probe has yet to uncover evidence of actual criminal acts by the president.

The revelations of the last few days are, though disguised, the crash in ignominy of the Robert Mueller putsch. But they are far from the end of the story. While the sire of the Mueller hit-squad assault, former FBI director James Comey, declared 245 times at last Friday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing that he did not recall events that occurred in the last several years, the president’s official enemies confessed that the best they could do to show collusion between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign was that lawyer Michael Cohen, who had almost nothing to do with the campaign, had received a message in 2015 from someone promising “synergy” between Russia and a Trump presidency. Cohen did not respond to the message. There is no evidence of such collusion, as chief FBI bloodhound Peter Strzok acknowledged to his intimate colleague Lisa Page in 2016, and collusion is not a statutory offense anyway, unless it is for an illegal purpose. Despite 29 months of mighty investigative effort, not a shred of evidence of such wrongful collusion has been adduced.

Collusion to rig the presidential election was cited by Hillary Clinton, along with being “shivved three times by Jim Comey,” as the reasons for her election loss, in her post-electoral memoir, What Happened. The first didn’t occur, and of the three administrations of the shiv, two were dubious exonerations about which the former FBI director now, under oath, has suffered a merciless attack of amnesia. An optimist could at least celebrate the end of this malignant idiocy of impeaching Trump for collusion with Russia, but there is something about the Trump phenomenon that is only now becoming clear: His support is irreducible and his enemies are inexhaustible, so, in the worst imaginable application of the tired phrase, the show must go on. His enemies hate him so fanatically, they cannot accept the absence of evidence against him.

Carl Bernstein, who predicted almost two years ago that the Steele dossier would bring Trump down, and announced almost a year ago that the president qualified under the 25th Amendment as mentally incompetent to serve, was nodded to approvingly by CNN’s always mechanically anti-Trump Brian Stelter when Bernstein asseverated that Mueller was causing the world to “tremble” by the gravity of his revelations. Poor Anderson Cooper, television’s saddest person, thought the “synergy” message, which Cohen did not respond to, “could stick.” Stick to what? He and his fellow commentators, adhering to CNN’s rigorous policy of 100 percent partisan hatred of the president, thought the whole business seemed “collusiony.” I submit that this sort of mindless, biased drivel is an assault on reasonable standards of public information and thus in some measure constitutes a form of animosity to the people. This lends a color of right to Trump’s references to his more perfervid media critics as “enemies of the people.”