"The sense among ordinary Americans has been that the law does not apply to members of the ruling class in the way it does to everyone else"

 

Here’s a litmus test for Democratic presidential contenders in 2028: Where do they stand on elite impunity and bringing justice to lawbreaking Trump officials and the “Epstein class”? 

Back in 2009, after nearly a decade of Republican misrule, there was a lot of talk about “accountability.” With the economy in shambles and the country embroiled in two quagmires, many were hopeful the Barack Obama administration would reverse George W. Bush policies and hold those responsible for the devastation accountable.

Writing for The Nation, attorney and Watergate-era Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman implored the new president to investigate the rife “constitutional and criminal misbehavior” of his predecessor. “To fully restore the rule of law and prevent any repetition of Bush’s misconduct,” she said, “the abuses of his administration must be directly confronted.”

In The New York Times, prominent human rights attorney Michael Ratner argued, “Unless government officials know that consequences follow from such abuses, they will break the law again.” High-ranking members of the president’s party in Congress similarly called for investigations and “truth commissions” to look into the many alleged constitutional violations and human rights abuses that had been sanctioned by senior Bush officials over the previous eight years. 

Nothing ever came of these demands. Under the leadership of Attorney General Eric Holder, the Obama Department of Justice failed to criminally prosecute any of the high-level government officials involved in authorizing illegal torture and surveillance programs, just as it failed to prosecute a single Wall Street executive after the 2008 financial crisis. 

Despite widespread demands for accountability, the Obama administration ultimately chose a posture of forgiveness and closure. Fast-forward almost a decade, and the folly of Obama’s “look forward” doctrine is unmistakable. By declining to pursue accountability more aggressively, the Obama administration did not close a dark chapter in American history; it simply left the door open for even more egregious abuses in the future. Just as many critics had warned at the time. Few imagined just how egregious those abuses would be, or how faithfully the next Republican president would embody George W. Bush’s worst instincts. 

While the parallels between the Trump and Bush administrations have been evident for some time, President Donald Trump’s decision to launch a war with Iran earlier this month effectively cemented his place in history as the second coming of Bush. In “politics as well as policies,” observes Michael Lind in UnHerd, “the Trump administration increasingly looks like a continuation of the post-2000 Republican norm: pro-war, pro-business.” 

The main difference between the two administrations is not in policy or politics but in style. As Lind notes, Trump’s “bizarre and abrasive style … couldn’t be more different than that of the Bush dynasty.” The president and his top officials are also far more brazen and shameless in their misconduct than the “Bushies” ever were.

Compare Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to the self-styled secretary of war, Pete Hegseth. While Rumsfeld authorized war crimes behind closed doors and then denounced those crimes as “un-American” after they were brought to light, the current defense secretary has openly endorsed war crimes in his public speeches, vowing to show “no quarter” and “no mercy for our enemies.” 

Hegseth hasn’t just advocated war crimes in his blustery speeches. His alleged order to kill all survivors of the shipwrecked boats struck by American drones in the Caribbean last year was a brazen violation of international and U.S. military law. He also bears responsibility for the bombing of a school in Tehran that killed 175 civilians, most of them young girls.

As ProPublica reported, the secretary shut down a program to reduce civilian harm last year as he made “lethality” the military’s top priority, reorganizing national security around the principles of “more aggression” and “less accountability.” The former Fox News host has deplored “stupid rules of engagement” and called for “maximum lethality,” advising U.S. soldiers that their job is to “kill people and break things.” 

Hegseth has shown little concern about exposing himself to legal risk by publicly endorsing and privately ordering war crimes. And why should he? No senior U.S. official has ever been criminally prosecuted for war crimes or human rights abuses, despite the large body of evidence implicating past officials like Rumsfeld. The defense secretary flaunts his lawlessness, confident that he will never face any kind of consequences for his actions. 

This sense of inviolability is evident across the entire Trump administration — from the Pentagon to the Homeland Security Department to the Justice Department — and ultimately reflects the president’s own belief that he is above the law. 

The sheer scale of criminality and corruption on display in the U.S. government today would have been inconceivable in an alternative timeline where powerful government officials had actually faced repercussions for their actions. The Obama administration’s unwillingness to prosecute the architects of the Bush‑era abuses bred a dangerous moral hazard, much like the failure to punish white-collar criminals for their role in the financial crisis. 

Trump’s own evasion of accountability for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election continued this trend of injustice. 

While the Biden administration at least pursued criminal charges — a meaningful departure from the Obama precedent — the case was ultimately doomed due to the apprehensions of main justice and the “maddeningly slow” pace of the investigation. Under Attorney General Merrick Garland, who waited nearly two years to appoint a special counsel to investigate the former president, the DOJ approached the case with little sense of urgency and a “wariness about appearing partisan.” As one commentator later observed, it was clear that Garland had “little desire to investigate and potentially prosecute Trump.” 

America’s accountability crisis has entered its terminal phase, with the rule of law itself on life support.

Since Trump’s reelection, America’s accountability crisis has entered its terminal phase, with the rule of law itself on life support. While the Justice Department has been weaponized against the president’s foes, the administration has further undermined any efforts to hold political and economic elites — the so-called Epstein class — accountable (unless those elites find themselves on the president’s enemies list, of course). 

Trump himself has mounted a one-man assault on the rule of law, employing his pardon power to further entrench elite impunity. Just one year into his second term, he has already issued twice as many individual pardons as Joe Biden did throughout his entire four-year presidency, not including his mass pardon of the Jan. 6 rioters.

The recipients of Trump’s pardons have mostly been elites, whether corrupt politicians or white-collar fraudsters. Altogether, over half of Trump’s second-term pardons have been for white-collar crimes like money laundering, bank fraud and wire fraud. In just one year, these pardons have wiped out as much as $2 billion in fines and restitution for victims.

One thing is clear at this point in Trump’s second term: As long as the president and his circle remain convinced of their own impunity, their abuses will grow more audacious. This makes it all the more urgent for Democrats to show their real commitment to holding officials like Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem accountable this time around.

Last month, author Cory Doctorow proposed that congressional Democrats form a “Nuremberg Caucus” to signal their seriousness about accountability. In Doctorow’s conception, this caucus would maintain a public archive documenting the full body of evidence for any future prosecutions of Trump officials: “Each fresh outrage, each statement, each video-clip — whether of Trump officials or of his shock-troops — could be neatly slotted in, given an exhibit number, and annotated with the criminal and civil violations captured in the evidence,” Doctorow wrote. 

Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, the sense among ordinary Americans has been that the law does not apply to members of the ruling class in the way it does to everyone else. The Jeffrey Epstein revelations have hardened that perception, with Trump standing as the most recognizable face of this untouchable elite. Almost 20 years after Obama’s ascent, the Democratic Party needs a new kind of promise — not hope, but accountability.

-Conor Lynch, Truthdig

Soulless Trump

The most profound realities of human existence are often the ones that can never be measured or quantified. Wisdom. Beauty. Truth. Compassion. Courage. Love. Loneliness. Grief. The struggle to face our own mortality. A life of meaning. But perhaps the greatest conundrum is the concept of a soul. Do we have a soul? Do societies have souls? And, most basically, what is a soul?

Philosophers and theologians, including Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Arthur Schopenhauer, have all grappled with the concept of a soul, with Schopenhauer preferring to define the mystical force within us as will. Sigmund Freud used the Greek word psyche. But most have accepted, whatever the definition, some version of a soul’s existence.

While the concept of the soul is opaque, soullessness is not. Soullessness means something inside of us is dead. Basic human feelings and connections are shut down. Those without souls lack empathy. I saw the soulless in war. Those so calcified inside they kill without any demonstrable feeling or remorse.

The soulless exist in a state of insatiable self-worship. The idol they have erected to themselves must be constantly fed. It demands a never-ending stream of victims. It demands abject obedience and subservience, publicly on display at Trump cabinet meetings.

Psychologists, I expect, would define the soulless as psychopathic. I write this not to get into an esoteric debate about the soul, but to warn what happens when those without souls seize power. I want to write about what is lost and the consequences of that loss. I want to caution you that death, our death — as individuals and as a collective — mean nothing to those without souls.

This makes the soulless very, very dangerous.

Those who lack souls have no concept of their own limitations. They feed off a bottomless and self-delusional optimism, giving to their cruelest deeds and bitterest defeats, the patina of goodness, success and morality. Those without souls — as Paul Woodruff writes in his small masterpiece “Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue” — do not have the capacity for reverence, awe, respect and shame. They believe they are gods.

The soulless cannot respond rationally to reality. They live in self-constructed echo chambers. They hear only their own voice. Civic, familial, legal and religious rituals and ceremonies that transport those with souls into the realm of the sacred, into a space where we acknowledge our shared humanity, forcing us, at least for a moment, to humble ourselves, are meaningless to those without souls. Those without souls cannot see because they cannot feel.

The soulless, enslaved by narcissism, greed, a lust for power and hedonism, cannot make moral choices. Moral choices for them do not exist. Truth and falsehoods are identical. Life is transactional. Is it good for me? Does it make me feel omnipotent? Does it give me pleasure? This stunted existence banishes them from the moral universe.

Human beings, including children, are commodities to the soulless, objects to exploit for pleasure or profit or both. We saw this soullessness displayed in the Epstein Files. And it was not only Epstein. Huge sections of our ruling class including billionaires, Wall Street financiers, university presidents, philanthropists, celebrities, Republicans, Democrats and media personalities, consider us worthless.

Thucydides understood. Reverence is not a religious virtue but a moral virtue. Woodruff went so far as to define it as a political virtue. Reverence for shared ideals, Woodruff writes, is the only thing that can bind us together. It is the only attribute that ensures mutual trust. Reverence allows us to remember what it means to be human. It reminds us that there are forces we cannot control, forces that we will never understand, forces of life that we did not create and must honor and protect — including the natural world — and forces that allow us moments of transcendence, or what in religious terms, we call grace.

“If you desire peace in the world, do not pray that everyone share your beliefs,” Woodruff writes. “Pray instead that all may be reverent.”

Trump’s celebration of himself is made manifest in his stunted vocabulary of superlatives and his rebranding of national monuments. He tears down the East Wing to construct his gaudy and oversized $400 million ballroom. He proposes a 250-foot-tall memorial arch, adorned with gilded statues and eagles, in honor of himself, an arch that will be bigger than the Arch of Triumph erected by North Korean dictator Kim II Sung in Pyongyang. 

He is planning a “National Garden of American Heroes” that will include life-size statues of celebrities, sports figures, political and artistic figures deemed by Trump to be politically correct, along with, of course, himself. His face adorns the sides of federal buildings on huge, well-lit banners. He changed the name of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts to the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. He added his name to the headquarters of the U.S. Institute of Peace. He has announced a new fleet of U.S. naval vessels called Trump-class battleships.

These are monuments not only to Trump, but to a perverted ethic, to the insatiable self-worship that defines the inner void of the soulless. Monuments, houses of worship and national shrines dedicated to justice, self-sacrifice and equality, which demand from us humility and introspection, which require the capacity for reverence, mystify the soulless.

The soulless have no sense of aesthetics. They have no sense of balance, symmetry and proportion. The bigger, the gaudier, the more encrusted in gold leaf, the better. They seek to shut out everything and everyone else, to herd us with offerings to the feet of Moloch.

When the soulless wage war it is part of this perverted drive to build a monument to themselves. When war goes badly, as it is going in Iran, the soulless, unable to read reality, demand greater levels of violence and destruction. The more they fail, the more they are convinced everyone has betrayed them, the more they descend into a tyrannical rage.

Trump, potentially facing a humiliating debacle in Iran, will lash out like a wounded beast. It does not matter how many suffer and die. It does not matter what weapons, including nuclear weapons, must be employed. He must triumph or at least appear to triumph.

“Fathers and teachers, I ponder, ‘What is hell?’” Father Zossima asks in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” “I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” This is the plight of the soulless. They seek, in their misery, to make their hell our own.

The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. "The Emperor Has No Soul" by Mr. Fish.

Trump's Clusterf$!k

 

Iran dismissed a US ceasefire proposal on Wednesday and responded with its own negotiation plan as intermediaries sought to keep diplomatic channels between the warring countries open.

Iranian state TV quoted an anonymous official as saying Tehran had rejected the plan it had received via Pakistan, saying it would “end the war when it decides to do so and when its own conditions are met”, and until then would continue fighting across the region. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, later said the proposals had been “passed on to the country’s senior authorities” but Iran had “no intention of negotiating for now”.

Gulf states have expressed doubt over Donald Trump’s claims that talks are happening. In a notable departure from Qatar’s role as chief mediator in the region, a Qatari government spokesperson, Majed al-Ansari, said on Tuesday that Qatar was not involved in any mediation efforts, before adding: “If they exist.”

What is the toll? The US-Israel war on Iran has killed more than 1,000 people in Lebanon, more than 1,500 in Iran and 16 in Israel, according to each country’s authorities. More than a dozen deaths have been reported in the West Bank and Gulf Arab states. Experts warn there has been a collapse in healthcare access.

-The Guardian

Trump's war on Iran and its impact

 

Most people have little understanding of what is big or small in the federal budget, in large part because the media have made a conscious decision to not inform people. Rather than taking ten seconds to indicate what share of the budget a particular item is, they just write huge numbers in the millions or billions, knowing they are completely meaningless to almost everyone who sees them.

With this in mind, I thought it would be useful to write a piece pointing out that the $200 billion (2.9% of the budget) Trump plans to ask to cover the cost of his war in Iran is, in fact, a big deal. While this is still less than what we spend on huge social programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, it is far larger than most of the items that are subject of major political debates.

Just to mention a few, we can start with the fraud in Minnesota in social programs that the Justice Department has uncovered. To date, this comes to $250 million. Trump has claimed there is $19 billion in fraud, but Trump also has claimed he has arranged for $18 trillion in foreign investment into the country and that he will reduce drug prices by 1500 percent. Numbers don’t have the same meaning for Trump and his team as they do for the rest of us.

While it is likely that the total figure for fraud will go higher, it almost certainly is not the earth-shattering scandal that Team Trump has claimed. After all, a childcare center refusing to let a random clown with a camera crew film the kids are not evidence of fraud. 

Where there is money on the table, whether in the public or private sector, some will be misspent or stolen. Trump has chosen to make a big deal out of the fraud in Minnesota because at least some of it involves Somali immigrants, but that is evidence of Trump’s racism, not a massive fraud problem.

The next item is the $550 million in annual funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Trump apparently felt it was important to save taxpayers this money rather than helping to fund Big Bird and National Public Radio. This spending comes to a bit less than $4 a household.

Then we have the Biden childcare agenda that would have cost $42.4 billion a year. This set of proposals would have made childcare affordable for the vast majority of people in the country. The last item for comparison is the extension of the enhanced Obamacare subsidies that was the basis for the government shutdown in the fall.  This would cost roughly $27 billion for a single year.

If you’re wondering where the bars are for the Minnesota fraud or funding for public broadcasting, I didn’t forget them. The bars are too small to be visible next to Trump’s Iran war budget. The childcare programs and Obamacare subsidies are visible, but an order of magnitude smaller than what Trump is asking for.

The point here is that the war is a really big deal in terms of the budget. The biggest impact is, of course, the lives lost and put in danger by the war. And the economic impact on the United States and world is enormous. 

But this is also a huge budget issue. It is the sort of expenditure that a president would ordinarily feel they have to make a serious case for and not just demand the money from Congress.

But I suppose Trump thinks that since his mandate was almost as large as Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, he has more authority than most presidents. Congress and the country need to bring some reality to this story.

This first ran on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog. Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. 

"When CNN wins in a case like this [against Trump], the rest of us do too"

 

In 2022, Donald Trump sued CNN for defamation. Donald Trump, of course, sues a lot of people and businesses on that basis. This case had a singular focus: he sued CNN over its use of the phrase “the Big Lie” to describe his lies about the 2020 election being stolen from him.

On July 28, 2023, Federal Judge Raag Singhal in the Southern District of Florida dismissed Trump’s lawsuit. In it, Trump claimed that CNN defamed him by “making statements comparing him to Hitler and the Nazi regime.” Trump identified five instances of what he alleged was defamatory conduct:

-Publication of a January 2021 piece by contributor (and friend of Civil Discourse) Ruth Ben-Ghiat that was headlined “Trump’s big lie wouldn’t have worked without his thousands of little lies,” and in which Ruth wrote, “This is Trump’s ‘Big Lie,’ a brazen falsehood with momentous consequences.” She “likened the Plaintiff to an authoritarian dictator.”   

-Publication of a July 2021 piece by Editor-at-Large Chris Cillizza, entitled “Donald Trump just accidentally told the truth about his disinformation strategy.” Cillizza compared Trump to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels: “One can only hope that Trump was unaware that his quote was a near-replication of this infamous line from Nazi Joseph Goebbels: ‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.’”

-Publication of a September 2021 piece by Cillizza entitled, “Donald Trump’s Mental Health becomes an issue again.” Cillizza wrote that Trump “continued to push the Big Lie that the election was somehow stolen despite there being zero actual evidence to back up that belief.” Airing a January 2022 segment of Jake Tapper’s show where Tapper talked about Trump continuing to “push his big lie.”

-Publication of a February 2022 piece by Cillizza entitled, “Here’s the terrible reality: Trump’s election lie is on the march.” Cillizza wrote, “This is the insidiousness of Trump’s big lie. It’s like an earworm – you may hate the song, but you just keep finding yourself humming it in the shower. Trump has created a constant low-level buzz within the American electorate that something is wrong with the way we conduct elections. That he has no proof doesn’t seem to matter; by sheer repetition, his false claims are wheedling their way into the consciousness of the public.”

Trump alleged that the use of the phrase “the Big Lie” was defamatory because it associated Trump with Hitler, and “incited” readers/viewers to have hate, contempt, distrust, ridicule for and “even fear” of Trump. He claimed that CNN damaged both his reputation and his future political career and asked for $475 million in damages (Noteworthy: Lindsey Halligan, who served a brief stint as Trump’s appointed, but never confirmed, U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, was one of the lawyers who filed the lawsuit.)

There is a very low threshold for a civil lawsuit to survive a motion to dismiss. These motions are usually brought after the plaintiff brings the case but before any discovery changes hands. They test the “legal sufficiency” of a plaintiff’s case: assuming all the facts the plaintiff alleges are true, do they have a case under the relevant statutes?

In Florida, to establish defamation, a plaintiff must be able to show that a false, defamatory statement was published with knowledge of or “reckless disregard” for its falsity and the defendant suffered actual damages as a result. The Judge pointed out that the law is well-established that statements of opinion don’t qualify as defamation: “A claim of defamation requires a false statement of fact.” He concluded, “even if the statement is made with bad or evil intent, it is not actionable under the law if it is pure opinion.”

The reason the Judge dismissed the case is this: “The next question is whether the statements were false statements of fact. This is where Trump’s defamation claims fail.” Judge Singhal held that the statements Trump complained about were opinions not statements of fact, which means they can’t support a verdict for defamation. And even, he noted, if CNN had acted with “political enmity” for Trump, that “does not save this case; the Complaint alleges no false statements of fact.”

Trump’s claim that the phrase “the Big Lie” associated him with Hitler and genocide didn’t hold water with the Judge either. He held that the phrase “does not give rise to a plausible inference that Trump advocates the persecution and genocide of Jews or any other group of people. No reasonable viewer could (or should) plausibly make that reference.” Even if they could, “Being ‘Hitler-like’ is not a verifiable statement of fact that would support a defamation claim.”

And so, Judge Singhal dismissed the case with prejudice. Trump was entitled to appeal, and he did. A three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit ruled against Trump in an unpublished opinion and without oral argument in November 2025, affirming the district court’s decision.

Judges publish opinions when they have important precedential value. Historically, the Eleventh Circuit has published fewer than 15% of its decisions every year. Just over 13% of cases in the Circuit go to oral argument, Again, it’s the most significant cases, or those that are complicated and require argument for judges to hear a full explanation of the issues, that make the cut. Trump’s case didn’t clear either bar. The court heard it because it was obligated to do so and then it dismissed it without much ado.

 

The panel judges, Aldaberto Jordan (appointed by Obama), Kevin Newsom (appointed by Trump), and Elizabeth Branch (appointed by Trump) ruled against Trump 3-0 in a per curiam opinion that held “We agree that Trump did not adequately plead falsity. Therefore, we affirm the dismissal of Trump’s claim.” They explained, “To be clear, CNN has never explicitly claimed that Trump’s ‘actions and statements were designed to be, and actually were, variations of those [that] Hitler used to suppress and destroy populations.’ … But, according to Trump, this assertion is implied in CNN’s use of the phrase ‘Big Lie.’” They conclude, “Trump’s argument is unpersuasive.”

Donald Trump doesn’t like to take no for an answer, so he asked for the full Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse the panel’s decision. Each Circuit typically hears only a handful of cases en banc in every term of court. So it was not particularly surprising, but still reassuring, when the Eleventh Circuit turned down Trump’s request today.

Of course, Trump can still petition the Supreme Court to hear his case. He has a similar petition pending before the Supreme Court currently, an attempt to get it to reverse E. Jean Carroll’s victory. He will have a similarly small chance there.

It’s a significant victory when our courts stand up for the First Amendment and free speech. Donald Trump has long been of the view that it’s too difficult for public figures to succeed in defamation cases, and that the law should be changed to make it easier. After Trump won in 2024, Reuters wrote, in a carefully worded story, that he was adopting “a wide-ranging legal strategy in suing media companies over what he describes as false or misleading coverage about him, filing cases under civil anti-fraud laws in addition to defamation lawsuits. 

Some legal experts say the cases appear aimed at punishing outlets for critical coverage, and that the novel legal strategies are an effort to get past steep hurdles in defamation lawsuits, which can be difficult for public figures in the U.S. to win.”

We’ve seen how those cases have turned out, with a number of defendants, like CBS and ABC, settling cases legal experts deemed marginal for astronomical sums. But in cases where litigants have proceeded in court, courts like the Eleventh Circuit have largely backed the First Amendment.

We don’t always have the opportunity to appreciate the many and varied ways federal courts continue to stand for the rule of law. Much of the time, it’s quiet cases like this one that don’t attract a lot of attention. But this decision underscores that Trump is not a monolith; he is not entitled to special treatment in court, and when parties that he sues stand up to him, they can win when they are entitled to. And when CNN wins in a case like this, the rest of us do too.

If you want to truly understand how the First Amendment is shaped—not just in headlines, but in the courts where it actually evolves—this newsletter is for you. Tonight, we take a deep dive into a single, consequential piece of litigation, tracing the district court and court of appeals’ decisions and translating the legal reasoning into clear, real-world meaning so you can see not just that Trump lost, but why it matters, how the arguments developed, and what it signals for the future of free speech. I hope tonight’s column gives you sharper insight into the legal forces quietly defining your rights and that if you think that’s important, you’ll subscribe to Civil Discourse.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

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Robert Mueller

 

Robert Mueller, the former special counsel whose investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election defined much of Donald Trump's first term in office, has died aged 81. The cause of his death was not immediately clear. CBS News, the BBC US partner, confirmed his death. "With deep sadness, we are sharing the news that Bob passed away" on Friday night, his family told the AP in a statement. "His family asks that their privacy be respected."

Mueller previously led the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 2001 to 2013, taking the office just days before the 11 September 2001 terror attacks. He is credited with reshaping it into a modern counterterrorism agency.

Mueller is survived by his wife of nearly 60 years, Ann Cabell Standish, their two daughters, and three grandchildren. Mueller's special counsel inquiry put Donald Trump's 2016 campaign under a microscope, drawing harsh criticism from the US president.

Trump wrote on Truth Social on Saturday: "I'm glad he's dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!"

Mueller's former employers and colleagues praised him as a longtime public servant. Both of the presidents he served under as FBI director - George W Bush and Barack Obama - paid tribute. Bush, who appointed Mueller to lead the FBI, said he was "deeply saddened" by his death.

"In 2001, only one week into the job as the sixth director of the FBI, Bob transitioned the agency mission to protecting the homeland after September 11," he said. "He led the agency effectively, helping prevent another terrorist attack on US soil."

Obama called him "one of the finest directors in the history of the FBI" and commended his "relentless commitment to the rule of law and his unwavering belief in our bedrock values".

Former FBI director James Comey, who succeeded Mueller at the agency and whose abrupt firing by Trump led to the Mueller investigation said: "A great American died today, one I was lucky enough to learn from and stand beside."

A spokesman for Mueller's former law firm, WilmerHale, called him an "extraordinary leader and public servant and a person of the greatest integrity" in a statement.

Mueller was born in 1944. After studying politics at Princeton University, he joined the Marines and deployed to Vietnam in 1968. As a lieutenant, Mueller led a platoon of troops, was wounded twice in battle and was awarded numerous commendations, including the Bronze Star for velour and a Purple Heart. After returning from the war, he went to the University of Virginia, where he studied law and graduated in 1973. In August 2001, Mueller was unanimously confirmed as FBI director by the US Senate and he served at the agency for more than a decade. He retired from the FBI in 2013.

But four years later, Mueller found himself at the center of a political maelstrom that consumed Washington and would later define his legacy. His investigation into Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election – and the potential involvement of Trump and his campaign – were a near daily source of intrigue and speculation for nearly two years, from May 2017 to March 2019.

The court filings of his special counsel's office were meticulously picked apart, with each new revelation a potential bombshell that could, depending on one's perspective, bring down a president or destroy a nation.

Trump condemned Mueller's inquiry as a "witch hunt" and a "hoax", viewing the special counsel as one of his greatest political adversaries. Trump frequently said there had been "no collusion" between his campaign and Russia.

During the investigation, Mueller's team scrutinized Russia's actions as well as several of Trump's top campaign staff and allies. Despite his work frequently making headlines, Mueller himself rarely spoke publicly.

"I did not always agree with everything that Robert Mueller did," Andrew Weissmann, a member of Mueller's team, told the BBC. "I think it's really important for people to know how much integrity and how much thoughtfulness went into his decision-making and how much faith he had - maybe more than I did - in the American people, in citizens and in Congress."

The investigation resulted in multiple indictments and plea deals with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, as well as national security adviser Michael Flynn.

In the end, the 448-page "Mueller report" was thorough but ultimately inconclusive. It found that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in a "sweeping and systemic fashion" but did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated in these activities.

His findings noted that "while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him".

In February 2021, Mueller sat for a rare interview with MSNBC to recount key moments in his decades-long career. Asked why he agreed to oversee something as politically daunting as his Russia investigation, he said: "I found that I've gotten tremendous enjoyment out of public service. And I find it hard to turn down a challenging assignment." 

-BBC

“Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!” -Donald Trump

When are we going to indict a bully who constantly attempted to obstruct the Justice Department's criminal investigation into Russian interference in a presidential election; a bully who, according to the Special Counsel for the United States Department of Justice Robert Mueller, made "public attacks on the investigation, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation..."

When are we going to indict a bully who tried to have his former Attorney General Jeff Sessions remove Mueller from investigating Russia's interference in the 2016 election and cover up his own obstruction of justice; a bully who "dictated a message for [former campaign manager] Corey Lewandowski to deliver to Sessions... that should publicly announce [Sessions'] recusal from the Russia investigation, that the investigation was 'very unfair' to the president, and that the president had done nothing wrong"; a bully who expressed anger at Jeff Sessions' recusal and told advisers that "he should have an Attorney General who would protect him"; a bully who "reacted to news that a Special Counsel [Mueller] had been appointed by telling advisers that it was 'the end of his presidency' and demanded that Sessions resign..."

When are we going to indict a bully who wanted us to believe the Russian investigation was an attack on the legitimacy of his election and just "a witch hunt," despite 34 indictments, seven guilty pleas, and five imprisonments because of Mueller's investigation; a bully who had pressured Australia to help his current Attorney General William Barr investigate the origins of the Mueller probe; a bully who would have been indicted if he weren't a sitting president?[...]. 

When are we going to indict a bully who called on Russia's interference with his election: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press"; a bully who believed Vladimir Putin instead of the 17 U.S. Intelligence Agencies; a bully who, on the world stage in Helsinki, stated fawningly: "I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today"; a bully who confiscated the interpreter's notes at his private meeting with Putin at the Group 20 Summit in Hamburg and would not share them with his senior administration officials; a bully who had met privately with Putin five times and has had 11 private telephone conversations, all of which were never made available for his senior administration officials to review; a bully who shortly after firing James Comey told two Russian officials visiting the White House that he wasn't concerned about election interference because "America does the same thing"; an ignorant bully who also disclosed highly-classified information to these Russian officials, thus, "creating political and security concerns in the U.S., its allies and especially in Israel"?  […]

 from “Why Donald J. Trump Is a Threat to Our Democracy and Unfit to be President of the United States of America” by Glen Brown

August 24, 2019

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glen brown: Why Donald J. Trump Is a Threat to Our Democracy and Unfit to be President of the United States of America by Glen Brown