By Andrew C. McCarthy | AmericanGreatness.com
How much goalpost moving should be tolerable in Mueller investigation into the Trump-Russia collusion investigation?
Remember, we started with an allegation that the Trump campaign may have been complicit in the Putin regime’s “cyber-espionage”—i.e., the hacking our intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian government operatives carried out against email accounts tied to Democrats. The Mueller investigation took a more serious turn last week, when it was revealed that Trump campaign officials met in June 2016 with a suspected emissary of the Putin regime. Yet, there is currently no basis to believe that meeting had anything to do with hacking. So, while the meeting warrants investigation, the original allegation is no closer to being proved.
Of course, it is certainly possible for a political campaign and a foreign government to engage jointly in unsavory behavior that does not rise to the level of crime. The less objectionable the behavior, however, the further afield we would be from the egregious allegation that prompted the investigation in the first place. Unless one is a rank partisan whose goal is to damage the president (rather than hold him accountable for actual, significant wrongdoing), this should be a matter of concern. Investigations are debilitating. They erode an administration’s ability to govern.
The Mueller investigation is a moving target because of its slippery vocabulary. It has been discussed and analyzed through the prism of “collusion” and “counterintelligence.”
When we think of an “investigation,” the connotation is a criminal proceeding—crimes, penal law, grand juries, subpoenas, warrants, arrests … prosecution. In that thicket, the terms “collusion” and “counterintelligence” are outliers. The former is a vague term that blurs the legally salient lines between mere association and conspiracy—that is, the difference between innocence and guilt. The latter is an unnecessary term: a counterintelligence investigation is an information-gathering exercise designed to divine the intentions of foreign powers to the extent they bear on American interests; a criminal investigation, by contrast, is an evidence-gathering exercise designed to build a prosecutable case that a specified person has committed a suspected penal-law offense.
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