It has never been reasonable to imagine that the Mueller investigation was aimed at bringing down Trump. Mueller was appointed to publicly clear the DoJ of the appearance of impropriety created by Trump’s actions regarding the Flynn investigation. The question of Trump having a corrupt motive for first trying to get Comey to lay off Flynn, then firing Comey when he wouldn’t, was raised by these actions of Trump. Then Trump made this question very public by going on TV with Lester Holt and announcing that the reasonable public justification to fire Comey that the DoJ had crafted for him, a justification in line with DoJ rules, was not his actual motive.
There was never any compelling reason to imagine that Trump had any corrupt motive in pressuring,and then firing, Comey, so much as a demented motive. He was very clearly told by his DoJ legal advisers to not pressure Comey, because that violated DoJ rules, which maybe a president gets to ignore, because he isn’t part of the DoJ, but which Comey doesn’t get to ignore because he is DoJ. Then he was clearly told that he could only fire Comey for the officially stated reason that they crafted for him in the letters that Sessions and Rosenstein signed supporting the firing. He ignored or just forgot everything he was told, though, and blabbed to Holt that he fired Comey for not laying off Flynn. To remove the implication that admission created that Sessions and Rosenstein and the senior DoJ people who wrote their letters for them did so to help Trump obstruct justice, there had to be an independent investigation into the Trump election campaign to demonstrate that there was no possible corrupt motive hidden anywhere.
Of course there was no such corrupt motive, at least not a corrupt motive that a non-demented person could entertain. Firing Comey was never going to have any other effect than to get Flynn and the Trump campaign investigated much more closely than it would have had Trump laid off any effort to get Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Trump was clearly told this, but went ahead anyway, whether out of a demented conviction that he could bull his way through anything, because dammit, he’s the president, or because he simply couldn’t understand or remember the competent legal advice to not pressure and then fire Comey.
There was never going to be an obstruction of justice case against Trump for pressuring and then firing Comey, because that action obviously served no rational corrupt purpose. The case that could be made, that has been made, is that Sessions and Rosenstein et al were not party to any such corrupt conspiracy of Trump’s.
Perhaps Sessions, Rosenstein, and Mueller at the outset shared McCabe’s impression at the time that Trump did what he did because he was demented, and they expected the people who have the duty to remove a president whose dementia renders him unable to execute the powers and duties of his office to start up the 25th Amendment process. Perhaps they thought that the absence of any rational corrupt motive for Trump’s actions that the Mueller investigation would uncover would goad these people to do their duty. Stop looking for Mueller to have done the job these people should have done all along. And since these people include the House, now controlled by Ds, stop letting the D House majority off the hook for dealing with a demented president by continuing to look to the Mueller report to do what they need to be doing.
