With Michael Cohen headed to jail for the next several years, Republicans have begun offering their defenses on behalf of Cohen’s unindicted co-conspirator: “Individual-1,” otherwise known as President Donald Trump. “I don’t agree with the assumption [that Trump] has been accused of a crime, I don’t see that here,” Republican Congressman Tom Reed said Tuesday morning on CNN. Cohen had confessed to breaking campaign-finance laws when he paid off porn star Stormy Daniels, allegedly at Trump’s direction. But Reed, distilling the Republican counter-argument, said he disagreed that the president had been implicated. Trump, he allowed, could have directed the payments, but even if he had, he hadn’t necessarily done anything untoward. “Obviously, there’s activity here, but I don’t think it’s criminal,” Reed concluded. “Whether or not it was wise, I’ll defer to the American people on that.”

Variations on Reed’s argument appear to be the consensus in “lock her up” MAGA-land, irony be damned. As multiple conservative activists patiently explained to me, Trump has not formally been accused of any crimes by special counsel Robert Mueller or federal prosecutors. What’s more, they said, the charges against Cohen reflect precisely the sort of anodyne misbehavior that Senator Orrin Hatch had in mind when he said that “you can make anything a crime under the current laws.”

“Look, [Cohen] pled guilty to three things,” said Tom Fitton, the president of the consistently pro-Trump, anti-Mueller group Judicial Watch. “The campaign-finance violation, which is a dubious reading of the law and one that is extremely controversial; tax fraud, which you don’t need a special counsel for; and lying on his home-equity loan applications in a way that didn’t cause anyone to lose money, meaning the financial institution. Generally speaking, it’s weak tea. But anything to make President Trump look bad.”

In fact, far from an additional nail in the president’s coffin, Fitton and others see Cohen’s plea as confirmation of their own counter-narrative. “[The Cohen filing] confirms what we’ve been saying from the beginning: that Mueller’s . . . was not a disinterested investigation,” Fitton told me. “It was out to get Donald Trump. It was generated as a result of misconduct by the Justice Department and the F.B.I. working with Hillary Clinton’s Fusion GPS. These recent filings raise questions about the motivations of Mueller, [who is] throwing things onto the record designed to make the president look bad as opposed to advance the rule of law and the public interest.”

Fitton isn’t the only conservative activist convinced that Mueller’s aggressive treatment of Cohen and other Trump associates has undermined his legitimacy. Will Chamberlain, an attorney and pro-Trump commentator, told me that he believes Trump is making a “calculated decision” to let Mueller beat up on his subordinates in order to expose the special counsel’s bias. At the same time, he said, Trump shouldn’t complain if he’s “willing to let some of [his] loyal supporters be indicted on process crimes.” The end result, he predicted, is that “people are going to be predisposed to not take the Mueller report seriously. Unless it reveals some brand-new information that we haven’t seen yet.” So far, the president’s supporters are reassured. “The whole purpose of the Mueller probe was to investigate whether there was specific Russian interference coordinated by the campaign, and that we have not seen, number one,” said a Republican attorney who worked on Bill Clinton’s impeachment. “Number two, if there is nothing that specifically indicts the president, then it becomes very much a political process undertaken by Congress.”