Every turn of every investigation into Russia and the 2016 election has hit a dead end, and likewise, no one should expect a thrill ride when special counsel Robert Mueller finally turns in his report.

A new Time article by former prosecutor Renato Mariotti readies liberals and other critics of President Trump for that ultimately disappointing outcome to the yearslong special counsel investigation. True, that’s the likely end facing Trump’s opponents, but Mariotti is 100 percent wrong in arguing that it will be because of a “successful disinformation crusade” by Trump.

Mariotti wrote that Trump “worked to raise a nearly impossible and definitely illogical bar for Mueller to clear: proving ‘collusion’ and charging a grand criminal conspiracy involving the Trump campaign and the Russian government.”

No, no, no, no, no. Any raising of expectations for the special counsel was done exclusively by the Democratic Party and the national news media, both of which in 2017 demanded the creation of a special counsel with limitless legal authority to find the golden egg, proof that Trump’s campaign had worked in coordination with Russia to tip the election in his favor.

Yes, that demand came after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was probing former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s clandestine conversations with Russian officials. But it’s well worth a reminder that firing Comey was also something Democrats and liberals in the media wanted.

The hardest evidence that anything happened with Russia in the 2016 election are indictments of some Russians for “fraud and deceit.” The product of their mass conspiracy was a bunch of tweets and Facebook posts spread on the Internet with the intention of getting people angry about politics. In essence, Russians looked at what was already on America’s Facebook and Twitter and repeated it.

What an ingenious plan to snatch the election from Hillary Clinton!

The grand social media scheme wasn’t a heist. It was a mirror.

After Facebook took measures in 2017 to fight any “fake” political posts on the platform, one liberal organizer told the Washington Post: “Russians might have been there, but Russians are not creating and invoking these feelings. These are real feelings, not Internet-created feelings.”

The FBI, the House, the Senate, and the entire national news media have been investigating Russia and any ties to Trump since 2016. Here are some of their findings:



Michael Flynn contacted Russian officials during the presidential transition and asked that they not escalate tensions with the U.S. over sanctions enacted by the Obama administration. There was no crime here until Flynn lied to the FBI about it.

Well, into the 2016 election, it appears Trump was pursuing a business deal in Russia to construct a Trump Tower Moscow, a project he has reportedly fantasized about since the 1980s. There is no crime here.

Paul Manafort, who for a period served as one of Trump’s campaign managers, reportedly showed internal polling campaign data to a Russian, a crucial bit of information, no doubt, in Russia’s tweet strategy. There is no crime here.

The purpose of the Time article is to sink expectations lower than they already were, as every “revelation” of the never-ending Russia nightmare has failed to lead us to the holy grail.

There’s a lot of wreckage as a result of Mueller’s rampage into the past professional lives of Trump associates. That alone kneecapped Trump’s presidency, compromising any goodwill he might have had with congressional Democrats and depressing his political capital with the public.

Democrats almost certainly won’t get the final kill shot from Mueller’s report. But that’s not Trump’s fault. It’s theirs.