Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

You’d think that Robert Mueller might know what any licensed attorney-at-law in the land tells a client in a tight spot with a lame alibi: better keep you mouth shut. Instead, Mr. Mueller crept Sphinx-like out of the Deep State woodwork on little cat’s paws and in a brief nine minutes blabbed out a set of whopperish riddles much more likely to get himself in trouble than the target of his hinky inquisition.

The key whopper was that he could not make “a determination” on an obstruction-of-justice charge against Mr. Trump because guidance policy from the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel had said some years ago that a sitting president can’t be indicted. That is not what he told his boss, Mr. Barr, the Attorney General (and a roomful of the AG’s staffers who heard it), in person when he delivered his final report a few weeks ago.

Upon receipt of that report, Mr. Barr asked the Special Counsel three times whether his inability to conclude anything on an obstruction charge was due to the OLC guidance, and three times Mr. Mueller answered “no.” Mr. Barr relayed this on-the-record in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee and, as averred above, he has plenty of witnesses. It should not be hard to reach a determination on who is telling truth here.

In fact, Mr. Mueller could have declared that he found chargeable obstruction crimes were committed based on the evidence, and also demurred to press them at this time — leaving them available to federal prosecutors until after the president was out of office, one way or another. The reason he didn’t is that Mr. Mueller does not want the case to come to trial, ever, because he would lose badly and his reputation would be destroyed. Consider that in any trial, the defendant gets to call witnesses and make his own case. The evidence for gross prosecutorial misconduct on the part of Mr. Mueller and his associates is mountainous compared to the molehill of Mr. Trump’s temper tantrums over the seditious hoax he was subject to. And that matter is now moving in the direction of adjudication.

So instead, Mr. Mueller has set in motion a potential political crisis as momentous as the Civil War, but completely unlike it. Knowing that congress can impeach the president on just about anything — especially this president, publicly reviled like no other before him — he served congress the platter of material to use in the form of his final report, and pretty much dared them to not go forward with it. Get this: it is a ruse. The object is solely to divert the nation’s attention with an impeachment circus, allowing Mr. Mueller to slip away harmlessly into history without sacrificing his own reputation in a courtroom.

Do you have any idea what a fiasco this set-up is? I will tell you.

The US government itself will be discredited and crippled. At one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, you’ll have the impeachment circus in which the misdeeds of the RussiaGate perpetrators will be revealed in all their naked political indecency; and at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue you’ll have many of the same government officials involved in all that indecency marched into courtrooms to be tried by Mr. Barr’s prosecutors on charges possibly as grave as treason. On the sidelines, you will see something like a fight to the death between the White House and the rogue leviathan that the nation’s “intel community” has grown into — like the ghastly, slime-dripping creature that stowed away on the spaceship Nostromo in the horror movie Alien.

In his farewell performance, Mr. Mueller declared that he considers himself unavailable to testify before congress in whatever proceedings they convene going forward. That’s rich. If you take him at his word, he said that if called, he would simply refer to his 448 report, where all the mysteries of existence may be found — like the Old Testament Yahweh laying his Good Book on the table before the cringing multitudes. It will surely come as a surprise to Mr. Mueller that he is actually not Yahweh with such supreme powers, but a mere mortal who has fucked up mightily in the service of an earthly political conspiracy. In the event, he may find himself citing not his fabulous RussiaGate report, but the Fifth Amendment to the constitution.

That’s what we have to look forward to in the months leading up to the 2020 election, if it can even take place during what may be an epic paralysis of government verging on sickening collapse.