AP Photo Law And Order Bob Mueller Is Not Playing Around Friday’s indictments prove that Russia interfered in our election. And they make it almost impossible to fire him.

Noah Bookbinder is executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and is a former federal prosecutor who handled public corruption cases and Senate. Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, was the chief White House ethics lawyer from 2009 to 2011 and ambassador to the Czech Republic from 2011 to 2014.

The intelligence community has spoken with one voice for more than a year about its unanimous findings that Russia interfered with the 2016 United States election. Nonetheless, President Donald Trump, fearful that acknowledging Russian interference would cast doubt on the legitimacy of his win, has vacillated between tepid acknowledgement and skepticism that anything of the kind ever happened. Polls have shown that most of his supporters, following his lead, don’t believe Russia interfered.

Friday’s indictment of three Russian organizations and 13 Russian individuals for their roles in interfering with the election should finally put any such skepticism to rest.


Federal investigators and prosecutors, and a grand jury, have now found probable cause to believe that a complex web of Russian organizations and agents executed a years-long scheme to undermine our elections—first to sow chaos, conflict and doubt into our electoral system and then specifically to support Donald Trump and oppose Hillary Clinton. These are not vague allegations; over 37 pages, the indictment lays out in careful detail a step-by-step scheme involving identity theft, fake accounts, carefully orchestrated trips and outreach, a concerted social media strategy and even real live rallies across the United States secretly planned from Russia. That is not to say that the president and his supporters will necessarily accept the allegations in the indictment, but this serious and thorough document does not leave them much of a leg to stand on if they continue to deny meaningful Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Beyond providing detailed support for Russian interference and starting the process of holding accountable those who perpetrated this exceedingly serious crime, special counsel Robert Mueller is, with this indictment, doing his part to prevent it from happening again.

The scheme he has uncovered threatened the very fabric of our democracy—and intelligence officials warned this week that Russia will do it again. If Russia repeatedly gets away with this kind of interference in U.S. elections, it will erode public confidence in our electoral system. By publicly spelling out the tactics used and acting swiftly and decisively to bring consequences, Mueller is making it easier for state and federal authorities to spot this conduct in the future and is providing a strong deterrent against Russian agents engaging in this kind of treachery.

But the special counsel cannot do it alone. Only with a serious commitment from the federal government, starting with a public declaration by the president and including a real allocation of resources by Congress to protect against future attacks and track down those implicated, can we truly hope to be effective in rooting out this problem. None of that has yet happened; this indictment should awaken us to the need for a strong government response.

Supporters of the president have been quick to point out that the indictment does not allege purposeful cooperation between the Trump campaign and the Russians charged. Some, apparently including the president, have gone so far as to suggest that the indictment exonerates him, proving his frequent assertions of “no collusion.” It does nothing of the kind.

First, the indictment makes clear that some Trump campaign workers unwittingly worked with the Russian conspirators advancing this scheme, which is already a disturbing development. It also says that on repeated occasions the indicted individuals conspired with “persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury,” explicitly leaving open the possibility that others were involved.

More to the point, as elaborate as the charged scheme was, it is limited to one particular disinformation operation. The indictment does not even address many of the areas in which knowing cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russia would most likely have occurred if it did occur. For instance, the indictment does not address the hacking of accounts belonging to the Democratic National Committee and others, nor does it address those who participated in the now infamous summer 2016 meeting in Trump Tower, apparently set up to obtain negative information about Hillary Clinton. The steady stream of pleas and indictments we have seen so far makes it only logical to conclude that there is more to come. We don’t know yet where it will all lead, but the trajectory seems to be closer and closer to the Trump campaign.

This indictment also makes it still harder for the president to fire Mueller. The special counsel now has outstanding charges, either through pleas or indictments, against 17 people and three organizations ranging from lying to investigators to a complex scheme to undermine the integrity of a U.S. presidential election. It can hardly be said that he has been ineffective, and it is difficult to imagine that a decision to fire him at this point could be seen as anything other than an effort to interfere with an investigation of the greatest national significance.

Also importantly, the announcement of Friday’s indictments was made in a televised news conference by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who supervises Mueller’s investigation because Attorney General Jeff Sessions is recused. Rosenstein has recently been the target of ire from the president and his supporters, and his potential firing has been much discussed. Now that Rosenstein has further demonstrated his full backing of Mueller, that animus may increase, but so too the risk to Trump of acting on it. More than ever, the firing of Rosenstein would have to be viewed through the lens of a possible attempt to interfere with an investigation that is making substantial progress in exposing a shocking scheme to attack American democracy.

There may be another shoe to drop shortly. CNN reported on Thursday that Rick Gates, a former senior Trump campaign aide already indicted by Mueller, is close to completing talks to plead guilty, cooperate with the investigation and testify against others. That will get Mueller’s team one step closer to understanding exactly what happened within the Trump campaign.

Adding all of this together, one thing is clear about this week’s developments: They leave the president in substantially more peril. His longstanding efforts to cast doubt on the idea that Russia interfered in the election are in tatters. His campaign now appears to have at least unwittingly furthered the efforts of Russian saboteurs to wreak havoc in our election. And this latest indictment, together with a likely Gates plea, very much leaves the door open to future findings of Trump campaign cooperation with Russian election interference. We all should hope that Mueller is successful in getting to the bottom of this debacle; his track record so far suggests he will.