“President Trump’s campaign did not conspire with Russia during the 2016 election, according to a summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report submitted to Congress on Sunday,” reported the BBC. NPR adds:

“The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russian in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” Barr writes in his letter to leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees delivered Sunday afternoon.

Mueller made a considerable effort: employing 19 lawyers and 40 FBI agents, issuing 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, 230 communications orders, 50 orders for pen registers, 13 requests to foreign governments for evincing, and interviewing 500 witnesses — yet ultimately finding n0 collusion. Mueller assiduously prosecuted what was presented as a definite contact. Yet after the equivalent of a destroyer captain carrying out numerous active sonar searches, MAD detection sweeps, and a bottom search he found nothing.

But a negative result isn’t a total waste. It shows what is not there. While Mueller brought indictments for the ordinary kind of Washington crime against several persons, he found no collusion. Like a patient who after a battery of tests finds he has acid reflux and ulcers but no stomach cancer, a negative result is full of information. The taxpayer paid a lot of money for the equivalent of Mueller’s tests and while not everyone may like the negative result, there it is. The rational thing for the Democrats to do is find a good candidate to oppose Trump in 2020 — or they can keep investing money in finding the phantom sub but with little objective hope of finding it.

Perhaps the most damaging legacy of the 2016 campaign was the Steele dossier. Its authors created their own MacGuffin. They launched their own decoy then fired all their warshots on the noisemaker of their own device. Now all tubes are expended and the sonarman reports “torpedo circling back.” Ironically it’s the Democrats, not the Republicans, who should be most outraged at the dossier. How the devil did they fire all available tubes at a nothing burger?

Follow Wretchard on Twitter

Support the Belmont Club by purchasing from Amazon through the links below.

Books:

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, by Joseph J. Ellis. How during the 1790s, which Ellis calls the most decisive decade in the American nation’s history, the greatest statesmen of their generation came together to define the new republic and direct its course for the coming centuries.

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World, by Brad Stone. The definitive story of the most radical companies of the new Silicon Valley and a dawning age of tenacity, conflict and wealth.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy’s Finest Hour, by James D. Hornfischer. A must-read.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, by Kevin Kelly. Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives can be understood as the result of a few long-term, accelerating forces already in motion. These deep trends – interacting, cognifying, flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking, and questioning — will completely revolutionize the way we buy, work, learn, and communicate with each other. By understanding and embracing them, says Kelly, it will be easier for us to navigate these changes in ways that will benefit us. For those who seek guidance on where their business, industry, or life is heading – what to invent, where to work, what to invest in, how to better reach customers, and what to begin to put in place – this book is indispensable.

For a list of books most frequently purchased by readers, visit my homepage.

Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with your friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.

The War of the Words, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres

Rebranding Christianity, or why the truth shall make you free

The Three Conjectures, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age

Storming the Castle, why government should get small

No Way In at Amazon Kindle. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action.

Storm Over the South China Sea, how China is restarting history in the Pacific.