But here’s a more discouraging takeaway — the powerful suggestion that the Mueller investigation that dominated the news for the better part of two years was never what the millions of Americans who believed in the battle-tested former FBI chief, a functioning justice system, and the truth actually thought it was. Saturday’s revealing memos were just the latest and strongest hint that an investigation upon which too many pinned too much hope — from “Mueller Time” T-shirts to that “Hon, Mueller’s got this. Come to bed” cartoon in the New Yorker — was in fact the gaslighting of America on a massive scale, even for the Trump era.