For nearly two years, Democrats desperately hoped that Robert Mueller would ride in on a white horse and save the country from Donald Trump’s corrupt presidency. But three days after the special counsel submitted his report to the Department of Justice, one thing is clear: The Russia investigation no longer poses a mortal threat to this presidency. Trump’s future is now in the hands of a divided, hyper-partisan Congress that agrees on almost nothing.

Dejected Democrats may be tempted to keep fighting the administration over the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia and the question of whether he obstructed justice. They are expected to increase pressure on Attorney General William Barr to release not only Mueller’s full report, but all of the documents that informed it, and may even try to assume the mantle of the now-concluded Russia investigation. “There’s a difference between compelling evidence of collusion and whether the special counsel concludes that he can prove beyond a reasonable doubt the criminal charge of conspiracy,” Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on Sunday.

It’s time for Democrats to quit their Russia obsession. Prolonging this investigation would be a grave political mistake and distract from more pressing—and more politically potent—inquiries into the president and his administration. It risks becoming a fool’s errand on par with the Republicans’ Benghazi boondoggle.



This comparison is likely to upset some on the political left, who would rightly contend that there are important differences between the Russia and Benghazi investigations. The latter was a largely manufactured scandal, an attempt to soil Barack Obama’s relatively clean administration and rile up the Republican base; it ultimately morphed into a genuine witch hunt aimed at discrediting Hillary Clinton before her presidential campaign got off the ground. This is in marked contrast to Mueller’s dutiful, apolitical investigation, which has produced 37 indictments and resulted in the conviction of Trump’s personal lawyer and his former campaign chairman, as well as a host of other figures with intimate connections to the president.



It’s worth also taking a step back to remember why the Mueller investigation took on such importance among Democrats. Some of it, to be sure, came from its nonpartisan appearance: Here was a strident G-man and lifelong Republican who even the most craven members of the GOP would have to respect. And the discretion of Mueller’s team, from which information rarely leaked, led to wild speculation about what it might know that the press and public did not. But much of the investigation’s allure came from the fact that, with Democrats completely out of power in Washington, the special counsel was the only person investigating Trump for the first two years of his presidency.

