Through his unrelenting

efforts to obstruct the Trump-Russia investigation since its inception, President Donald Trump has inflicted a slow-motion Saturday Night Massacre on the American people, a constitutional nightmare that has lasted two years instead of one night.

And it is still going on, despite the fact that special counsel Robert Mueller has completed his investigation. Trump now has a willing lackey in Attorney General William Barr, who is aiding and abetting the president’s ongoing efforts to control the Justice Department and corrupt the country’s system of checks and balances.

The original Saturday Night Massacre ended far more quickly than Trump’s version.

On the night of October 20, 1973, President Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Nixon wanted Cox out because Cox had just subpoenaed the president and demanded that he turn over his Oval Office tape recordings. Nixon feared that Cox was getting too close to unraveling the Watergate scandal.

Richardson refused to fire Cox, instead resigning as attorney general that night. Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus also refused to do Nixon’s dirty work and also resigned. But by the end of that Saturday night, Nixon had found his hatchet man: Solicitor General Robert Bork agreed to fire Cox.

Given what we now know about the events of the last two years, Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre resembles a routine weekend in the Trump administration.

Much of the carnage is documented in the second volume of the Mueller report, which focuses on obstruction of justice. Mueller recounts Trump’s nonstop efforts to block the Trump-Russia investigation and details the firings, threats, and intimidation tactics Trump used to pressure key figures involved in the probe.

But Mueller may not have captured every aspect of Trump’s Saturday Night Massacre. That’s because Trump’s threats to fire the special counsel — combined with the president’s incessant public and private pressure on Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the Justice Department official who supervised Mueller’s investigation — may have influenced both what is in the special counsel’s narrow and hesitant report, and what is conspicuously absent.

On March 2, 2017, less than two months after Trump took office, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from overseeing the Trump-Russia probe because of his own contacts with Russian officials during the campaign. As Sessions’s deputy, Rosenstein, a former U.S. attorney, took on the role of supervising Mueller’s special counsel investigation.

For the next two years, Rosenstein and Mueller had frequent confidential conversations about the status of the inquiry. During that time, the media often gave Rosenstein credit for protecting Mueller from Trump and allowing the special counsel to complete his investigation.

But it is now becoming clear that Rosenstein, like virtually everyone else in the administration, bent to Trump’s will. He may have done so to save his own skin.

Last year, the New York Times reported that Rosenstein had considered Trump unfit for office and had discussed the idea of wearing a wire during meetings with the president following James Comey’s firing. The report lent credence to the idea that Rosenstein was Mueller’s last line of defense, but also sparked talk that Rosenstein would be forced to resign.

Instead, on a call with Trump, the deputy attorney general argued that he should be allowed to continue to oversee the special counsel investigation because he lent it credibility, according to the Washington Post. He also claimed that he could “land the plane,” the Post reported.

That phrase — “land the plane” — can be interpreted in various ways. It could mean, as the Post reported, that Rosenstein would ensure that Mueller treated Trump fairly. But it could also have been interpreted, particularly by Trump, as a sign that Rosenstein would make sure the Mueller investigation remained narrow and constrained enough to satisfy the president.

Exactly how Trump’s constant pressure on Mueller and Rosenstein’s efforts to “land the plane” affected the outcome of the Trump-Russia investigation is still not known. But Mueller’s report offers some intriguing clues.

The report relies on extremely cautious interpretations of the uncovered evidence and the laws that Trump or those around him may have violated. Mueller decides just about every close call in Trump’s favor.

It’s clear that Mueller handled the Trump-Russia case in a far less aggressive way than previous independent prosecutors have handled other high-profile scandals. By contrast, both Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel who investigated the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration in the 1980s, and Kenneth Starr, who investigated Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the 1990s, were criticized for being obsessive and even partisan in their investigations.

The question is: Why was Mueller so cautious?

Mueller has been careful throughout his career, so the narrow scope of the report may reflect his own nature as much as the pressure from Trump or his loyal lieutenant Rosenstein. One high-profile episode from Mueller’s years as FBI director reveals his incremental approach and his reluctance to take bold action.

Beginning in 2002, FBI agents assigned to Guantánamo Bay began to raise concerns about the abusive interrogation techniques the military was secretly using on terrorism suspects held there. Eventually, Mueller ordered FBI agents not to be involved in abusive interrogations at the prison.

But Mueller did not launch any significant effort to halt the abusive interrogations conducted by the CIA and the military or open criminal investigations into the personnel involved. Senior FBI officials raised concerns about the abusive interrogations with Justice Department officials, but little came of their discussions.

“We found no evidence that the FBI’s concerns influenced DOD interrogation policies,” a 2008 Justice Department inspector general report on the Department of Defense matter concluded. It wasn’t until after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal exploded in the press in 2004 that the FBI even issued formal written guidance about detainee treatment to its agents, according to the inspector general’s report.

In other words, Mueller received early warnings about the Bush administration’s use of torture on terrorism suspects, and his response was to make certain that his people were not involved, but not to take much action beyond that until after the scandal became public.

Similarly, Mueller’s special counsel report presents damning evidence against Trump and his circle, but then fails to follow through to conclusions that a more aggressive prosecutor might have reached.

The report details the frequent and often mysterious direct and indirect contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians, including instances in which intermediaries for Moscow told people in the Trump circle that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton. But in several cases, Mueller never got to the bottom of those interactions, sometimes because people lied to him or refused to be interviewed, or were in Russia and out of reach.

In investigating links between the Trump campaign and Russia, Mueller limited himself to the question of whether he had evidence to connect Trump-Russia contacts directly to a Russian cyberoffensive against the Democratic Party, particularly the effort by Russian military intelligence to hack the Democrats and steal emails and other materials.

But that narrow scope meant that Mueller effectively ignored all the unresolved contacts between Trump and Russia if he could not find evidence linking them directly to Moscow’s cyberoffensive.

Bob Bauer, who was White House counsel to President Barack Obama, also found Mueller’s analysis of the evidence and the law extraordinarily narrow. He noted, for instance, that Mueller seemed to back away from the logic of his own investigation with his refusal to pursue charges that the Trump campaign violated campaign finance laws. Writing in Just Security, a national security website, Bauer argued that Trump and his campaign solicited and accepted help from Moscow, and that Mueller should have found them in violation of the law banning foreign national spending of any kind in federal elections and American support for those kinds of illegal campaign finance activities.

The Mueller report “treats the campaign finance issues almost cursorily — one could say superficially — even to the point of failing to identify and address all the applicable law,” Bauer wrote. “The results are an unconvincing decision to decline any prosecutions, and a major question about the enforcement of this law in 2020 and beyond.”