Until last week, the Robert Mueller investigation had a Kenneth Starr feel to it. Starr was the independent counsel who was supposed to be investigating Bill and Hillary Clinton’s involvement, if any, in an old Arkansas land swindle. Instead, Starr spent five years probing the president before issuing a scathing report documenting Clinton’s lies about his sex life — and a sexual harassment case — resulting in impeachment.

Mueller has gone even further afield than Ken Starr, but the investigation of President Trump has taken a different turn. It’s beginning to evoke Watergate. That’s what comes to mind when the president’s campaign manager gets convicted of eight felonies on the same day the president’s lawyer cops a guilty plea to tax charges and campaign finance violations — while sounding like he can’t wait to rat out the boss.

If the scandal that cost Richard Nixon his presidency had numerous villains, it also had some unlikely heroes, among them young reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, federal trial Judge John J. Sirica and Frank Wills, the Watergate security guard who merely did his duty one fateful June night in 1972.

It’s harder to find the white hats this time around, at least so far, but Paula Duncan emerged last week as one candidate. She’s the Leesburg, Virginia housewife who was a juror in the trial of Donald Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort. Duncan actually sports a hat, but it’s red, not white, and it proclaims “Make America Great Again.”

Before going into an Alexandria courtroom each day to decide Manafort’s fate, Duncan deliberately left her MAGA baseball cap in the car. She didn’t want to alienate fellow members of the jury, who she suspected didn’t share her politics. Nor did she want to risk giving court officials the impression that she had a political agenda — although it’s clear to her that Mueller has such an agenda — and couldn’t fairly weigh the evidence.

“I wanted Paul Manafort to be innocent,” she told NBC News after the case ended. “But he wasn’t.”

Whether you love Donald Trump or hate him — or are one of the handful of us who’ve managed to keep your wits in these trying times — the events of last week revealed the distinct possibility that the 45th U.S. president could be impeached, and perhaps divorced or imprisoned as well.

Make no mistake: This special prosecutor is going after Trump hard. Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election may have been his original mandate — pretext might be a better word — but its goal now is obviously to implicate Trump in criminal wrongdoing. Those 25 Russian agents and military aides indicted by Mueller? Unlikely to ever see the inside of an American courthouse, they’re a beard, a way of justifying what has become a hunt for any wrongdoing by Trump, his family and his associates.

One would expect that Mueller, a career lawman who led the FBI, who was a decorated Marine Corps combat officer in Vietnam and who eschewed the big paydays that awaited him in private legal practice — all in the service of his country — would have a clearer understanding of the danger here. Sixty-three million Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Many of them are already deeply suspicious of a probe launched by FBI officials openly hostile to Trump even before his inauguration. Yet neither Mueller nor Rod Rosenstein, the Justice Department official who appointed him, have shown that they understand the damage their investigation could do to our country.

The FBI has conducted armed raids on Manafort’s office and the home of Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. Mueller has convicted both men on tax charges that have nothing to do with elections. He has even reprised the Clinton-era impeachment tactic of targeting a president’s sex life.

Mostly, the media has gone along for the ride. Journalists know this isn’t how democracies settle elections that come out unexpectedly. But an entire generation of reporters and editors consider Trump and his entourage so menacing that they’re not gauging the precedent being set by their cheerleading coverage of an over-zealous prosecutor.

Trump is hardly blameless. His bullying and crudeness are real — and a real problem. His name-calling, racial insensitivity and endless bragging do not project a mentally healthy persona. Moreover, the corruption Mueller is finding is not imagined. Anyone investigating the Russia angle would have started with Paul Manafort. He ran the Trump campaign, and has a history of working with Russians and Ukrainians.

Is it Mueller’s fault that Manafort hadn’t registered as a foreign lobbyist, as required by federal law? Is it Mueller’s fault that Manafort hid millions of dollars in offshore banks? Or that Manafort stiffed the government on his taxes — to the tune of millions of dollars? Likewise, was Mueller really supposed to overlook the financial crimes of Manafort’s sleazy deputy? Or the tax chicanery of Trump’s attorney?

That’s asking a lot of a career G-man who has spent so many years as a federal prosecutor. But the telltale sign that this is more about following the letter of the law was making Cohen plead guilty to a campaign finance violation. That was an easy thing to overlook. For starters, it’s not really a crime. Campaign finance law says nothing about paying off ex-girlfriends, and when the Justice Department leveled similar charges against former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, he beat them in court.

Mueller’s excesses are a reminder of why the independent counsel statute was allowed to lapse. So how did we get here again? The short answer is that a number of men in authority behaved badly. During his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Jeff Sessions fudged his reply to a question from Sen. Al Franken about Russian meddling, which meant that Sessions later recused himself from the Russia investigation. Meanwhile, FBI Director James Comey, who testified that he didn’t leak or do “weasely” things, got fired by Trump — and promptly began leaking and pulling weasel-like maneuvers in hopes of getting a special prosecutor appointed.

Speaking of sneaky behavior, why is an editor — even an editor of a supermarket tabloid — paying sources for dirt and then not publishing salacious scoops about newsworthy people like Donald Trump? That’s not journalism at all.

Which brings us back to Paula Duncan. Now here is someone who did her job, and did so conscientiously. Going into the Manafort trial, she considered the Mueller investigation a “witch hunt,” as Trump has called it. She was even more convinced afterward.

“America chose,” she said, referring to the 2016 election. “The other half of America that lost doesn’t want to accept those of us who won. I didn’t vote for Obama but I had to accept him as my president. We’re getting derailed by this whole special counsel thing — let the man [Trump] do his job. “

Yet Duncan followed the oath she took at the outset of Manafort’s trial — and voted to convict. She lives in Virginia’s Loudoun County, where the suburbs of Washington, D.C., end and Middle America, you could say, begins. Where Americans are pretty great already.

Carl M. Cannon is executive editor and Washington Bureau chief of RealClearPolitics