In How The Good Guys Finally Won, his fine little book about the climactic Watergate summer of 1974, the late Jimmy Breslin describes a period in the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation in which the committee’s chief counsel, John Doar, was playing things so close to the vest that the members of the House were getting extremely antsy about what Doar was doing.

There is a meeting between Peter Rodino, the Democratic chairman of the committee, and Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, in which O’Neill demands to know what Doar was doing and how long it was going to take to get a report that O’Neill could bring to his anxious colleagues. Rodino takes O’Neill’s concerns to Doar, asking Doar for a timetable on when the report would be delivered, and Doar then tells Rodino—and, through him, O’Neill—to pound sand.

“What right has O’Neill got interfering in your business?” [Doar asked]…He, Peter W. Rodino of New Jersey was the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and, as such, under law, he was in charge of hearings into the possible impeachment of a president. As for Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr., of Massachusetts, he was the Majority Leader of the House. There is not one thing in law or House Rules that says the Majority Leader has the right to do anything. Rodino’s head came down and his hand hit the desk.

“You’re right. He has no business bothering me at all, and I’m going to tell it to him tomorrow.”

That’s a story about how investigations are supposed to work—with all the various players skating their wings, as the hockey coaches say. It’s also a story about how, in any investigation of similar magnitude, there is always an extended period of sitzkrieg in which everybody involved gets the nervous fidgets and starts panicking to all points of the compass.

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That seems to be where we’re at with Robert Mueller’s investigation now. Mueller’s people are still grinding away and nobody knows what they have, except that they have a lot more than anyone anywhere thinks they have. Outside those offices, the president* and his ever-expanding crew of acolytes, enablers, and otherwise unemployable suckfish are beating whatever tin drums are handy, especially on the topic of what the president* is insisting on calling SpyGate, as though he weren’t his own Gordon Liddy.

Some Democrats are starting to quiver, and the tremulous souls on The New York Times opinion pages are beginning to look haltingly in the direction of the lifeboats. Here’s Frank Bruni:

The longer Mueller soldiers on, the more I worry, and the duration is part of the reason. There’s a Catch-22 to these special-counsel extravaganzas: In order to be credible, they must be thorough, but in order to be thorough, they risk becoming unwieldy, appearing indiscriminate and taxing the patience and trust of voters to the point where they numbly tune out… Mueller’s journey down certain tributaries strikes even some observers who aren’t Trump partisans as invasive and punitive. His crawl and sprawl have also given the president the time and the trove of details that he needs to refine his tactics for delegitimizing the investigation. His shameless effort has evolved in sophistication from the reflexive yelp of “witch hunt” to more elaborate and alluring conspiracy theories, including the scenario of espionage within his campaign.

This is exactly what was happening to O’Neill’s Democrats in 1974, when Doar was compiling information and not talking to anyone about anything. Again, from Breslin’s book, wherein Breslin runs into former New York congressman Emanuel Celler:

“They’re taking too much time,” [Celler] said. “They’re trying to get it bipartisan. That can’t be done. The other side is only going to make it a partisan issue at the end anyway. So you might as well call them on it.”

This was a terrible idea in 1974 and it would be a terrible idea in 2018, even though the partisanship in our politics now is even worse than it was then, and even though actual moderate Republicans like Thomas Railsback and Walter Flowers, GOP congressman who voted for the articles of impeachment in committee, don’t actually exist.

As long as Mueller has a job, he will keep working and he will force an increasingly impatient nation with a decreasing attention span to sit quietly while he finishes his work—on Russian ratfcking, on money-laundering, on influence peddling, and on god alone knows what else. As long as he has a job, nothing that is being said outside his offices is any more than the evening breeze.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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