What happens if President Trump is innocent?

The Washington Post recently reported that special counsel Robert Mueller has informed Trump’s attorneys that the president isn’t considered a target of a criminal investigation. If, after more than a year, a team of seasoned and aggressive investigators with nearly unlimited access and autonomy couldn’t dig up any substantial evidence linking the president to criminality, the idea that Trump will be implicated by Mueller, much less face an indictment, is farfetched.

And the dream of impeachment? Well, that would probably die, as well.

Much of the case for the impeachment of Trump is tethered to the alleged illegitimacy of his election — and much of that case relies on the findings of the Mueller investigation. Judging from the reaction we’ve seen so far to the reports that Trump is merely a subject, but not a target, of the special counsel, it seems most Democrats haven’t fully prepared themselves for the eventuality that the investigation may end up vindicating Trump.

Circumstances can change, obviously, but what happens if election interference amounts to nothing more than Russian hacking, fake Facebook accounts and Twitter bots, all of which went largely ignored by the Obama administration until it became politically advantageous for Democrats to make an issue?

What will Democrats do if Michael Flynn, and others who misled investigators, did so for political and personal reasons having nothing to do with “collusion?” After all, to this point, not a single Mueller indictment has been linked to Trump’s 2016 campaign.

For many people, of course, nothing would change. They believe, or have been convinced, that the president of the United States conspired with an antagonistic nation to wrest or steal the election from its rightful winner. A further lack of evidence on this front is unlikely to change their minds.

None of this is exactly surprising. For over a year now, a great amount of energy and attention has been expended by credible major media outlets attempting to prove a conspiracy.

And much of the political media has worked backward from a preconceived assumption of guilt, relying on a multitude of leaks as the foundations for breathless stories — often walked back or corrected later — which created the impression that a smoking gun proving collusion was imminent.

None ever came.

Certainly the idea that Trump conspired with Russians to win the 2016 election is so embedded in our discourse that even absolution by Mueller would be unlikely to change the perceptions of the chattering class.

If talking heads like Joe Scarborough and officials like former CIA chief John Brennan can contend that Vladimir Putin might have been blackmailing the president of the United States without a shred of evidence, what makes anyone believe Mueller’s investigation is going to temper their tone?

Congressional Democrats have also regularly insinuated collusion, and sometimes outright accused Trump of engaging in seditious activities. Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has, on more than one occasion, claimed to have seen an “abundance” of evidence corroborating this collusion.

And since Democrats are likely to win the House — and perhaps the Senate — in the 2018 midterms, there will be tremendous pressure on them to impeach the president.

It’s unlikely, however, that articles of impeachment will be drawn up merely on the claim that the president is unfit temperamentally and ideologically. They’ll almost certainly need some criminal act to imbue this effort with credibility.

It was one thing to push vague allegations about the president being in cahoots with Putin, but it will be quite another for elected Democrats, who have unreservedly praised Mueller’s integrity, conscientiousness and professionalism, to reject his findings and continue propagating the idea that the American election was stolen, much less use the charge as a means of impeachment.

There is, of course, plenty of political fodder to use against Trump. But Democrats put themselves in an awkward position by fully embracing the most unlikely conspiracy right out of the gate. Then again, continuing to corrode trust in our elections might be too politically tantalizing for them to resist. That’s a shame.



David Harsanyi is a syndicated columnist and senior editor at The Federalist.