Jonah Goldberg

Opinion contributor

Editor's Note: This column originally appeared in November.

Many of President Trump’s biggest supporters want him to make Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation go away. Some suggest that the president fire Mueller. Some propose that he pardon everybody and anybody conceivably involved in colluding with Russia. And some argue for both.

That is all great advice — if the president is guilty. It’s terrible advice if he’s not. The simple fact is that firing Mueller or pardoning everybody will make it look like he’s trying to hide something.

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Of course, that’s how he got a special counsel in the first place. On May 9, he fired his FBI director James Comey under the plausible pretext provided in a memo by Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein, that Comey had behaved badly during the election.

But the next day, in a private Oval Office meeting, Trump told visiting Russian officials “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job.” He added, “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

The day after that, Trump publicly contradicted statements from his press secretary, his Justice Department and his own vice president when he admitted to NBC News that he was going to fire Comey “regardless” of Rosenstein’s findings.

Since then, Trump has continued to act like he hears the ticking of the Tell-Tale Heart. He’s said if he’d known his attorney general was going to recuse himself from matters related to the Russian investigation, he would never have appointed him in the first place. His Twitter feed is a sphincterless stream of assurances that there was no collusion. And his biggest surrogates and confidantes — Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, Corey Lewandowski et al — many of whom once praised Mueller, now attack him with a fervor that borders on panic or paranoia.

None of this means the president is actually guilty of collusion. He may simply be insecure about his victory. His constant insistence that the Democrats “made up” the Russia story as an excuse for Hillary Clinton’s defeat is not, on its face, ridiculous. It certainly seems like he sincerely believes it.

But his beliefs are irrelevant. In politics, what matters are appearances, and when you act like you have something to hide, people notice — especially the press and the opposition party. This is why one of the most time-honored clichés in politics — “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover up” — is as close as Washington gets to an Iron Law of Politics.

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So let’s assume Trump did something very bad that Mueller might uncover in the course of his investigation. That Very Bad Thing could be collusion or it could be some disastrously shady business deal. In that case, trying to quash the whole inquiry by firing Mueller or pardoning everybody in sight, might be a smart Hail Mary play.

It would certainly ignite a media firestorm and fuel calls for Trump’s impeachment for abuse of power (especially if he tried to pardon himself). Democrats going into the 2018 race would be jubilant for the gift. And, if they took back the House they would surely pick up where Mueller left off, using newly acquired subpoena power to make working in the White House a living Hell.

Again, if he’s guilty, it might be worth the risk. But why go through all that if he did nothing wrong?

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, lawyers David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey make a high-minded case that pardoning everyone will put the question of collusion in Congress’ lap, where the founders would have preferred it. As an argument for constitutional civics, it makes some sense. But as a matter of pure politics it’s terrible advice.

More sound advice would be for the president simply to ignore the investigation and refrain from acting like he’s scared of what it might uncover. If he followed that advice from the outset he’d be in a better place, and Robert Mueller would still be enjoying retirement. That is, unless he’s got something to hide.

Jonah Goldberg, an American Enterprise Institute fellow and National Review contributing editor, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow him @JonahNRO.