The campaign to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller has reached a shrill and desperate phase, as some believe it is more important to protect Donald Trump's interests than to establish how and why an adversarial government influenced a presidential election.

The goal is to dismiss any findings damaging to the president as political bias; to invent corruption in the highest echelons of law enforcement, notably in the FBI; and to preempt any discovery of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia with distractions.

Much of it is a whingeing chorus of victimhood, slithering from a Twitter account, which invariably overlooks pertinent facts.

So as 2018 begins and the second year of Mueller's investigation unfolds, we need to acknowledge a baseline of immutable truths, and review what we have learned from the man Republicans recently considered the most scrupulous public servant in government.

First, he has secured two guilty pleas. Both Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos lied to the FBI about contact with Russians, with Flynn asking Sergey Kislyak during the transition to eschew any sanctions-related escalation. If the subsequent lie to the FBI about that conversation was ordered by Trump (as NBC reported), Trump also may be in violation of the Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from conducting foreign policy.

Second, Mueller indicted Paul Manafort and Rick Gates for laundering tens of millions from a foreign adversary while they were also running a U.S. presidential campaign. That will never cease to amaze.

Third, Mueller is trying to establish whether Trump obstructed justice by firing James Comey, which isn't a hard trail, considering the FBI director was sacked after ignoring Trump's plea to back off Flynn.

Fourth, emails revealed that Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer during the campaign on the premise that she had dirt on Hillary Clinton, which some experts believe is election fraud or conspiracy to obtain information from a foreign adversary.

Fifth, Trump campaign officials repeatedly lied about their Russia connections, notably Kushner, who didn't mention such meetings on his security clearance forms, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who lied under oath before Congress about it.

In short, this is not something invented by Democrats as "a hoax, as a ruse, as an excuse for losing an election," as Trump told the New York Times in an interview Thursday.

And his assertion that he has "an absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department" should inspire Congress to pass legislation protecting the special counsel, because the president is getting more squirrelly by the month.

And though he hopes Mueller will treat him "fairly," Trump last week trotted out one freshman (Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.) to announce that we are "at risk of a coup d'etat" and another freshman (Rep. Francis Rooney, R-Fla.) to call for a "purge" of the "deep-state FBI." He also uses the bumbling chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (Devin Nunes, R-Calif.) as his proxy -- he now runs a counter-investigation into what his own committee is investigating.

Along with other paste-eating nihilists such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Louis Gohmert (R-Texas), they believe that three other Republicans -- Trump appointee Sessions, Sessions appointee Rod Rosenstein, and Rosenstein appointee Bob Mueller -- conspired to damage what is already a mangled presidency, which ordinarily would have most of us reaching for the popcorn as this administration implodes in slow motion.

But this is no longer entertaining. It speaks of the irrationality that has poisoned the GOP. It is dangerous because the system of law and the credibility of our chief law enforcement agency are supposed to be buoyed and not rhetorically destroyed by a president and the chew toy he calls his political party.

Trump's people, clearly cornered, are moving the game. It's up to truth-tellers not to let it happen, because the biggest questions are still unanswered.

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