A short diary to plug a powerful profile of Bob Mueller and Jim Comey that Politico is going to run tomorrow.
It’s by Garrett Graff who has written a biography of Bob Mueller. He starts off by relating the well-known showdown in AG John Ashcroft’s hospital room. Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzalez had driven there to get Ashcroft, who was recovering from an operation, to renew a NSA program that Deputy-AG Jim Comey had determined was illegal. Card and Gonzalez were working at Cheney’s insistence. On his way to Ashcroft’s hospital room, Comey called his former mentor Mueller, to ask for his help because…
It was, in an extraordinary showdown between the White House and Justice Department, perhaps the single most extraordinary moment of the tumultuous Bush years: The FBI director ordering his agents to resist the Secret Service if they tried to remove the deputy attorney general from the attorney general’s bedside. As motorcades converged on the hospital from across Washington, everyone involved wondered: Just how far would this situation escalate?
Graff thinks the Trump White House doesn’t know what it’s managed to walk into:
Donald Trump, as it turns out, has stumbled into taking on two experienced Washington players on their home turf—in skirmishes that will play out in public Capitol Hill hearings with Comey even as Mueller slogs along with what is likely to be a quiet, tenacious and by-the-book investigation into the heart of the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia. […]
President Trump impulsively fired Comey in the hope that it would shut down the Russia investigation; one week later, though, he finds himself facing not just one esteemed former FBI director but two: the first a wronged martyr for the bureau, and the second a legendary investigator without a hint of politics. […]
It is as if, after having an unrelated disagreement over movie trivia in a bar, Trump has challenged Usain Bolt to a 100-yard dash or John Cena to a cage match to the death.
The article is long, but really worth a read.
We’ll see whether Graff’s view of Mueller’s moral compass will stand once we’re done.