HE who wants to persuade”, wrote the author Joseph Conrad, “should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word”. President Donald Trump, whose empires in business and politics were built around that maxim, could now see the veils of verbal dissimulation behind which he has long hidden, begin to fall away. The appointment of Robert Mueller — described as “America’s straightest arrow” — as special counsel to investigate allegations of Russian interference in the elections that led to Trump’s march to the White House marks a severe blow to an already embattled administration. Fiercely independent, Mueller was the longest-serving director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation since its founding head, J. Edgar Hoover.
He served a 10-year term after being appointed by George W. Bush, only to be reappointed for a special two-year term by President Barack Obama, a decision that required special legislation and made him the only FBI chief to be appointed by two separate presidents. He has since served as a moral force in corporate affairs, often gently nudging unwilling business leaders to open cans of worms they would have rather left closed. Trump, who fired FBI director James Comey in an effort to slow down the Russia investigation, thus finds himself facing two former FBI bosses, not one.
Trump has reacted with predictable hostility to the decision, claiming that no politician in history “has been treated worse or more unfairly”. This, his critics say, is a fig leaf to hide patent illegality. The case, in essence, concerns campaign-time contacts between members of the Trump team, including fired National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, and Russian officials, discussing setting up a back-channel to improve relations that would bypass the United States national security bureaucracy.
The contacts — monitored by United States intelligence services listening in to Russian officials — are alleged to have led Russia to unleash a barrage of fake news through social media that helped the Trump campaign. There are also allegations, unearthed in a private investigation by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, that Trump was compromised by Russia, using sex workers, and then blackmailed to support policies that would divide the US and its European allies.
No-one knows for certain, obviously, whether any of these allegations are true but Mueller’s record shows he has both the tenacity and integrity to find out. The former FBI chief’s appointment is a tribute to the institutional resilience and integrity of the US system.
In few other democracies, after all, would an independent prosecutor be appointed with a mandate to unearth possible wrong-doing by the chief executive, on the basis of what is, after all, relatively thin evidence. Trump’s early actions suggest he expects trouble; the President has begun distancing himself from members of his staff, perhaps in anticipation of being forced to sacrifice some as the investigation unfolds. In the end, the investigation will likely be a salutary lesson that democracy works best if citizens refuse to be seduced by demagogues.
