By Quin Hillyer at the Washington Examiner;
At the risk of sounding rude, can we demand that talking heads and yelling yahoos shrieking about special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia-related investigation just shut their yaps for now?
The rushing to verdicts, the jumping to conclusions, the hyper-spin, and breathless breast-beating: All of it is too much, too soon, too uninformed, and too entirely irresponsible.
The truth, aside from the narrow facts included in the actual, discrete indictments filed against Paul Manafort and two others, is that we really don’t know where Mueller’s investigation is going. We don’t know whether the investigation itself is compromised, or whether it is virtually the Lord’s own work, or something in between. We don’t know whether it means curtains for President Trump or exonerates him, or neither. And we don’t know whether Mueller’s team is pursuing anything having to do with the Clintons or Uranium One.
We don’t know, and what we don’t know, we should just shut up about.
Yet all week long, Trumpies have been yelling that these narrow indictments show that Trump and his close advisers did nothing wrong or that the paucity of the charges show there was no good reason to appoint Mueller in the first place or — well, insert your own example of Sean Hannity-style Trump toadyism.
On the other side, all week long, the old establishment media and purveyors of conventional wisdom-cum-idiocy have been pronouncing the developments horrid for Trump, and asserting that Trump is morally guilty already just because he hired Manafort — or whatever other nonsense their fondest anti-Trump dreams can conjure up.
Hence these dueling headlines at RealClearPolitics: “Mueller is unraveling Russian meddling. Let him finish his job” versus “Mueller is running amok.” Or: “Still no Trump-Russia ‘collusion,’ but Clinton looks guilty.” And also, “Mueller’s thin gruel.”
And on and on and on.
Almost all of this is speculation. Almost none is well-informed. Much of it shows near-complete obliviousness to how actual criminal investigations work….
