Is the Mar a Lago search Mueller redux?

Well, no, but there are similarities.

Donald Trump has already provided us with his own summary of the similarities between the two, very serious probes:  both are “witch hunts,” according to the enraged former president.  Trump has been enraged continuously since the afternoon of his first-ever press conference in February 2017 after being elected president when he was asked about contacts between his campaign and Russia during the contest for the presidency in 2016. 

Jeez, typing those two years makes the whole thing seem like ancient history…and it is, because it’s been going on for so long.  Trump has been under investigation for one thing or another since FBI Director James Comey revealed at a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee that an investigation into contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russian intelligence operatives had been opened in July of 2016.  That probe morphed into what became known as the Mueller investigation, named after Special Counsel Robert Mueller, himself a former FBI director and Deputy Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division of the DOJ.

Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign lasted for two years, from May of 2017 to May of 2019 and resulted in indictments and convictions of several top officials of the Trump campaign including its chairman, Paul Manafort, and other, lesser, figures such as George Papadopoulos (a foreign policy adviser), Michael Flynn (a campaign adviser who briefly became Trump’s first National Security Adviser), Rick Gates (deputy campaign chairman), Roger Stone (informal adviser to candidate Trump) and several others.  None were convicted of contacts with Russia, however.  Most were convicted of so-called process crimes such as obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI, or in Manafort’s case, tax and bank fraud unrelated to the campaign.  Mueller also indicted and convicted in absentia 25 Russians for interfering with the campaign and for stealing and leaking DNC and Clinton emails, crimes that ended up being serious factors in Clinton’s loss in the election.

In the end, Mueller issued a report to the Department of Justice that failed to find that members of the Trump campaign conspired with Russians to interfere in the 2016 campaign.  The report however did find that Trump had engaged in numerous instances of obstruction of justice but concluded that the evidence of obstruction “did not form a basis for prosecution.”

The Mueller investigation was followed by another investigation of Trump for attempting to get a foreign power to interfere in the election of 2020.  This time it was Ukraine.  Trump attempted to essentially blackmail its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, into helping him defeat Joe Biden by threatening to withhold $400 million in military aid Ukraine badly needed in its fight against Russian aggression on its eastern border, which had been going on since 2014.  The House Judiciary Committee began an impeachment investigation for the Ukraine conspiracy leading to Trump’s impeachment but failing to convict him in a party-line vote in the Senate which failed to reach the two thirds vote necessary to convict.

And then Trump was investigated again for inciting the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, leading to his second impeachment, this one after leaving office.  The Senate again failed to convict him in another largely party-line vote.

What are the differences between the Mueller investigation and the investigation of Trump currently underway by the Department of Justice under Attorney General Merrick Garland, which led most recently to the search of Trump’s home Mar a Lago in Palm Beach, Florida? 

Well, the Mueller probe was a special counsel investigation separate from the DOJ, even though Mueller had been appointed by then Attorney General Jeff Sessions.  The Mueller investigation team was housed in rented offices in a building separate from the Department of Justice building in Washington, and far fewer investigators and assistant attorneys general were assigned to the Mueller probe. This time the investigation is being overseen by the Attorney General himself and is being run out of the DOJ building in Washington.