Mueller passes Ongoing Investigation to Granddaughter, years after Trump finished Second Term

Dateline: D.C., Year 2031—Special Counsel Robert Mueller passed away on March 10, 2031, but shortly before he died he handed to his granddaughter the ongoing investigation into former President Trump’s 2016 campaign and financial connections with Russia. 

At a press conference she vowed to continue the investigation until her death and to carry on her grandfather’s policy of not telling anyone what the investigation has uncovered.

For his part, Donald Trump was reelected in 2020 and served the full eight years as president, leaving much of the United States in ruins.

When the Second American Civil War led to the destruction of FBI headquarters shortly after Mr. Trump’s reelection, Mr. Mueller carried on the investigation from his home’s barricaded garage.

In 2020, roughly 204 million Americans signed a petition demanding that Mr. Mueller “hurry the fuck up” with his investigation, but the special council refused to “speed up his legal process,” as he put it.

The fact that Mr. Mueller persisted with the investigation even after Donald Trump completed his second term and then after the former president died in 2028 led surviving legal experts, political pseudoscientists, and media personalities to speculate as to what the unseemly cause might be of Mr. Mueller’s absurd obsession with secrecy.

“I can understand if an ultra-meticulous lawyer wants to build the perfect case,” said law professor Raymond Legalese. “And if you’re going up against the president, you’ve obviously got to ensure your case satisfies the most rigorous legal standard.

“But there was never any realistic expectation that the legal case against Trump mattered more than the political one. The Republican-led Senate was never going to convict President Trump even were he to have been impeached, and Donald Trump had millions of dollars to spend on delaying any subsequent criminal or civil cases against him, until his death would have made such cases moot. Therefore, all that ever mattered was the court of public opinion, which the shameless demagogue Trump managed far better than the conscientious Democrats ever could have done.”

The mystery, then, was why under those circumstances Mr. Mueller would not only carry on and take so seriously an impractical investigation, but keep his findings secret long past the point when the investigation had lost even its theoretical significance. Why did Mr. Mueller pass the investigation to his granddaughter who has likewise sworn to keep the findings secret?

According to Mr. Legalese, “the answer can be found in an old book by John Ralston Saul, called Voltaire’s Bastards. Saul argued that in a modern, rationalist, neoliberal society, everyone’s importance depends on his or her place within a system, because the system and its often inhuman rules come to matter more than the citizens who are ruled by them.

“Saul wrote, ‘The measurement of our power is based upon the knowledge which either passes through our position or is produced by it,’ and so ‘the individual can most easily exercise power by retaining the knowledge which is in his hands. Thus, he blocks the flow of paper or of information or of instructions through his intersection to the next’ in the social system.

“Saul concludes that ‘the encouragement of such retention has become a religion of constipation’ in the puritanical West.

“This is the heart of the matter. Mr. Mueller appeared to have suffered from a severe case of spiritual constipation. He kept the investigation going and he kept it secret because he felt that doing so gave him power.

“Even when that power was lost, after the investigation’s legal and political window of opportunity was closed when Mr. Trump served his full two terms, having dragged the country into civil war and wholly discredited the American political and legal systems, Robert Mueller pursued the investigation because he couldn’t let it go; he was constipated.”