Commemorating the day, Trump took to Twitter, as he typically does, and wished a grand ol' congrats to the US of A on the eve of diving into "the second year of the greatest Witch Hunt in American History."
Mueller's investigation into Trump's alleged cosiness with Russia has yet to result in any evidence of criminal collusion, though it has turned up unrelated white collar financial crimes by former campaign officials — mostly before they ever joined the campaign.
Speaking to Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear, Ted Rall, an award-winning editorial cartoonist and columnist, called the investigation "singularly unimpressive."
"It just seems like a colossal waste of time," Rall told show hosts Brian Becker and John Kiriakou. "There has been absolutely no evidence of collusion between Trump's 2016 campaign and the Russian government that has come to light so far."
"It looks like the arrests and the searches and everything else has come down to what anyone with common sense could've figured out… that Trump is kind of a sleaze and that he is surrounded by sleazy people. We really didn't need to spend all this time and money and political energy into something that was so evident," he added.
Fellow guest Jim Kavanagh, editor of ThePolemicist.net, shot down Trump's claim that the Mueller probe was the "greatest Witch Hunt" in US history. (We can't forget Watergate, folks!)
"It is a political witch hunt in the sense that they're trying to find crimes to stitch up the man… and they probably will," Kavanagh told Becker. "There will probably be crimes of financial chicanery and money laundering."
To Rall, the entire investigation is also starting to look like a "conspiracy theory at this point."
"People are always looking for… more interesting, bigger, grandiose schemes… somehow there must be a bigger power involved here," the cartoonist said. "I think that's what happened here with the Hillary Clinton people, they just can't accept the fact that they woke up on election morning… reading she had 90 percent chance of winning an election and then having 90 percent chance of that not happening that evening."
"It has to do with the inability of people to understand that she was an atrocious candidate with a terrible campaign," Rall explained.
At the end of the day, Kavanagh stated, the entire investigation was really just a political witch hunt masked as a legal process — and therefore without the need for pitchforks or burning at the stake.
"It is, as Ted says, an absolute political waste of time… Donald Trump is probably guilty of some kind of crime and they may find it, but it is, again, from my point… the substitution of litigation for politics," the editor stressed before adding that "what they can't win politically, they go after via litigation."
The investigation is likely to go on for another year, according to Kavanagh, who believes that the end goal is more about targeting Russia than Donald Trump himself.
"The targets of this are not Donald Trump, but Russia in a geostrategic sense and American political dissident. I think the Clintonite Democratic party was furious at their loss… and after the campaign they sought a way to proceed politically, without taking up the issues that the progressive left had raised, and at the same time increased the pressure and pushed the country further in a direction of aggression toward Russia," he concluded.
