How Scared Should Trump Be of Mueller? Ask John Gotti or Sammy The Bull

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/how-scared-should-trump-be-of-mueller-ask-john-gotti-or-sammy-the-bull
How Scared Should Trump Be of Mueller? Ask John Gotti or Sammy “The Bull”
If history is any guide, Mueller will put up with 19 murders to get his mark.
by

Howard Blum

December 1, 2017 6:31 pm
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Gotti’s lawyer labored hard to make something of the fatuous hypocrisy that secured the government’s case. At one point he gestured to where the 12 jurors were seated and proclaimed that there weren’t enough seats to prop up the corpses of all the men that Gravano had killed. It was a nice bit of theatre, but in the end, when the curtain fell, Gotti was—at last!—found guilty.

And Robert Mueller, who would go on to head the F.B.I., had discovered the logic that is the unwritten precept in any treatise on the art of the deal: winning is better than losing. It is ample justification for most any compromise.

Now, as special counsel, he is once again making deals. He is still determined to get his man at all costs. First he flipped Papadopoulos. And then his office met with Robert Kelner, Michael Flynn’s lawyer. Many accusations were swirling around Flynn, including, not least, his alleged role in a complicated plot to kidnap Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen in return for a $15 million payday (a charge his lawyer has adamantly denied on his client’s behalf). But on Friday the deal was cut: Flynn was charged with one felony count of making a false statement to the F.B.I. regarding his potentially incriminating conversations with the Russian ambassador.

In return for getting off with what amounts to little more than a slap on his bony wrist—the maximum sentence the former general now faces is five years—Flynn will soon have to keep his side of the bargain. Can there be any doubt that the general who had chanted “Lock her up!” at the Republican National Convention has, like Gravano, agreed “to change sides?” Or is there any doubt that Mueller has brought Flynn into his fold because he has his eye fixed, once again, on bigger prey?


Rumors as to who told Flynn to talk to the Russians, and what he was told to say, are already swirling. Multiple reports on Friday fingered Jared Kushner, in what legal experts have suggested could be a violation of the Logan Act—a potentially outdated law, which makes it illegal for a private citizen to undermine U.S. policy in negotiation with a foreign power, but one that Mueller may use nonetheless. It is not difficult to imagine the wail of indignation, a keening and self-righteous outburst that would rival John Gotti’s at his moment of betrayed shock, that might rise out of the Oval Office when Flynn’s testimony finds its target.