Better in their words…

JEFF CHILDERS. MAR 22, 2026

Robert Mueller’s mysterious death at 81. How many people did he really hurt? Massachusetts lost $4.2 BILLION in income after its millionaire tax. Manhattan’s median rent hitting an all-time $5,000 thanks to laws to help renters! NYT’s profile of Don Lemon so devastating you think it was written by The Epoch Times. mrossol

ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “Robert Mueller, Former FBI Director Who Led Trump Inquiry, Dies at 81.” Mueller may be more responsible for President Trump’s persecution for made-up national security crimes than any single person. The Times said Mueller “brought politically explosive indictments” and labeled him a “liberal Republican.” President Trump —who the Times described as “remaining unforgiving”— netted a news cycle of performative outrage when he tweeted, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”

Like much else about the man, Mueller’s death remains shrouded in mystery. His obituary “did not say where he died or specify the cause.” Our only hint was that the former FBI Director was diagnosed with Parkinson’s during the year of the jab (2021), but didn’t announce it till last year. Of course, he was also 81, so.

Nine years ago, on May 17, 2017, which was eight days after Mr. Trump dismissed FBI Director James Comey —who this week received fresh subpoenas— the deep-state’s DOJ excreted Robert Swan Mueller, III, as special counsel to investigate the newly elected president. Mueller’s reputation was broadcast as unimpeachable: Republican, former Marine, decorated Vietnam veteran, and longest-serving FBI Director (2001-2013) since J. Edgar Hoover.

The appointment made Mueller the figurehead for the most expensive, most hyped, and most catastrophically unsuccessful political investigation in modern American history.

🔥 In May 2017, after cowardly Jeff Sessions inexplicably recused himself from anything Russia-related, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller as Special Counsel to investigate “Russian government efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election.” What followed was 22 months and roughly $32 million of taxpayer-funded political theater, fueled by the now-discredited Steele dossier, which itself had been funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Mueller’s team was really Andrew Weissmann’s team, since the aging Mueller increasingly appeared to be just a creaky figurehead. The team ultimately secured 37 indictments. Trad-media loves to trumpet that figure, but even a quick glance at the details shows how fruitless it all really was:

• Mueller indicted Paul Manafort for tax and bank fraud from years beforehe joined the Trump campaign— but nothing to do with Russia.
• Mueller indicted Michael Flynn for lying to FBI investigators during an interview in which the agents themselves said they didn’t believe he was lying. Later pardoned.
• Mueller gave George Papadopoulos 14 days in prison for making a false statement about the date of a meeting.
• Mueller indicted Roger Stone for obstruction and witness tampering related to the investigation itself— process crimes having nothing to do with Russia.
• Mueller indicted thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian companies for social media trolling. No arrests, no convictions. When one indicted Russian company actually arrived to fight the charges, Mueller’s team delayed as long as it could and then finally dismissed the case. More cowards.

Not one American was ever charged for conspiring with Russia to “influence” the election. Zero. Zilch. The investigation’s central premise was a dry hole. It wasn’t a justice system; it was a drunken lynch mob that strung up some innocent cowboys and then got lost in the desert.

🔥 The eponymous Mueller Report, released in April 2019, found —in Mueller’s own carefully lawyered language— that “the investigation did notestablish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.” Now you tell us. After two years, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, 500 witness interviews, four men jailed or ruined over process crimes, and tens of millions spent on lawyers and investigators, the answer was: never mind.

Even on the obstruction charge —another process crime— Mueller punted, saying he couldn’t charge Trump but also couldn’t exonerate him— an unprecedented legal non-conclusion that satisfied nobody and violated the basic prosecutorial principle that you either charge someone or you don’t. In reality, it was Schrödinger’s Indictment; a way to permanently smear the President, leaving an open question for Democrats and their op-ed authors to drive a fleet of defamatory trucks through.

A few months later, Mueller’s July 2019 Congressional testimony was supposed to be the Democrats’ made-for-TV moment. Watching it was like having gravel slowly picked out of your face after a road rash accident. Mueller pulled a Biden. He seemed dazed and confused. He repeatedly asked lawmakers to repeat their questions. He couldn’t recall key details of his own report. And he deflected with “that’s not within my purview” so often that it became a meme.

Mueller’s inability to answer simple questions raised serious concerns about who had actually been running the investigation— further evidence that Mueller had just lent his name to help the deep-state manufacture some institutional credibility.

🔥 Mueller was a serial killer. Trump’s persecution was Mueller’s worst case of character assassination-disguised-as-justice, but it wasn’t Mueller’s first. As FBI Director, he oversaw the catastrophic anthrax investigation after 9/11, in which the Bureau hounded an innocent man, scientist Steven Hatfill, for years, destroying his career and reputation, before the government was forced to pay Hatfill $5.8 million to settle his lawsuit. (The New York Times also had to cough up a settlement.) The suspected real anthrax killer, Bruce Ivins, committed suicide in 2008 after the FBI finally turned its attention toward him (and even that conclusion remains disputed).

In one cartoonish incident, FBI agents tailing Dr. Hatfill in a car literally ran over his foot when he approached them. The cops cited Hatfill for “walking to create a hazard”— not the agent who squashed his toes. The DOJ debarred him from government grants. LSU fired him. He became unemployable, and his stellar scientific reputation as a biodefense researcher was annihilated.

Either way, Mueller wasted years slaughtering Dr. Hatfill’s career and never caught the real killer.

At the end of the long day, Mueller’s final, deplorable legacy was RussiaGateitself: the most corrosive, destructive, and ultimately baseless political conspiracy theory of the 21st century. For three years, half the country was assured —by trad-media, by Congress, by 51 former intelligence officials chattering on cable news channels— that the President of the United States was a Russian asset.

That sinister theory consumed the national conversation, paralyzed governance, sparked impeachments, and poisoned public trust in failing institutions already on life support.

Mueller didn’t create RussiaGate by himself. But he was its willing tool. At a critical moment, he handed the conspirators the one thing they needed most to transform a completely made-up fantasy into a reality that hamstrung a president and turned the country inside-out: the appearance of legitimacy. RussiaGate could never have happened without Robert Swan Mueller. He was an evil man who immeasurably injured America on purpose.

And then, when Mueller’s RussiaGate operation finally imploded in shame and disgrace, covid magically appeared. That one worked. (But I digress.)

🔥 Like just about everyone else, I was initially shocked at the bare-knuckled hostility of Trump’s mean tweet when it sprang into my social media feed. Predictably, Democrats —who cackled like mental patients after Charlie Kirkwas assassinated— piled on with their daily dose of political outrage. But so did some squishy Republicans. For instance, Fox’s Brit Hume:

It forced me to take a moment and reflect. Did Brit have a point? How should I write about Trump’s comments in an intellectually honest way after criticizing progressives for celebrating Charlie Kirk’s killing? Did President Trump breach a moral duty not to speak ill of the dead? Should he have stayed silent, saying nothing since he had nothing good to say?

I quickly worked it out. Brit does not have a point. He’s lost the plot. Mueller’s mysterious death at 81 was nothing like Charlie Kirk’s appalling assassination.

🔥 Firstly, President Trump didn’t speak ill of Mueller for any cheap political thrill, like gleeful Democrats did after Kirk was killed. Trump and Mueller knew each other. They had a relationship. Trump was Mueller’s victim.

Take Trump out of it and consider a different hypothetical. What would you say if a woman who survived a brutal rape assault tweeted her satisfaction after the rapist died in prison? Good, I’m glad he’s dead. Like the Times, would you shake your head and say she “remained unforgiving?” Like Brit Hume, would you insist that “saying that kind of stuff makes people hate her?”

Probably not.

In other words, it’s not like Trump didn’t even know Mueller. Mueller persecuted Trump. And not just the President— his friends, his family, and arguably half of the country that voted for him. While we might hope the rape survivor would learn to forgive her attacker, we do not morally require her to do so. And we certainly do not condemn her for expressing her anger as a victim, lest we ourselves morally fail to show sympathy for the victim.

How about Steven Hatfill? What if Dr. Hatfill had said he was glad his persecutor, Mueller, was dead? Would we condemn him for it? Or would we uneasily understand?

The truth is, I have no idea how I would feel in Trump’s place. I would like to think that I would handle it more gracefully than he did. But how can any of us really know until we’ve walked the president’s path? That’s the point; we refrain from judging victims because, with our cheap criticism, we only condemn ourselves.

Brit Hume condemned himself. He failed to recognize Trump’s victimhood and righteous anger, because Brit doesn’t think Mueller did anything wrong (except maybe fail to get the goods). The Times was more right than Brit was— Trump’s transgression, if any, was not speaking ill of the dead. It’s only that he hasn’t yet forgiven Mueller. While President Trump draws breath, there remains time. Maybe after Trump has beaten the deep state for good, he’ll have more free time to reflect on forgiveness.

Second and finally, just switch out the characters, and you’ll see how hollow the Democrat and RINO criticism is. Let’s use their favorite historical figure! If Hitler had died and then Biden stammered, “Good, I’m glad he’s, you know, the thing,” then “liberal Republicans” would all nod in approving agreement like a warehouse full of bobblehead dolls.

So, while I won’t say I’m glad Mueller is dead, neither will I criticize Mueller’s victims for having strong feelings about it, either. I sympathize with Mueller’s victims. Brit, you should apologize.

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Bloomberg ran an accidentally hilarious story Thursday headlined, “Massachusetts Lost $4 Billion of Income After Millionaire Tax.” In 2022, Massachusetts voters approved a 4% surtax on incomes over $1 million —on top of the state’s existing 5% income tax— to fund ‘schools and transportation.’ It was for the children! And for the roads. Newly published IRS data now shows that in 2023, the first year of the surtax, residents fleeing the state took a net $4.2 billion in adjusted gross income with them.

The numbers tell their own Aesop’s fable. Fewer people left Massachusetts in 2023 than in 2022— but the ones who did leave were much richer. Top earners accounted for 70% of the $4.2 billion outflow, more than double the share from 2019. In other words, Massachusetts isn’t losing a few feathers, it’s losing the golden geese. The regular geese are stuck in traffic on the Mass Turnpike. The golden ones are nesting poolside in Palm Beach.

Surtax supporters love to point out that it’s raised more than $6 billion since 2023, with collections jumping 19% this year. See? It’s working! But that’s like a farmer bragging about the giant omelet he made while the henhouse empties out behind him. “We are trying to make money on a smaller tax base,” warned Jim Stergios, executive director of Boston-based Pioneer Institute. “It’s going to be harder.” It’s going to be impossible, Jim.

These aren’t billionaires relocating their yachts. According to the Boston Business Journal, the exodus is being led by young workers and high earners— tech professionals, startup founders, the very people Massachusetts spent a fortune educating at its world-class universities, who are now taking their six-figure salaries to states that don’t punish ambition. They aren’t just golden geese. They’re the future golden eggs, the people whose incomes would have grown for decades. Massachusetts isn’t plucking a few eggs off the goose tree; it’s harvesting the roots.

And here’s where the story gets really self-destructive. Despite Massachusetts staging a live, real-time demonstration of what happens when you reach for the golden goose’s neck, other blue states are lining up to try it.Washington State —which has never had an income tax— just enacted a millionaire tax this month.

This is the same Washington that spent $143 million to move 126 homeless people out of homelessness —over a million dollars per homeless person— and is now asking ‘millionaires’ to fund more of the same. California is considering a full-on wealth tax on billionaires’ net worth. Rhode Island and Illinois are pushing similar proposals. Governor Pritzker actually cited Massachusetts as a success story.

These states are caught in economic doom loops of their own making. Federal spending cuts under Trump and DOGE are squeezing blue-state budgets. So they raise taxes on ‘the rich.’ The ‘rich’ —mostly young professionals with the most lifetime earnings to lose— move to Florida and Texas, where there’s no state income tax and where the weather doesn’t try to turn you into a human popsicle seven months a year. The tax base shrinks. Revenue falls short. So they raise taxes again. Rinse and repeat until the last high achiever shuts off the lights on his way to Fort Lauderdale.

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, somehow keeping a straight face, is now fighting a ballot initiative that would cut the state income tax from 5% to 4%, warning it will ‘blow a hole’ in the state’s budget. She’s worried about losing revenue from a rate cut while actively losing the people who pay the revenue. It’s like bailing water out of a sinking boat while the first mate drills ventilation holes in the hull.

The Laffer Curve remains undefeated.

🔥 In related news from the progressive economic laboratory, the New York Post reported Saturday, “Manhattan median rent soars to ‘all-time high’ of $5,000 — experts warn it will only get worse.” Five thousand dollars. Median. That means half of Manhattan’s rentals cost more than that. The communist experiment is going great!

How did they get here? The usual way: by helping. New York’s FARE Act —“Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses”— was supposed to save tenants money by forcing whoever hired a broker to pay the broker’s fee instead of sticking the tenant with it. Brilliant! Except landlords just added the fee to the rents, permanently raising the base price even for renters who don’t use a broker.

As one Manhattan broker told the Post, the law “made landlords bake this fee into rent, which now has raised the price of rent.” Imagine that.

Then there’s the Housing Stability and Protection Act, which clamped standards down so hard on landlords that many can’t afford to renovate vacant rent-stabilized units and put them back on the market. Result: a 2% vacancy rate and 26% fewer listings than a year ago. The apartments exist. They’re just … sitting empty, because Albany made it economically irrational to rent them out.

In short, the rent laws raised rents— not landlords. The vacancy protections created vacancies— not demand. And socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s solution is to threaten to freeze the rent — which will obviously cause even fewer apartments to hit the market, driving rents even higher for units that remain.

Gosh. It’s almost like every government intervention makes it worse. Welcome to the government help doom loop, Manhattan edition. As Ronald Reagan sagely observed, the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.

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What does it say about the conservative counter-revolution when the New York Times throws Don Lemon under the bus? The New York Times Magazine published an absolutely stunning 4,000-word profile piece this morning headlined, “‘I Am the News’: The Absurd Drama (and High Stakes) of the Don Lemon Affair.” Technically, it was a quasi-sympathetic portrait of a brave journalist standing up to the Trump machine. In reality, it was one of the most exquisitely brutal takedowns I’ve ever seen published by a major newspaper— of one of its own allies.

The profile followed Lemon —the former CNN host fired in 2023 for suggesting on air that Nikki Haley was past her prime because “women peak in their 20s and 30s”— through his reinvention as a YouTube streamer broadcasting from his Greenwich Village apartment in a “LEMON LIVE” T-shirt under a “LEMON LIVE” sweatshirt, twelve feet from his kitchen, while “three dogs (one wearing a diaper) stirred at his shoeless feet.”

That’s how the article described him. Seriously. The whole thing almost sounds like something I wrote.

His audience, the Times explained, consists of “the kinds of news consumers who kept their Obama-Biden bumper stickers and really believed in Robert Mueller.” They ran this on the weekend of Mueller’s death. Amazing. They were mocking their own readers.

The nominal hook was Lemon’s federal indictment for terrorizing a St. Paul church service during an anti-ICE protest in January. But the article’s realachievement was cataloging, with deadpan precision, the most astonishing collection of unintentional self-owns since Joe Biden’s final press conference.

Let’s take a tour through the highlights. (But you should really read the whole thing. I provided a non-paywalled gift link.) The article reported the following things, just like this (it’s not a Jeff edit):

🍋 Lemon livestreamed himself entering the church, urged viewers to “like and subscribe, become a member, support independent journalism” while people were praying, acknowledged on camera that a young man in the corner was scared and crying, and then, walking to his car afterward, told his audience with a smile, “I might get arrested, people. One never knows.”

🍋 His comedian touring partner, D.L. Hughley, laughably compared Lemon to Rosa Parks. And then said the Democrat party was pining for “a future progressive Trump.” Lemon’s response: “So, should I run?” The crowd roared. Lemon’s lack of self-awareness could power a small city.

🍋 The man who spent years on CNN calling everything Trump did a “dog whistle” does not, the article reported, understand what a dog whistle literallyis. When his own spokeswoman tried to explain that the ultrasonic device he uses on his dogs is, in fact, a dog whistle, Lemon protested. She had to tell him twice. “That’s what a dog whistle is, Don,” she said firmly. He turned to the reporter and begged, “Don’t write this!” The reporter wrote it.

🍋 Lemon bragged that his therapist told him, “You are Black history.” Lemon said he wept and did not disagree.

🍋 He once tried to get Kamala Harris to call herself a “Lemon Head” on camera. She looked perplexed and politely declined. “I’m nobody’s head,” the cackler insisted.

🍋 His former CNN colleague S.E. Cupp was asked whether elevating Lemon to ambassador for American journalism was “healthy.” She laughed and said, “No comment. You can quote me.”

🍋 And the pièce de résistance: after his arrest made international headlines, Lemon’s biggest concern wasn’t the federal charges. It was whether there would be “crazy media” at his arraignment. Not, Will I go to prison? But, Will anyone still be watching?

Fellow CNN exile Chris Cillizza summarized the new-media economy with admirable honesty: “If you want to start something and you’re solving for money primarily, be as consistently pro-Trump or anti-Trump as possible.” There it is: the influencer business model, stripped bare.

The Times closed by calling Lemon “our most 2026 journalist: unaffiliated and unbound, self-immolating and self-regarding, deeply trusted by a fragmented audience in an age of fragmentation.” The line was almost a work of art. Self-immolating. Self-regarding. Fragmented. That’s not praise. It was a eulogy for a dying industry, written by the industry’s flagship paper.

The most significant thing about this remarkable story was that the New York Times published it. It isn’t The Blaze dunking on Lemon. This is the house organ of the progressive establishment, holding a mirror up to its own readers and saying: this is what we’ve become. A man who doesn’t know what a dog whistle is, broadcasting in his socks next to a diapered dog, urging people to “like and subscribe” while terrified churchgoers pray, comparing himself to civil rights heroes, and the whole time he never wonders whether he might be wrong— just whether people might stop watching.

Look— I’m not saying that the Times has had a conservative epiphany or anything. Probably it’s just trying to squash competition from liberal journos going independent. Or maybe it knows Lemon is likely going down for the church invasion and wants some helpful separation. But still. That crack about people who really believed in Robert Mueller was telling.

If the Times is willing to say all that out loud, something truly has shifted. Let’s keep pushing.

Have a blessed Sunday! Thank you, as ever, for your continued loyal support of the C&C mission. Enjoy the rest of your weekend, and get back here tomorrow morning, for more nutritious and delicious essential news and commentary.

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