"That's a dirty story! Bob Mueller doesn't want to have to tell that on TV"

Since the former governor of Massachusetts, Bill Weld pointed out that both he and Robert Mueller had been friends of Donald Trump's taxpayer funded lawyer William Barr, what he said about the revelation that the model of rectitude, Robert Mueller's condition that he would only testify to the House Judiciary Committee in closed session on Lawrence O'Donnell's show last night was refreshingly honest.

Well, Lawrence,  I think that that Bob Mueller is totally up to testifying in public.  He was head of the FBI for twelve years, he was grilled by Congress, both parties many, many times.  And he was my deputy in the U.S. Attorney's office in Boston and I remember I went to dinner in New York where he was giving a speech, twelve years later after he had served so long and ably in the FBI.  He's a totally different guy, he's a very, very consummate, experienced guy, so he would be up to it [testifying to the House  Judiciary Committee].

I think what's going on here is Bob is so straight, he doesn't necessarily want to say how the process has been perverted and my reading of what happened behind closed doors - Bob Mueller's report says we decided not to make a traditional prosecutive judgment because we really couldn't.  

Translation: Bill Barr told me that he was going to squash any indictment I tried to bring against the president for obstruction.  That's a dirty story!  Bob Mueller doesn't want to have to tell that on TV and I think that's exactly what's going on here. 

To which I say, Robert Mueller is entirely too full of himself if that's really his reason, if that's his real reason, we'd better know about that and depend on the judgement of those who know the case but are ready to put American democracy before a crooked pal. "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country," might make an overly clever line for for some second-string scribbler like E. M. Forster to pen, it might make it for sustaining a class-ridden Britain, American democracy can't survive it.

As both O'Donnell and Bill Weld pointed out, Robert Mueller has made a lifetime career of serving in the government, being appointed by presidents, being hired on the basis of his identity as a Republican to fill posts in Republican administrations, he has testified IN PUBLIC at hearings before, he has basked in the adulation of politicians and had his highly vaunted integrity lauded over and over again.  For him to belatedly get shy about presenting the findings of his most important work - the object of which is merely saving American democracy from its enemies foreign and domestic - is not credible, it is certainly not honorable, his given reason is certainly not straight.

I think that as Bill Weld said, he doesn't want to have to say that his good buddy Barr said he'd refuse to bring an indictment of the very indictable Donald Trump, that Barr said or made known to him that he was not to call for an indictment, that he would have to reveal Barr's very political ratfucking in league with the enemies of American democracy, domestic, for sure, in league with those who are foreign enemies, that he did so in pursuit of his fascistic conception of a Republican-fascist presidency with the power to break any law with impunity, the last Constitutional resort of impeachment being about as real as Donald Trump's hair color.

Robert Mueller's pose of integrity is anything but that if he doesn't carry this through IN PUBLIC ON TELEVISION.  If he refuses to lay out all of the filth that he has witnessed, including by Barr, it is him putting a buddy of his same political orientation, of his political party above the good of the country.

For him to strike that pose after seeing what Barr has been doing to his report for the past two months is an act that deserves to go down in history as among the more infamous betrayals of public trust.   I am not good buddies with Robert Mueller, I don't have any reason to trust the common DC - NYC media and establishment consensus on his reputation. Even some of those I might have some regard for are way too quick to treat those in power with entirely too much deference and a pose of respect. 

In Robert Mueller I see a man who may have not been the worst of Republican-establishment apparatchiks but one who, in this crisis, has chosen his sides knowing better than almost anyone else what that means, ducking the full measure of the responsibility that he assumed when he agreed to conduct this most important of jobs.

Update:  I should have added the very last sentence of what Bill Weld said in that passage,  "He's such a gentleman!"  Well, the old saying goes, "The devil is a gentleman."   If that's what a gentleman does, to hell with such gentlemen.