‘The tip of a big, slimy iceberg’: GOP strategist explains why the Mueller report is hardly the end of Trump investigations

Thursday, April 18, 2019 will go down in history as the day in which Attorney General William Barr publicly released a redacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report for the Russia investigation. But Republican strategist Rick Wilson, one of President Donald Trump’s most vocal critics on the right, stresses in an opinion piece for the Daily Beast that Mueller’s report is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Trump’s legal concerns.

Wilson is highly critical of Barr in his piece, describing him as “a Justice Department head dedicated not to the law or our security, but to protecting Donald Trump’s ample ass.” But the GOP strategist stresses that regardless, “very smart legal minds” will be analyzing the report—which he describes as only “one more battle in a long war.”

“Even from the currently filed indictments and documents that have come to light, we know that the counterintelligence aspects of the Mueller investigation almost immediately, and in granular detail, identified the Russian influence operation that successfully manipulated the 2016 election,” Wilson notes. And he goes on to say that “we’ll get to see the grasping, venal eagerness Trump had to build a tower in Moscow.”

Trump-related investigations, Wilson emphasizes, will continue—and Mueller’s probe will hardly be the last one.

“The Mueller investigation has already given us an idea of the scuzzy, sleazy behavior of several of Trump’s close advisers, including Michael Cohen, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort,” Wilson writes. “We’ll see more, and it won’t be pretty. In many ways, this 400-page redaction is the tip of a big, slimy iceberg.”

Legal entities that will continue to carry out Trump-related investigations in the months ahead, Wilson writes, range from federal prosecutors for the Southern District of New York to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. “Those cases are ongoing, and like a minefield, still dangerous to Trump and his cronies,” Wilson points out.

Wilson concludes his piece by saying, in effect, that Trump’s claims of total vindication are misleading. “The wheels of justice grind notoriously slowly, but they grind fine,” Wilson asserts. “Sorry, Donald—the game is still on.”