Sometimes beneath the noble exterior, human imperfection is exposed, and a sturdy reputation is shattered.

With the recent passing of Robert Mueller we are reminded that even accomplished figures can stumble into an abyss of poor decisions and regrettable mistakes. His tarnished legacy is the sad coda to a once towering life and career.

Mueller’s earlier service in the military and high government positions, including as director of the FBI, was commendable. But in May 2017, he agreed to serve as special counsel to investigate allegations that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

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What followed was a contemptible partisan inquisition that tore the nation apart and severely impaired Trump’s first term in office. Thuggish tactics, coercion, and threats were deployed, innocent people were targeted and persecuted and legal rights were shredded — leaving lives in ruins.

In the end, Mueller’s belated report found that there was no Trump-Russia conspiracy. Anyone with an ounce of common sense already knew that. It was all a hoax and the worst political fraud ever perpetrated. But the damage was done, and Mueller bears much of the blame. And the shame.

I recounted the ugly details in my book, “Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History.” As special counsel, Mueller’s actions were not only noxious but patently unfair to Trump and so many others.

In the end, Mueller’s belated report found that there was no Trump-Russia conspiracy. Anyone with an ounce of common sense already knew that. It was all a hoax and the worst political fraud ever perpetrated. 

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His inability to find a scintilla of incriminating evidence against Trump did not deter him. In violation of Justice Department rules, he publicly disparaged the president with tales of suspicious behavior instead of stating evidence that rose to the level of criminality.

The special counsel learned early in his investigation that there was no evidence of collusion and that the president had committed no crimes. Mueller admitted it to Trump’s lawyers in a meeting on March 5, 2018. He should have ended his misbegotten investigation right then and there, sparing the nation prolonged divisiveness and trauma.

But Mueller was obsessed and refused to do the right thing. Instead, he shifted his focus to whether the president somehow obstructed justice for, among other things, daring to publicly criticize the probe. Trump had a First Amendment right to do so, of course. Mueller didn’t care.

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He spent the next year chasing the elusive ghost of obstruction without success. It was especially ludicrous since fired FBI Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, both testified that no one had obstructed the bureau’s investigation and that the probe continued uninterrupted after Comey’s departure.

Former FBI director James Comey is seen testifying before Congress. Comey is expected to file a motion to dismiss his criminal case on Monday, Oct. 20, 2025, citing ‘vindictive’ prosecution. (Cheriss May/Getty Images)

No matter. In his March 2019 report, Mueller turned the law upside down with an incendiary statement guaranteed to ignite a fire under the president’s inveterate haters:

“While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

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Mueller’s rationale was unintelligible. As any lawyer will tell you, it is never the job of a prosecutor anywhere to exonerate people. By this one act, Mueller managed to reverse the burden of proof and invert the presumption of innocence, which are sacrosanct principles in American law.

He had no intention of treating Trump fairly or conforming to the law. Rather, Mueller spent 183 pages maligning Trump by implying that, under certain circumstances that did not actually exist, the facts might sustain an obstruction case.

Mueller declined to charge the president in a court of law but was determined to indict him in the court of public opinion with outlandish smears. He shrewdly created the impression that Trump might have engaged in wrongdoing because he could not prove otherwise. It was disgraceful.

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Mueller should never have accepted the job of special counsel. He had more than one disqualifying conflict of interest, including his close ties to Comey, who was a pivotal witness. The appointment itself had the insufferable Comey’s dirty fingerprints all over it.

The cover of Gregg Jarrett’s book the Russia collusion hoax, “Witch Hunt.”

Even worse, Mueller had met with the president in the Oval Office the day before he accepted the assignment to investigate Trump. It was a trap. The appointment by Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, was not just a perfidious act of retribution, it was contrary to federal regulations.

The ensuing witch hunt assumed an odious dimension as Mueller hired a “hit squad” of highly partisan prosecutors. They loathed Trump, and their toxic bias polluted the report they produced. But what they omitted was revealing.

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Nowhere in the 448 pages will you find a single word about the corrupt acts and gross misconduct at the FBI that formed the basis of Mueller’s probe. He also turned a blind eye to who engineered the collusion hoax to influence an election and destroy a presidency.

The fictional narrative was invented and funded by Hillary Clinton to sully her political opponent and tip the election in her favor. Behind a double firewall of hidden payments, her campaign and Democrats hired a bumbling ex-British spy, Christopher Steele, to conjure up a phony dossier that was then funneled to the FBI, DOJ, and the Trump-hating media, which eagerly gobbled it up as gospel.

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The faux scandal took flight. Yet all of that was deliberately ignored by Mueller and his confederates. The surreptitious acts of Clinton and her cronies to hustle and hype the nonexistent collusion conspiracy were brushed aside.

The magnum opus that Mueller eventually produced stands as an egocentric monument to the miscarriage of justice. When called to testify during televised hearings, it became an embarrassing spectacle. The special counsel stumbled and stammered. He seemed lost and confused.

Mueller struggled to understand basic questions. His answers were slow, halting, and uncertain. It was obvious that Mueller had not written the report that bore his name. He had a feeble grasp of the facts and seemed oblivious to the law that supposedly supported the evidence cited therein.

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The debacle of his disoriented discourse was a disaster politically and a calamity personally for Mueller. He was not what his vaunted reputation promised. His diminished mental acuity made plain that he had been little more than a detached figurehead, ceding command and control to his cadre of hyper-partisans.

Anyone who devotes his life and career to serving our country deserves our thanks. Tragically, for all of Mueller’s exemplary service earlier in his career, his final undertaking will forever stain his legacy. His mistakes and miscalculations were laid bare for all to see. As a consequence, he committed a grave disservice to the nation. History should remember it as a tragic epilogue to a life that was otherwise well lived.

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Travis Kalanick chose to ditch California on Dec. 18 for a reason. The Uber co-founder relocated from San Francisco to Austin, Texas, exactly 14 days before California’s would-be billionaire wealth tax residency deadline, dodging a potential $180 million hit on his $3.6 billion fortune. He made no secret of the calculation.

“Just to be clear, on Dec. 18, I moved to Texas. I don’t know what’s so specific about December 18, but let’s just say it’s prior to January,” Kalanick said in an interview with TPBN.

He joined Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Larry Page, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and PayPal and Founders Fund founder Peter Thiel in a steady procession of wealth abandoning blue states for Florida and Texas. Democrats have been engineering this for years. California, New York and now Washington state are running the same tax-hiking playbook at nearly the same moment, and the results are entirely predictable.

In New York City, socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made taxing the wealthy a centerpiece of his administration. He is pushing an additional 2 percent income tax surcharge on city residents earning over $1 million annually, along with corporate tax hikes he claims would generate billions toward closing a $5.4 billion budget deficit. His ultimatum to Albany is that approving those taxes is the only way to prevent the city from imposing a 9.5% property tax hike on everyone, including the working and middle class he says he represents.

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Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson speaks at a podium in Seattle. (Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images)

Democrat New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has repeatedly refused to go along, explaining at an event, “I don’t want to lose any more people to Palm Beach.” That admission does not come from someone who genuinely believes taxing the wealthy carries no consequences. Someone who believed that would not worry about Palm Beach. Even Hochul understands perfectly well what happens to a tax base when people leave. At least in New York, she has enough self-awareness to hold the line. Washington state Democrats do not.

Washington Democrats pushed Senate Bill 6346 through the legislature after an intense 25-hour floor debate. The bill imposes a 9.9% income tax on households earning over $1 million a year. Democrat Gov. Bob Ferguson has pledged to sign it.

Former state Attorney General Rob McKenna issued a legal memo calling the bill unconstitutional, pointing to nearly a century of settled precedent. Democrats already know that. Their strategy depends on it.

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In 1933, the Washington Supreme Court ruled in Culliton v. Chase that income is property under the state constitution. Article VII requires property to be taxed at a uniform rate, making a graduated income tax flatly unconstitutional. That ruling has held for 93 years. Washington voters have rejected income tax measures at the ballot box 10 separate times. 

Most recently, in 2010, a tax on households above $200,000 went down in 38 of 39 counties. The legislature’s 2021 capital gains tax only survived judicial review because the far-left state Supreme Court bent itself into a pretzel to absurdly classify it narrowly as an excise tax on a specific transaction. A broad millionaires’ income tax is legally distinct, and Democrats are using it to force the court’s hand.

That clean decision is the entire ballgame. Tax supporters are banking on a state Supreme Court now stacked with justices appointed by Democratic governors and backed by liberal interest groups. If Culliton falls, income is formally decoupled from property for the first time in Washington’s history. The uniformity requirement disappears.

Once that constitutional wall comes down, nothing prevents the legislature from lowering the threshold from $1 million to $500,000 to $200,000 to everyone who draws a paycheck. The millionaires’ tax is not the destination. It is the crowbar to push the income tax on everyone.

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The economic fallout is not waiting for any ruling.

Former state Attorney General Rob McKenna issued a legal memo calling the bill unconstitutional, pointing to nearly a century of settled precedent. Democrats already know that. Their strategy depends on it.

Bulwark Capital Management’s principal told The Jason Rantz Show on Seattle Red that he’s leaving the state and bringing his business with him. The CEO of Moment similarly said his business is ditching the state for Wyoming. Starbucks announced it is expanding its corporate footprint in Nashville, Tenn.

Meanwhile, Downtown Seattle’s office vacancy rate reached a record high above 30% in the final months of 2025, a figure the Downtown Seattle Association’s Jon Scholes tied directly to the city’s escalating tax burden. Scholes noted that Amazon has relocated thousands of employees to Bellevue and other King County locations over recent years due to the increasingly aggressive tax environment.

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An independent economic study found that Washington’s 2025 tax increases, already the largest in state history, are projected to cut wages by $3.7 billion in 2026 alone. The millionaires’ tax has not even taken effect yet. Seattle attorney Joe Wallin, who testified against the bill, warned that some of the bill’s effects will be invisible because new companies won’t come to Seattle or the state of Washington in the first place.

Every business that leaves or never arrives is a data point Washington Democrats will ignore on their way to the courthouse because their tax thirst is unquenchable.

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When not ignoring the consequences of their policies, Democrats stage bewilderment each time the wealthy and their businesses head for the exits. Hochul’s Palm Beach comment shows the bewilderment is a performance. Kalanick’s Dec. 18 timestamp tells the rest of the story.

Washington Democrats are deliberately passing a law they know is unconstitutional today because they are betting on a court packed with their allies tearing down the constitutional barrier tomorrow. The $1 million figure is a political fig leaf. The real agenda is a permanent, broad-based income tax on every Washingtonian, and this is precisely how they intend to get there.

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Republican Sen. Ted Cruz says that the U.S. is “unquestionably winning the war” with Iran.

And the conservative firebrand and three-term senator from Texas tells Fox News Digital that, in his opinion, President Donald Trump‘s “decision to launch this military action is the most consequential decision” of his presidency.

“If you look at how our military has carried out this action, it has been an incredible success,” Cruz emphasized in an interview this week.

But many Americans don’t agree with the senator’s reading on the nearly month-long strikes by the U.S. and Israel on Iran.

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Several new national surveys released this week, including a new Fox News poll, indicate that most Americans give the military strikes a thumbs down. But the surveys point to a continued broad partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans over the ongoing fighting in the volatile Middle East.

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The military attacks by the U.S. and Israel have resulted in the deaths of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top officials, and the decimation of the country’s military.

But Iran has retaliated with attacks against Israel and many of its other neighbors in the region.

A general view of Tehran, Iran with smoke visible in the distance after explosions were reported in the city, on March 2, 2026. (Contributor/Getty Images)

And Iran has targeted energy facilities with missile and drone attacks in a number of Persian Gulf nations. It has also made the Strait of Hormuz nearly impassable to commercial shipping, bringing to a halt roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply and in turn sending fuel prices skyrocketing in the U.S. and across the globe.

Asked about the ongoing operation, Cruz highlighted, “We’ve taken out virtually the entirety of their air defenses. We have taken out their short range and medium range ballistic missile launchers, their missiles, and their missile manufacturing capacity. Have taken out their drone launchers, their drones and their drone manufacturing capacity.”

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“We have executed over 9000 military strikes. We have sunk 140 of their ships. That is the largest… sinking of naval ships since World War Two, and on top of that, we’ve taken out the Ayatollah and virtually the entirety of the top military leaders. That is a profound victory,” the senator emphasized.

Cruz noted that he “spent the entire day” with Trump on the eve of the launch of the strikes, as the president traveled to Texas.

President Donald Trump shakes hands with Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in a Whataburger restaurant in Corpus Christi, Texas, on Feb. 27, 2026.  (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

“The day before he launched this military action, I was on Air Force One with him. He was flying down to Texas, and then he and I were one on one in the Beast, the Presidential limo, and we spent most of the day talking about, should he launch this military action, or should he negotiate further.”

Cruz recollected, “What I told him at the time is, I said, I don’t think there’s anything to negotiate. The Ayatollah is negotiating in bad faith and the regime was weaker than it ever has been.”

The senator highlighted that “the Ayatollah and the mullahs in Iran have been waging war against the United States for 47 years… Iran has been the number one state funder of terrorism in the world.”

According to the Fox News poll, a third of voters nationwide said the U.S. military action against Iran will make America safer, with 44% saying less safe and nearly one in four (23%) saying the strikes will make no difference.

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Cruz disagrees.

“The president decimating this regime has made America substantially safer, and that is his responsibility as commander in chief,” the senator stressed.