Is Mueller off in left field?

George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman, has hovered on the fringes of international diplomacy for three decades. He was a back-channel negotiator with Syria during the Clinton administration, reinvented himself as an adviser to the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, and last year was a frequent visitor to President Trump’s White House.

Mr. Nader is now a focus of the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel. In recent weeks, Mr. Mueller’s investigators have questioned Mr. Nader and have pressed witnesses for information about any possible attempts by the Emiratis to buy political influence by directing money to support Mr. Trump during the presidential campaign, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

As many wise investigators will tell you, the key to proving a case is to find the evidence. They will tell you that generally speaking investigators who spend most of their time trying to get a variety of people to confess to crimes, are doing so because they simply have no evidence.

There are many different stories being painted about the Mueller investigation. On one hand, you have the never ending stories from certain members of the press who continue to tell us that Mueller is closing in, that he is cornering the President, that he is just a line or two away from connecting the dots. On the other hand, you have many who will tell you that Mueller is behaving exactly like an investigator who is becoming increasingly frustrated chasing around in search of a crime he is cannot even be certain exists.

Now, certainly both theories could ultimately be the reality.

Mueller really might have all sorts of evidence piled up in his virtual evidence vault, and he is simply carefully biding his time, lining up his ducks, crossing the t's and dotting the i's.  Perhaps in moving his focus towards a Lebanese businessman he is simply trying to pile on a few extra crimes to charge the Trump team with.

Or, as others suggest Mueller talking to a Lebanese businessman is a sign that he still has nothing to show for his time, and that his hunt for "any" evidence of collusion has been expanded by necessity. These are the ones who see Mueller as frustrated, out to get scalps by any means, and desperate to find something/anything to tie someone named Trump to some sort of crime.

The bigger problem Mueller, and ultimately Rosenstein run into at this point is the so called expansion of the investigation provides plenty of ammunition for critics to allege abuse. Those allegations become more and more real depending on how much Mueller has actually found.

Now provided Mueller does have solid evidence of corruption and crimes, then expanding out to see just how far this corruption goes is warranted. Nobody would (or should) question the decision to check for "more" of the same sort of corruption that Trump (theoretically) engaged in with Russians. Simple logic dictates that if he colluded with the Russians for election help, then he probably colluded with other foreign powers as well.

But imagine for a second that critics are correct and Mueller has no real evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Considering that many people felt that the entire appointment of special counsel was dubious to begin with, the lack of finding anything confirms their doubts. But it would be a much bigger problem would be if Rosenstein allowed Mueller to keep fishing into other areas without strong evidence that there is some crime involved. You simply don't get to use special prosecutors with unlimited budgets to hunt for crimes without probable cause to believe they have been committed.

Bottom line: The difference between this being a legitimate, thorough investigation by the Mueller team, and it being a problematic witch hunt is entirely based on the hard evidence of criminal activity that Mueller has actually found. If he has hard evidence of criminal conspiracy, then everything he is doing (including expanding this toward other foreign interests) is legitimate and necessary. If he has not found any hard evidence of criminal conspiracy at this point, then it's certainly fair to call an expansion of the investigation as political witch hunt.

At this point... we really don't know for sure the truth.