Siege warfare is not a matter of striking precisely the correct blow at the correct moment at a particular stone in the wall. It is a campaign of degradation over a substantial period of time. While those inside the fortified city may only rely on the strength of their walls and their stored resources, the attackers can take their time. Volleys of projectiles—arrows or trebuchets—pepper the city walls and those atop them, while the strength of the defending army diminishes as soldiers slip away and food dwindles. Moreover, active conflict is an episodic, not a constant, feature of siege warfare; the enemy army can encamp outside of the walled city and blockade it without firing a shot. Over time, the walls and defending forces become degraded to such a degree that the invaders are able to scale the walls and sack the city.
No, Mueller and his forces are not a Mongol horde, but the Trump White House is very much under siege.
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There is also an encampment made up of private litigants. Trump is facing civil litigation regarding possible violation of the Emoluments Clause pending in the District Court for the District of Columbia. The plaintiffs are Democrat lawmakers. He also faces additional lawsuits challenging the the constitutionality of his appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general following the forced resignation of Jeff Sessions.
Finally, there’s the big new army marching on the Trump fortress, with an expected arrival of January 3, 2019: The leadership of the new Congress has already promised to intensify oversight of this administration. Representative Adam Schiff, incoming head of the House Intelligence Committee, has hintedat a restart of that committee’s moribund investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Other committees will be aggressive as well.
Meanwhile, the castle’s defenders are slipping away at night: John Dowd, the president’s personal lawyer, has left matters in the dubious hands of Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow. The White House counsel’s office is a ghost town. Ty Cobb and White House Counsel https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-counsel-don-mcgahn-officially-leaves-the-job/2018/10/17/d42bf59a-d27b-11e8-a275-81c671a50422_story.html?utm_term=.0b25b72b2343 (Don McGahn) are both gone. The office now appears to be manned by acting White House Counsel Emmett Flood and a skeleton staff of 25 lawyers (of the estimated 40 it would require to handle its workload).
So what will the big one look like, if not some Mueller-lobbed bombshell? When the walls are finally breached, how will we know it really is the beginning of the end? Here’s a hint: The big one will not be a legal development, an indictment, or a plea. It will be a political development: that moment when the American political system decides not to tolerate the facts available to it any longer. What does that look like? It looks like impeachment. It looks like enough Republicans breaking with the president to seriously jeopardize his chances of renomination or re-election. The legal developments will degrade the walls. But only this sort of political battering ram can breach them.
Not all sieges succeed. Mont-Saint-Michel, a tiny fortified island off the coast of France, withstood English siege for the entirety of the Hundred Years’ War. If the political system does not come to care about what we are learning, it doesn’t matter how many boulders Mueller hurls against the walls of Castle Trump; the forces laying siege to it will, like the defeated Ottoman Empire after the siege of Vienna, eventually slink away into the snow.
