Coastal elites, are you listening?

If Mueller’s investigation were truly independent and autonomous, what would it look like? At American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson suggests,

avoid hiring those from Mueller’s law firm.

Avoid hiring any attorneys and investigators who in the past have been involved in an investigation, trial, or lawsuit involving either the Clintons or the Trumps.

Avoid hiring those who have given more than $100 to national political campaigns.

Avoid hiring those whose spouses have received money and compensation in any form (legal fees, campaign contributions, jobs) from either Clinton-affiliated or Trump-affiliated campaigns or operatives.

Avoid hiring those who in the past have represented high-profile members of the Clinton, Obama, or Trump family, political team, or their foundations.

Avoid hiring anyone involved, even in a peripheral way, with the Fusion GPS dossier or its use to obtain FISA orders.

Avoid hiring those who have voiced their dislike of the current object of their investigations.

But do hire federal attorneys or FBI career officers from outside the East Coast. Do hire investigators not trained in the Ivy League law industry. Do hire attorneys that have no known background of political activism. Do hire attorneys that were not in some way involved in the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

There are thousands of qualified attorneys nationwide. Hundreds have worked in the past at DOJ or FBI offices, who now live, operate and think in a way quite distant from the status quo in New York and Washington.

Far from being sources of reassurance, the résumés of the Mueller team are what explains its current lack of public confidence.

Oddly, after the 2016 election one would have thought all the old rubrics of excellence would have become suspect—given that the polling establishment, political grandees, and the East Coast punditocracy had little clue about how or why Donald Trump had a shot at winning the presidency.

…It seems unlikely that any in the 2106 Republican field would have won swing voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin. A President Rubio would likely not have withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord—any more than a president Jeb Bush would have clamped down on illegal immigration. In the past, a President Romney would likely not have talked of “our” farmers and “our” miners.

Like it or not Trump’s very rambunctiousness set the tone for and gave the latitude to his subordinates to risk doing the unorthodox—whether James Mattis recalibrating U.S. policy in Syria, or H.R. McMaster crafting a new deterrent strategy toward North Korea, or Nikki Haley reprising the role of Jeane Kirkpatrick at the United Nations, or a Neil Gorsuch appointment ensuring another Antonin Scalia rather than an Anthony Kennedy.

…When a director of the FBI admits he deliberately leaked to the press the contents of his own private notes, written on government time, of a confidential conversation with the President of the United States—a possible criminal offense—for the sole purpose of eliciting the appointment of a special counsel (a gambit which resulted in the selection of his friend Robert Mueller), then most Americans have no compunction about seeing FBI leadership as ethically compromised and something gone terribly wrong at the highest echelons of the once hallowed agency.

That is not “bashing the FBI,” but admitting that the current generation of leaders at the FBI and the Justice Department by their very behavior have bashed their own agencies and loyal and professional subordinates.

All the brilliantly degreed economists of the past decade could not craft policies to achieve even 3 percent growth. All the wittiest and “in the know” advisors had little clue about how to radically reduce illegal immigration. All the supposedly empathetic and moral crusaders more or less wrote off a broad swath of America as clingers, deplorables, and irredeemables—losers in a preordained global world—whose lack of the right stuff earned them deserved oblivion.

The result is that the deities of Washington and New York still do not quite know how and why Trump was elected, or why he well might be reelected—the result of half the country’s profound lack of confidence in the morality and competence of the coastal and gentry managerial classes. And to the degree our elite think they know why many Americans believe that their reputations are undeserved, it is a revelation so disturbing that they are not by background, education, and experience capable of understanding, appreciating, or responding to it.

Read more here.