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The Trump-Russia saga has entered its special-counsel phase.This is strange, given that a special prosecutor is typically reserved for when a crime has been alleged, and not only has no serious penal-law violation been credibly alleged against Donald Trump or any of his associates, but, as we have repeatedly noted, the FBI was engaged in a counterintelligence, not a criminal, investigation as it relates to Russia. A more suitable approach would have been an independent commission, like the one established to investigate the September 11 attacks.But Trump’s ham-handed firing of FBI director James Comey, the White House’s misleading account of how and why Comey was ousted, and news that Trump personally asked Comey to drop the Flynn probe created enough of a cloud around the FBI investigation that deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein felt compelled to act. If Trump had intended to create the conditions for the appointment of a special counsel, he wouldn’t have acted any differently . . . . . . It’s anyone’s guess where this goes from here. Mueller has a wide investigative brief, and we will no doubt be hearing more about Messrs. Flynn, Manafort, and Page, the Trump associates with known ties to the Kremlin, and Roger Stone, the outlandish gadfly who worked with Trump for years. So far, despite the Democratic hysteria, we haven’t seen anything that suggests anything worse than that these figures are shady operators who never should have been close to a presidential nominee or a president. But we want to see where the facts lead.Ideally, Mueller will be able to conclude his investigation expeditiously, but it’s possible this could drag out: The special counsel appointed to investigate Whitewater in 1994 outlasted the Clinton administration. For this reason, among others, no administration ever wants a special counsel. Trump has no one to blame but himself that he now has one.