Mueller time is over, but special-counsel keepsakes are forever.
On Wednesday, former special counsel Robert Mueller arrived on Capitol Hill, fielding questions from lawmakers in hotly anticipated back-to-back hearings.
Mueller wrapped up his nearly two-year probe in March into whether President Trump’s 2016 campaign conspired with Russia — detailing the Kremlin’s scheme to influence the 2016 presidential election, establishing links between the Trump campaign and Russia, and noting 10 instances of Trump’s potential obstruction of justice.
“While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime,” Mueller wrote, “it also does not exonerate him.” He reiterated that line on Wednesday.
Mueller insisted in a May press conference that his report should speak for itself, and said that any testimony he gave before Congress wouldn’t go beyond the 448-page tome’s bounds.
The lengthy investigation incensed the President, produced 34 indictments and transformed the strong-jawed, taciturn ex-FBI director into a liberal resistance hero of sorts. While Trump raged on Twitter about what he perceived to be an unjust “witch hunt,” artists and merchandisers spun Democrats’ hopes into Mueller-themed tributes and talismans: prayer candles, jewelry, baseball caps, mugs, T-shirts, buttons and even dolls, available on sites like Etsy, Redbubble and CafePress.
The souvenirs could find a new audience among Trump supporters
Even in the days after the special counsel finished his investigation, some who bought souvenir items said they weren’t ready to throw them out, while some sellers were waiting to see how the Mueller report saga played out in subsequent days.
There’s even potential for Mueller products to become a “validation item” for Trump boosters, Paul Palmer, a senior lecturer in marketing at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, told MarketWatch. “It’s going to be that coffee mug that sits on your desk that says, ‘Mueller report — it was all garbage, it was all hype, I told you so,’” he suggested. “My team won; your team lost.”
The President quickly capitalized on Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary of the Mueller report in March by dropping a limited-edition $30 T-shirt. It featured a screenshot of a Trump tweet reading “WITCH HUNT!,” along with a number to subscribe to campaign text messages.
“In simple terms, Mueller is entertainment,” Palmer said. The frenzy and excitement around Mueller’s imminent report had fueled “debate and anticipation,” he added, “which ultimately drives sales and continued demand.”
Palmer, a former Hasbro Inc. senior brand manager who worked on the Star Wars product line from 1999 to 2003, likened the Mueller probe’s process to a movie property.
“You have to think of it through a theatrical lens, and think of the leaks and speculation being very similar to what you’d have with movie trailers and initial screenings,” he said. “There’s been so much hype, so much discussion, so much energy expended in anticipation — almost as if you’d have [with] a blockbuster movie that’s been heavily promoted.”
And while movie merchandise may lose some of its allure after the film’s release, people who bought Mueller-themed items said they weren’t ready to part with their purchases.
Prayer candles and ‘lucky charm’ pendants wouldn’t go in the trash just yet
Elayne Burke, a 50-year-old attorney who lives in Washington, D.C., owns two $22 highlighter-yellow Mueller prayer candles. On certain days, she said, she would light a Mueller candle after arriving home from work to her Dupont Circle apartment, where she has a view of the National Cathedral and the Russian embassy.
“I’d just light my Mueller candle and be like, ‘You’re going down at some point, hopefully,’ looking at the Russian embassy,” Burke told MarketWatch in late March. “It was just a fun way to let off some energy about the current political climate that we find ourselves in, which obviously feels amplified for me living in D.C.”
After Barr issued his controversial summary, Burke noticed the candle on her desk and started walking it to the kitchen to toss it in the garbage. Instead, she wound up placing it with the other Mueller candle on a shelf. “I thought I might just throw it in the trash, like, ‘OK, well, that’s done,’” she said. “[But] he did an awesome job. I don’t want to throw it out. We don’t know anything yet.”
Jane Cullinan, a retired marketing executive from Piedmont, Calif., thought of Mueller as “honest, forthright and admirable,” and says she trusted him to do a decent job as special counsel despite their political differences. (Cullinan is a Democrat; Mueller is a registered Republican.) A friend Cullinan had met in a conversational Spanish class gave her a necklace with a Mueller pendant ($15 on Etsy), and after its picture faded, Cullinan bought more for herself and some friends.
She wore the long chain, which tucked easily under her clothes, to send Mueller good vibes throughout his investigation. “I don’t think of myself as a superstitious person, but it was kind of like a lucky charm,” Cullinan, 69, told MarketWatch. “I just felt like it was my way of semi-secretly supporting him.”
But the Monday after the probe’s end, she said, was the first day in many months she did not wear her necklace. “I wore it to hope that he would be healthy and happy every single day, and able to complete his work,” she said. “Now he has completed his work, so now I’m not wearing the necklace.” Cullinan plans to save the jewelry, predicting that Mueller “will go down in history as an important figure.”
Meanwhile, Kristen Blush of New York’s Upper West Side felt in March that the investigation remained an “open-ended situation” until Mueller’s report was released to the public in full. (A partially redacted version was released in April.) Blush, a 38-year-old photographer who has worn her $20 handmade acrylic pink Mueller earrings to events and some political marches, said at the time she would hang on to them.
One Mueller merchandise seller saw an uptick in sales
As for the makers of Mueller merchandise, some were waiting for more information before they considered pulling their special-prosecutor wares. Clare Winter, an entrepreneurial single mom whose Mueller devotional candle (then $12, now $16) pulled in about $38,000 in sales during one week leading up to Christmas, suggested that drawing conclusions from Barr’s four-page summary was “premature.”
Winter, 50, of Charlottesville, Va., who says she created the candles as “a viable vehicle that people could put their faith in,” said she’d seen “a surprising uptick in site visits and six orders for Mueller candles” in the days after the investigation’s end. “Sure, that’s not many, but I wasn’t expecting any. In fact, I figured there would be no orders … or site visits for at least a couple of weeks, if then,” she said. “Maybe something is brewing.”
“I think I’ll still have it on my site, because I have a feeling he’s going to be pulled in for questioning,” added Julie Simanski, a 54-year-old community-college professor from Ankeny, Iowa, who sells $12 handmade glitter-detailed dolls depicting Mueller as Superman.
Jason Davis, the Atlanta-based owner of the online store Real Sic, had sold between 500 and 600 “It’s Mueller Time” enamel pins at $10 a pop since debuting them last year. Sales tended to spike a couple of days after major Mueller news dropped. Davis, who called the Mueller spectacle “the best entertainment tax dollars could buy,” said in March he was waiting to see how quickly his inventory of about 170 pins sold before deciding whether to make more.
“I think that there’s going to be some amount of controversy with the release of the full report, and with internet culture, there could even be a backswing of irony,” he said. “We’re selling it to the left, and then we’ll start selling it to the right.”
Overall demand for these goods, Palmer added, was likely to wane if and when the public has digested and analyzed the full Mueller report — “reminiscent of a movie we’ve long anticipated.”
Autographs and personal effects could have real lasting value
Objects connected to Mueller the person, on the other hand, may have more staying power. Any autographs, business cards or personal effects associated with the 74-year-old attorney “will remain more collectible and desirable than mass-produced [shirts], buttons, etc. that anyone with a credit card can order over the internet,” said Hunter Oatman-Stanford, a collectibles expert and senior producer for Collectors Weekly. The No. 1 reason: rarity.
“This is true of almost all political figures,” Oatman-Stanford told MarketWatch. “For example, if you look for [former special counsel for the Bill Clinton probe] ‘Kenneth Starr’ on eBay, the highest-priced items are generally autographed [items] or original documents pertaining to his investigation.”
While the special counsel has remained largely private — he was once pronounced “the most unknowable man in Washington” by its paper of record — there’s a market for reselling objects people have wrestled away from their encounters with him, Oatman-Stanford said.
Take, for example, the Sea Ranch-branded cap Mueller was photographed wearing before he submitted his report.
“If someone got their hands on that Sea Ranch hat,” Oatman-Stanford said, “it would be worth quite a bit of money.”
This story was originally published March 27, 2019, and updated July 24, 2019.
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