FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledges applause during President Barack Obama’s remarks in the Rose Garden of the White House, June 21, 2013. The President announced James Comey, right, as his nominee to succeed Mueller. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Special Counsel Robert Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey’s long-standing relationship should have disqualified Mueller from overseeing an investigation into President Trump. Comey has been a fierce critic of the President, reports Julie Kelly in American Greatness. Without Comey, who helped fabricate the Trump-Russia collusion narrative in 2016, “there wouldn’t have been a Mueller investigation into the fabricated Trump-Russia election collusion.”
No Evidence of Conspiracy
Robert Mueller’s report shows beyond doubt, there is no evidence of a conspiracy, broad or narrow, opines the WSJ.
(Mueller’s) report recounts a series of contacts between individual Russians and Trump officials that were of no great consequence and are connected by nothing more than coincidence. Mr. Mueller should have said this clearly on Wednesday.
Mueller Shifts Responsibility to Barr
Mueller also suggested that his office reached no prosecutorial decision because Justice Department rules don’t allow the indictment of a President while in office. “Charging the president with a crime was, therefore, not an option we could consider,” Mueller said Wednesday.
He thus left it hanging for everyone else to infer whether he would have indicted Mr. Trump if he were not a sitting President. And he left Attorney General William Barr to take responsibility for reaching the prosecutorial judgment that Mr. Mueller refused to make. Mr. Mueller added to this sneaky anti-Trump implication by noting that “the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting President of wrong doing.” What else could he mean but Congress and impeachment?
Yet Mr. Mueller’s analysis of the obstruction evidence in his own report makes clear that no investigation was obstructed. Not the FBI’s counterintelligence probe, and not his own. No witnesses were interfered with, and Mr. Mueller was allowed over two years to issue nearly 500 search-and-seizure warrants and interview anyone he wanted, including anyone in the White House.
Mueller’s Job Was to Indict or Not
Wednesday Mr. Mueller also said that “if we had had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”
Since when do prosecutors make it their job to pronounce whether someone they investigate is exonerated? Their job is to indict, or not, and if not then keep quiet.
McCabe, Strzok, Page – Politically Motivated
Mueller praised “the attorneys, the FBI agents, and analysts, the professional staff who helped conduct the investigation in a fair and independent manner.” These individuals, he said, “were of the highest integrity.”
Does that include Andrew McCabe, the former deputy FBI director who is being investigated for lying to investigators? Does he mean Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the FBI paramours whose antipathy for Donald Trump is obvious from their text messages? Mr. Strzok was part of Mr. Mueller’s investigating team until those texts were discovered.
Does Mr. Mueller also mean the FBI officials who used the politically motivated, and since discredited, Steele dossier to persuade a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to issue a warrant to spy on Trump adviser Carter Page? Mr. Mueller didn’t appear to want to investigate that part of the Russia story. Was that behavior of “the highest integrity”?
Unfortunately for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, if Mueller had let his report speak for itself, the “media and backbench pressure will now build on her to open an impeachment inquiry to charge Donald Trump with obstructing an investigation that wasn’t obstructed into a conspiracy that didn’t exist.”
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