here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nHistory shows that special counsels almost inevitably overstep their mandates.<\/p>\n
Former FBI director Robert Mueller was supposed to run a narrow investigation into accusations of collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and the Russian government. But so far, Mueller\u2019s work has been plagued by almost daily improper leaks (e.g., \u201csources report,\u201d \u201cit emerged,\u201d \u201csome say\u201d) about investigations that seem to have little to do with his original mandate.<\/p>\n
Now, there are leaks claiming that Mueller is going after former national-security adviser Michael Flynn for his business practices before he entered the Trump administration. Specifically, Mueller is reportedly investigating Flynn\u2019s security assessment and intelligence work for the Turkish government and other Turkish interests. Yet possible unethical lobbying on behalf of a NATO ally was not the reason Mueller was appointed.<\/p>\n
The Roman satirist Juvenal famously once asked how one could guard against marital infidelity when the moral guardians were themselves immoral. His famous quip, translated roughly as \u201cWho will police the police?\u201d is applicable to all supposedly saintly investigators.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Independent counsel Ken Starr was supposed to look into Bill Clinton\u2019s supposed shady Whitewater dealings in Arkansas. He ended up investigating every aspect of Clinton\u2019s life, including his many sexual escapades.<\/p>\n
No doubt Clinton was a philanderer. But it was not Starr\u2019s mission to prove to the nation what it had already suspected when it voted Clinton into the Oval Office.<\/p>\n
In 2003, Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed as special counsel (by now-notorious former FBI director James Comey) to determine whether Lewis \u201cScooter\u201d Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney\u2019s chief of staff, had illegally exposed the allegedly covert status of CIA operative Valerie Plame. As with the Starr investigation, Fitzgerald soon presided over a media circus.<\/p>\n
When the investigation was over, Libby was charged on five counts even though Plame may not have been a covert CIA agent at all. Also, it was reported early in the investigation that Fitzgerald knew that someone other than Libby (Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage) was almost surely guilty of first leaking Plame\u2019s status.<\/p>\n
But Fitzgerald was desperate for a big administration scalp. So he continued to lead an investigation that resulted in Libby\u2019s conviction on four charges \u2014 in part based on Libby\u2019s supposed disclosures to journalist Judith Miller. In her memoir, Miller later disavowed that Libby had ever given her classified information.<\/p>\n
Special-counsel investigations are only as good as the society at large that orders them. The idea that a godly inquisitor, invested with extralegal authority, can somehow use superior wisdom and morality to solve an unsolvable ethical problem is a stretch.<\/p>\n
Usually, these chasing-your-own-tail appointments are born out of media and political hysteria. The special counsel immediately feels enormous pressure to find anything to avoid being accused of running a \u201cwhitewash\u201d or wasting time and money.<\/p>\n
If the original investigation finds little traction, the all-powerful special counsel then ventures into ever new territories \u2014 apparently on the theory that everyone has at least something to hide in his past. Or the special counsel tries to cross up panicked targets in order to find inconsistent narratives that can be banked as fallback evidence of lying or hiding something that was not necessarily a crime to begin with.<\/p>\n
Yet counsels themselves are not above reproach. Starr later voiced regret about venturing into Clinton\u2019s tawdry sex life. Fitzgerald did not disclose that he had targeted the wrong leaker.\u00a0 In unethical fashion, Fitzgerald never brought charges against Armitage, who lacked the sensational media buzz that had surrounded Libby.<\/p>\n
In predictable fashion, Mueller himself may soon be the target of inquiries. He came to the job in part because his old friend and successor at the FBI, Comey, testified that he had deliberately (and perhaps illegally) leaked to the press his notes on private conversations he\u2019d had with Trump, whom he had just assured was not under investigation.<\/p>\n
The stated aim of the Machiavellian Comey was to force the appointment of a special investigator \u2014 which turned out to be none other than his friend Mueller.<\/p>\n
In the charge-countercharge swamp of Washington-insider politics, Mueller\u2019s prior tenure at the FBI during the Barack Obama administration may likewise come under scrutiny.<\/p>\n
Mueller was serving as FBI director when the Obama administration approved a deal allowing a Russian company, Rosatom, to buy a Canadian company that owned the rights to a large share of U.S. uranium supplies. Before the deal went through, the FBI reportedly learned that the head of a Rosatom subsidiary was corrupt, and that Rosatom officials knew about the corruption. It\u2019s unclear whether Muller\u2019s FBI alerted the administration about its findings. Did Mueller wrongly slow down the investigation, or was he sidetracked by higher-ups? Why did his investigation amount to nothing?<\/p>\n
Will officials soon be investigating for collusion the current investigator of collusion? Do we now need a special, special counsel?<\/p>\n
The point is not that Mueller may have acted unethically but that he, in theory, could be policed just as easily as those he polices.<\/p>\n
If we have lost faith in our institutions, then creating starry-eyed new ones will not solve the problem, given that the fault is in ourselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Victor Davis Hanson Originally published in the National Review. Read the original article here.\u00a0 History shows that special counsels almost inevitably overstep their mandates. Former FBI director Robert Mueller was supposed to run a narrow investigation into accusations of collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and the Russian government. But so far, Mueller\u2019s work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1139,1107,375,154,285,1],"tags":[1140],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2ND","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11620,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-mueller-squirrel-case\/","url_meta":{"origin":10765,"position":0},"title":"The Mueller Squirrel Case","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 23, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Special Counsel Robert Mueller recently indicted yet another peripheral character in his Trump probe, Russian attorney Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, for alleged money laundering in a matter quite separate from Trump. Like almost all of Mueller\u2019s indictments of the past 20 months, the charges against\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Donald Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Donald Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/donald-trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11139,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/mueller-at-the-crossroads\/","url_meta":{"origin":10765,"position":1},"title":"Mueller at the Crossroads","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 12, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel in May 2017 in reaction to a media still gripped by near hysteria over the inexplicable defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. For nearly a year before Mueller\u2019s appointment, leaks had spread about collusion between\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Donald Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Donald Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/donald-trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10817,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/one-mueller-investigation-coincidence-too-many\/","url_meta":{"origin":10765,"position":2},"title":"One Mueller-Investigation Coincidence Too Many","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 12, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/National Review \u00a0 Stacking the deck with anti-Trump staffers is proving to be a really bad idea. \u00a0 Special prosecutors, investigators, and counsels are usually a bad idea. They are admissions that constitutionally mandated institutions don\u2019t work \u2014 and can be rescued only by supposed superhuman moralists,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Mueller"","block_context":{"text":"Mueller","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/mueller\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11012,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-paradoxes-of-the-mueller-investigation\/","url_meta":{"origin":10765,"position":3},"title":"The Paradoxes of the Mueller Investigation","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 22, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review They are numerous, and none of them are good news for President Trump\u2019s opponents. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 13 Russian nationals for allegedly conspiring to sow confusion in the 2016 presidential election. The chance of extraditing any of the accused from Vladimir\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Donald Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Donald Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/donald-trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11834,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/he-did-it-not-me\/","url_meta":{"origin":10765,"position":4},"title":"He Did It, Not Me!","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 20, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness There is something Kafkaesque about the current round of investigating possible FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, Justice Department, and National Security Council wrongdoing during the 2016 election, Trump transition, and early presidency. Special Counsel Robert Mueller had been permitted to range well beyond his\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "FBI"","block_context":{"text":"FBI","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/fbi\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11050,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/swamp-things-in-the-russia-investigation\/","url_meta":{"origin":10765,"position":5},"title":"Swamp Things in the Russia Investigation","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 13, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness \"The Swamp\u201d usually refers to the vast federal bureaucratic machinery of mostly unelected top officials who exercise influence and power without worry about the appearance of conflicts of interest. They are often exempt from the consequences of the laws and regulations that affect others.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "James Comey"","block_context":{"text":"James Comey","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/james-comey\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10765"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10765"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10773,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10765\/revisions\/10773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}