{"id":10817,"date":"2017-12-12T15:37:45","date_gmt":"2017-12-12T23:37:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=10817"},"modified":"2017-12-12T15:37:45","modified_gmt":"2017-12-12T23:37:45","slug":"one-mueller-investigation-coincidence-too-many","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/one-mueller-investigation-coincidence-too-many\/","title":{"rendered":"One Mueller-Investigation Coincidence Too Many"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/National Review<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Stacking the deck with anti-Trump staffers is proving to be a really bad idea.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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, who are without the innate biases inherent in human nature.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The record from Lawrence Walsh to Ken Starr to Patrick Fitzgerald suggests otherwise. Originally narrow mandates inevitably expand \u2014 on the cynical theory that everyone has something embarrassing to hide. Promised \u201cshort\u201d timelines and limited budgets are quickly forgotten. Prosecutors search for ever new crimes to justify the expense and public expectations of the special-counsel appointment. Soon the investigators need to be investigated for their own conflicts of interest, as if we need special-special or really, really special prosecutors. Special investigations often quickly turn Soviet, in the sense of \u201cShow me the man and I\u2019ll find you the crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has led what seems to be an exemplary life of public service. No doubt he believes that as a disinterested investigator he can get to the bottom of the once contentious charge of \u201cRussian collusion\u201d in the 2016 election. But can he?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A Mandate Gone Wild<\/strong><\/p>\n

Something has gone terribly wrong with the Mueller investigation.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The investigation is venturing well beyond the original mandate of rooting out evidence of Russian collusion. Indeed, the word \u201ccollusion\u201d is now rarely invoked at all. It has given way to its successor, \u201cobstruction.\u201d The latter likely will soon beget yet another catchphrase to justify the next iteration of the investigations.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There seems far less special investigatory concern with the far more likely Russian collusion in the matters of the origins and dissemination of the Fusion GPS\/Steele dossier, and its possible role in the Obama-administration gambit of improper or illegal surveilling, unmasking, and leaking of the names of American citizens.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Leaks from the Mueller investigation so far abound. They have seemed calibrated to create a public consensus that particular individuals are currently under investigation, likely to be indicted \u2014 or indeed likely guilty.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

These public worries are not groundless. They are deeply rooted in the nature and liberal composition of the Mueller investigative team \u2014 whose left-leaning appointments just months ago had understandably made the liberal media giddy with anticipation from the outset. Wired, for instance, published this headline on June 14: \u201cRobert Mueller Chooses His Investigatory Dream Team.\u201d Vox, on August 22, wrote: \u201cMeet the all-star legal team who may take down Trump.\u201d The Daily Beast, two day later, chimed in: \u201cInside Robert Mueller\u2019s Army.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Whose \u2018Army,\u2019 Whose \u2018Dream Team,\u2019 and Whose \u2018All-Stars\u2019?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Special Counsel Mueller was himself appointed in rather strange circumstances. Former FBI director James Comey (now reduced to ankle-biting the president on Twitter with Wikipedia-like quotes) stated under oath that he had deliberately leaked his own confidential notes about conversations with President Trump, hoping to prompt appointment of a special investigator to investigate a president \u2014 whom he said, also under oath, that he was not investigating.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Comey\u2019s ploy worked all too well. Department of Justice officials, now in the Trump Justice Department but who once served in Barack Obama\u2019s administration, selected Comey\u2019s close friend and long associate Robert Mueller as investigator. From that germination, an innate conflict of interest was born \u2014 given that Mueller\u2019s appointment assumed that Comey himself would not come under his own investigation, a supposition that may be increasingly untenable.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Okay \u2014 but one such conflict of interest swallow does not make a discredited spring.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But then<\/em> there was the weird position of Comey subordinate and deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe. He ran the Washington, D.C., office that was involved in the Clinton email investigations. For some strange reason, McCabe did not recuse himself from the email investigation until one week before the presidential election, even though just months earlier his wife, Jill McCabe, had announced her Democratic campaign for a state senate seat in Virginia \u2014 and had received a huge donation of more than $675,000 from the political organizations of Governor Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton supporter and intimate. Like it or not, the behavior of the FBI during the Clinton email investigations also extends to the Russian-collusion probe, especially as it pertains to the Clinton-funded Fusion GPS\/Steele dossier.<\/p>\n

Okay \u2014 Washington is an incestuous place, and such conflicts of interest may be unavoidable. Perhaps McCabe himself was not really so directly involved in the FBI investigations of Clinton, and perhaps he had not even talked about the current Mueller investigations.<\/p>\n

But then<\/em> it was announced that at least six of Mueller\u2019s staff of 15 lawyers, who previously had donated (in some cases quite generously) to Hillary Clinton\u2019s campaigns, were now investigating her arch foe Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Okay \u2014 no doubt, such apparent conflicts of interests are not what they seem (given the overwhelming preponderance of liberal lawyers in general and in particular in Washington). After all, no one should be disqualified from government service for his or her political beliefs.<\/p>\n

But then<\/em> we came to the inexplicable case of Peter Strzok, an FBI investigator assigned to the Mueller investigation of Russian collusion. Strzok and Lisa Page, a consulting FBI lawyer (part of Mueller\u2019s once-ballyhooed \u201cdream team\u201d), were for some reason relieved from the investigation of Trump in late summer 2017. Mueller\u2019s office refused to explain the departure of either, other than to let the media assume that the departures were both unrelated and due to normal revolving or transient appointments.<\/p>\n

Okay \u2014 even dream-teamers and all-stars occasionally move on, and the less said, the better.<\/p>\n

But then<\/em> we learn that the two, while part of Mueller\u2019s investigation of Trump, were having an extramarital affair, and exchanging some 10,000 texts, of which at least some were adamantly anti-Trump and pro-Clinton. One wonders, Why did that information, now confirmed, come out through leaks rather than through official Mueller communiqu\u00e9s? In other words, if there is nothing now deemed improper about the two Trump investigators\u2019 amorous political expressions or in the anti-Trump nature of their exchanges, why was there apparently such a reluctance in August and September to avoid full disclosure concerning their abrupt departures?<\/p>\n

Okay \u2014 perhaps indiscreet electronic communications and affairs in the workplace are no big deal in Washington.<\/p>\n

But then<\/em> Strzok apparently was also responsible for changing the wording of the official FBI report on the Clinton email affair. He crossed out the original finding of \u201cgrossly negligent,\u201d which is legalese that under the statute constitutes a crime, and replaced it with \u201cextremely careless,\u201d which does not warrant prosecution.<\/p>\n

Okay \u2014 perhaps we can shrug and suggest that Strzok surely did not have the final say in such verbal gymnastics. Or perhaps his anti-Trump, pro-Clinton sentiments were not germane to his mere copy editing or his reliance on a thesaurus.<\/p>\n

But then<\/em> we learned that Andrew Weissmann, who is another veteran prosecutor assigned to Mueller\u2019s legal team, praised Sally Yates, an Obama-administration holdover at the Trump Department of Justice, for breaking her oath of office and refusing to carry out President Trump\u2019s immigration order (Yates was summarily fired). \u201cI am so proud,\u201d he emailed Yates, on the day she publicly defied the president. \u201cAnd in awe. Thank you so much. All my deepest respects.\u201d<\/p>\n

Okay \u2014 it certainly does not look good that a disinterested government attorney investigating the president was so indiscreet as to write his admiration to a fellow Obama holdover who was fighting with Trump. But to give the anti-Trump attorneys the benefit of the doubt, perhaps Weissmann was merely reacting to Yates\u2019s panache rather than to her shared political views?<\/p>\n

But then again<\/em>, we learned that another attorney on the Mueller staff, Jeannie Rhee, was at one time the personal attorney of Ben Rhodes, the Obama deputy national-security adviser who is often mentioned as instrumental in making last-minute Obama-administrative-state appointments to thwart the incoming Trump administration. Rhee also provided legal counsel to the Clinton Foundation and was a generous donor to Hillary Clinton\u2019s presidential campaign.<\/p>\n

Rhee seemingly could not be a disinterested investigator of Trump, given that she has had financial interests with those, past and present, who are fiercely opposed to the current likely target of her investigations.<\/p>\n

Okay \u2014 but perhaps in Washington\u2019s upside-down world, lawyers are mere hired guns who have no real political loyalties and they investigate, without bias, those whose politics they detest. Why should they feel a need to be shy about their political agendas?<\/p>\n

But then<\/em> again, most recently, it was disclosed that a senior Justice Department official, Bruce G. Ohr, connected with various ongoing investigations under the aegis of the Justice Department, was partially reassigned for his contact with the opposition-research firm responsible for the Clinton-funded, anti-Trump \u201cdossier\u201d \u2014 which in theory could be one catalyst for the original FBI investigation of \u201ccollusion\u201d and thus additionally might be the reason cited to request FISA orders to surveil Trump associates during the 2016 campaign. And note that it was also never disclosed that Ohr\u2019s wife, Nellie Ohr, whose expertise was Russian politics and history, actually worked for Fusion GPS during the 2016 campaign, when the opposition research firm\u2019s discredited anti-Trump dossier alleging Russian collusion was leaked shortly before Election Day 2016.<\/p>\n

Okay \u2014 perhaps Ohr, as part of his job, was merely learning about aspects of the dossier from one of its owners, for future reference.<\/p>\n

But then<\/em> again, we learned of the strange career odyssey of yet another person on Mueller\u2019s legal team, Aaron Zebley (supposedly known in the past as Mueller\u2019s \u201cright-hand hand\u201d). He once served as Mueller\u2019s chief of staff while employed at the FBI and was also assigned to both the FBI\u2019s Counterterrorism Division and the National Security Division at the Department of Justice. In addition, Zebley served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the National Security and Terrorism Unit in Virginia. Yet Zebley, as late as 2015, represented one Justin Cooper. The latter was the IT staffer who set up Hillary Clinton\u2019s likely illegal and unsecure server at her home, and who purportedly smashed Clinton\u2019s various BlackBerries with a hammer in fear they would be subpoenaed. Zebley had come into contact once earlier with congressional investigators, when he was legal counsel for Cooper \u2014 and yet Zebley now is on Mueller\u2019s team investigating Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s Next? <\/strong><\/p>\n

By now there are simply too many coincidental conflicts of interest and too much improper investigatory behavior to continue to give the Mueller investigation the benefit of doubt. Each is a light straw; together, they now have broken the back of the probe\u2019s reputation.<\/p>\n

In inexplicable fashion, Mueller seems to have made almost no effort to select attorneys from outside Washington, from diverse private law firms across the country, who were without personal involvement with the Clinton machine, and who were politically astute or disinterested enough to keep their politics to themselves.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the special-counsel investigation has developed an eerie resemblance to the spate of sexual-harassment cases, in which the accused sluff off initial charges as irrelevant, unproven, or politically motivated, only to be confronted with more fresh allegations that insidiously point to a pattern of repeated behavior.<\/p>\n

What then is going on here?<\/p>\n

No one knows. We should assume that there will be almost daily new disclosures of the Mueller investigation\u2019s conflicts of interest that were heretofore deliberately suppressed.<\/p>\n

Yet Donald Trump at this point would be unhinged if he were to fire Special Counsel Mueller \u2014 given that the investigators seem intent on digging their own graves through conflicts of interest, partisan politicking, leaking, improper amorous liaisons, indiscreet communications, and stonewalling the release of congressionally requested information.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the only remaining trajectory by which Mueller and his investigators can escape with their reputations intact is to dismiss those staff attorneys who have exhibited clear anti-Trump political sympathies, reboot the investigation, and then focus on what now seems the most likely criminal conduct: Russian and Clinton-campaign collusion in the creation of the anti-Trump Fusion GPS dossier and later possible U.S. government participation in the dissemination of it. If such a fraudulent document was used to gain court approval to surveil Trump associates, and under such cover to unmask and leak names of private U.S. citizens \u2014 at first to warp a U.S. election, and then later to thwart the work of an incoming elected administration \u2014 then Mueller will be tasked with getting to the bottom of one of the greatest political scandals in recent U.S. history. Indeed, his legacy may not be that he welcomed in known pro-Clinton, anti-Trump attorneys to investigate the Trump 2016 campaign where there was little likelihood of criminality, but that he ignored the most egregious case of government wrongdoing in the last half-century.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/National Review   Stacking the deck with anti-Trump staffers is proving to be a really bad idea.   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, who are without the innate […]<\/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":[1139,1092,1091,1090,11,495,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2Ot","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11933,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-dream-team-loses-to-the-nobodies\/","url_meta":{"origin":10817,"position":0},"title":"The Dream Team Loses to the Nobodies","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 7, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review When figurehead Robert Mueller likely allowed Andrew Weissman to form his special counsel team to investigate so-called charges of Russian collusion involving Donald Trump\u2019s presidential campaign and the Kremlin, Washington elites became bouncy. The high-profile legal \u201cpowerhouse\u201d lineup immediately looked like a sure-thing\u2014an elite\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"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":10817,"position":1},"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":[]},{"id":11620,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-mueller-squirrel-case\/","url_meta":{"origin":10817,"position":2},"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":11817,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/progressives-face-a-bleak-post-mueller-landscape\/","url_meta":{"origin":10817,"position":3},"title":"Progressives Face a Bleak Post-Mueller Landscape","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 9, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Democrats have grown infuriated by Attorney General William Barr\u2019s indifference to their hysteria over the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. Barr recently released a brief summary of special counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s conclusions that Donald Trump did not collude with the Russians to warp the 2016 election.\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":10817,"position":4},"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":12082,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/are-thought-crimes-impeachable\/","url_meta":{"origin":10817,"position":5},"title":"Are Thought Crimes Impeachable?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 3, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review During special counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s investigation, his legal \u201cdream team\u201d tried to make a secondary case that Donald Trump also obstructed efforts to prove Trump-Russian \u201ccollusion.\u201d Trump was said to have advised his lawyers and other subordinates, past and present, not to cooperate fully\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10817"}],"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=10817"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10818,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10817\/revisions\/10818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}