Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review<\/p>\n
They are numerous, and none of them are good news for President Trump\u2019s opponents.<\/span><\/p>\n S<\/span>pecial 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 Putin\u2019s Russia is zero.<\/p>\n Some of the Russians\u2019 Keystone Cops efforts to disrupt the election favored Donald Trump (as well as Bernie Sanders). Yet Mueller\u2019s team made it clear that the Russians neither colluded with any U.S. citizens nor had any material effect on the election\u2019s outcome.<\/p>\n But from here on out, there will be ironies, paradoxes, and unintended consequences with just about everything Mueller does.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Is it now time to prosecute foreigners for attempting to interfere with a U.S. election? If so, then surely Christopher Steele, the author of the Fusion GPS dossier, is far more culpable and vulnerable than the 13 bumbling Russians.<\/p>\n Steele is not a U.S. citizen. Steele colluded with Russian interests in compiling his lurid dossier about Donald Trump. Steele did not register as a foreign agent. And Steele was paid by Hillary Clinton\u2019s campaign to find dirt on political rival Trump and his campaign.<\/p>\n In other words, Steele\u2019s position is far worse than that of the Russians for a variety of reasons. One, he is easily extraditable while the Russians are not. Two, his efforts really did affect the race, given that the dossier was systematically leaked to major media and served as a basis for the U.S. government to spy on American citizens. Three, unlike with the Russians, no one disputes that American citizens \u2014 Hillary Clinton, members of the Democratic National Committee, and anti-Trump partisan Glenn Simpson and his Fusion GPS team \u2014 colluded by paying for Steele\u2019s work.<\/p>\n Mueller\u2019s team has also leveraged a guilty plea from former Trump national-security adviser Michael Flynn for making false statements to FBI investigators. If the Flynn case is now the Mueller standard, then we know that a number of high-ranking officials are vulnerable to such legal exposure.<\/p>\n Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr deliberately omitted on federal disclosure forms the fact that his wife, an expert on Russia, worked on the Fusion GPS dossier.<\/p>\n Steele himself probably lied to the FBI went he claimed he had not leaked the dossier\u2019s contents to the media.<\/p>\n Hillary Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills likely lied to FBI investigator Peter Strzok (who had also interviewed Flynn) when they claimed they had no idea that Clinton was using a private and illegal email server until the story went public. In fact, Abedin and Mills had communicated with Clinton over the same server \u2014 as did then-president Barack Obama, who likewise denied that he knew about the improper server.<\/p>\n Former FBI director James Comey likely lied to Congress when he claimed that his exoneration of Clinton came after he had interviewed her. We now know from documents that he drafted a statement about the conclusion of the investigation even before he met with her.<\/p>\n As far as obstruction charges go, Mueller has other possible targets. Former attorney general Loretta Lynch met secretly with Bill Clinton on a jet parked on a tarmac in Phoenix shortly before the Justice Department closed the probe of Hillary Clinton and chose not to pursue charges against her. Comey said Lynch asked him not to use the word \u201cinvestigation\u201d when discussing the Clinton email probe. Text messages between Strzok and fellow FBI official Lisa Page suggest that Lynch knew in advance about the conclusions Comey would reach in the investigation.<\/p>\n What is going on?<\/p>\n Mueller is under enormous pressure to find collusion between the Trump team and Russia, or to find that the Trump team obstructed justice by trying to hide such collusion. But neither likely happened. Mueller was appointed at a time of national hysteria, brought on by partisan journalism based on a leaked dossier \u2014 itself a product of a discredited British agent working with Russian sources while being paid by the Clinton campaign.<\/p>\n Worse still, the effort to hide the origins and the use of that dossier to obtain court permission to spy on American citizens may be a classic case of obstruction of justice.<\/p>\n Mueller\u2019s existential problem has been with him from the start. Due to the shenanigans of his discredited friend Comey and a rabid media, he was appointed to investigate crimes that did not exist. But if they did exist, collusion and obstruction were committed by those associated with the Clinton campaign and even by members of the Obama administration.<\/p>\n Investigating any possible crimes committed by members of the Clinton campaign or the Obama administration apparently is taboo, given the exalted status of both. But every time Mueller seeks to find incidental wrongdoing by those around Trump, he only makes the case stronger that behavior by those involved in the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration should be investigated.<\/p>\n If such matters are not treated in an unbiased manner, we are not a nation of equality under the law, but a banana republic masquerading as a democracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 Putin\u2019s Russia is zero. Some […]<\/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":[1161,1139,1092,375,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2RC","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11817,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/progressives-face-a-bleak-post-mueller-landscape\/","url_meta":{"origin":11012,"position":0},"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":11012,"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":12176,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-art-of-warping-elections\/","url_meta":{"origin":11012,"position":2},"title":"The Art of Warping Elections","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 5, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review No sooner were Democrats\u2019 Trump-Russia collusion charges debunked than they began to claim that Trump will do again in 2020 what Robert Mueller found he did not do in 2016: rig the election. After 22 months, nearly 500 subpoenas, and somewhere around $35 million\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11373,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-truth-will-set-us-all-free\/","url_meta":{"origin":11012,"position":3},"title":"The Truth Will Set Us All Free","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 30, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Special counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s investigation was star-crossed from the start. His friend and successor as FBI director, James Comey, by his own admission prompted the investigation \u2014 with the deliberate leaking of classified memos about his conversations with President Donald Trump to the press.\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":11763,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/with-mueller-hopes-gone-so-goes-progressive-unity\/","url_meta":{"origin":11012,"position":4},"title":"With Mueller Hopes Gone, So Goes Progressive Unity","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 4, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness The Democratic Party has lots of radical new ideas, and lots of radical presidential candidates and politicos. But the common hatred of President Donald Trump has united otherwise quite disparate Democratic leaders such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.); former Vice President Joe Biden;\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "2020 Election"","block_context":{"text":"2020 Election","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/2020-election\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11800,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-adolescent-progressive-mind\/","url_meta":{"origin":11012,"position":5},"title":"The Adolescent Progressive Mind","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 30, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness One of the strangest things about the series of psychodramas that surround the ongoing effort to remove President Trump before the 2020 election is progressive schizophrenia. 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