Good day all. Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor has started to wander far afield of his mandate. As I’ve written before, he went after Paul Manafort, ostensibly for paperwork violations. This has also drawn in the Podesta brothers and now he’s looking at Vin Webber, former U.S. Senator from Minnesota.
This is a far cry from his original mandate of getting Trump at all costs investigating Russian influence in the 2016 election. In the last few weeks, some major news has come out on how the FBI under then Director Robert Mueller appears to have covered up some serious charges of Bribery and Collusion by the Russians in their purchase of 20% of America’s uranium mines. (The Uranium One scandal)
There have also been questions into Mueller’s ethics and conflicts of interest regarding his appointment. His choices in prosecutors has led many to the conclusion that Mueller’s sole goal is to Get Trump and protect himself and others. For a while now, people have been demanding that Mueller step aside. Mueller appears to be digging in for a fight. Here are some of the details from Politico:
Robert Mueller is on an early winning streak.
That’s debatable.
Stacked with some of the country’s premier prosecutors, the special counsel has beaten back a pair of preliminary attempts to block his subpoena power and limit who he can question as a potential witness. In July, Mueller’s team also managed to win approval to execute a no-knock search warrant—unusual in a white-collar case.
Those “Premier” prosecutors have had their ethics questioned, and a number of their “Premier” criminal cases were thrown out, in many cases rather loudly, by the appellate courts. Several were accused of major violations of defendants rights, up to and including suppression of evidence. But then this is Politico and they are not noted for being a conservative publication.
But as the criminal case against former Donald Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates speeds toward a possible spring 2018 trial, Mueller’s team is bracing for an array of challenges to its authority.
There are a large number of questions on just what authority Mueller actually has. I’ve been hearing that his appointment isn’t actually legal. Special counsels or prosecutors are supposed to be appointed to handle actual crimes, not investigations. Considering how Mueller’s band of Gestapo wannabes have been acting, there may be some blow back down the road.
Kevin Downing, Manafort’s lead attorney, submitted a document Friday indicating that he anticipates filing pre-trial motions that question “the legal basis for and sufficiency of the charges, the suppression of evidence improperly obtained by search warrant, subpoena or otherwise.” Downing also said he may try to prevent Mueller’s prosecutors from presenting some of their evidence during the criminal trial.
So? That’s what lawyers do.
In the Mueller investigation, the probe itself may be ripe for legal questions. He’s not operating under the independent counsel law that generated Whitewater, Iran-Contra and 19 other investigations dating back to the post-Watergate years – because it lapsed in 1999.
There is a reason it was allowed to lapse. Far to many, basically all of them, special prosecutors would go far afield of their mandates and try to railroad as many people as they could, primarily to justify their massive budgets. One of the worst was Lawrence Walsh. He went after then Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and probably threw the election to the most corrupt president of the 20th Century, Bubba Horndog. (aka Bill Clinton)
Instead, he’s working under Justice Department regulations that allow for an outside lawyer to step in when the typical investigation process “would present a conflict of interest for the Department or other extraordinary circumstances.”
And in this case, the conflict of interest is actually with…the special prosecutor. Of course, that’s not what they’re saying.
The situation is similar to the one that arose in 2003 when U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald was tapped to investigate whether the George W. Bush White House deliberately leaked the identify of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. That case produced only one indictment, and a jury in 2007 convicted Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, of four counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements (Bush later commuted Libby’s prison sentence).
And here we have a classic railroad job. Libby was not the one who put Plame’s name out there. Instead Fitzgerald railroaded him on charges of forgetfulness. The person who actually leaked Plame’s name, Richard Armitage, was never charged in the incident. It also secured George W. Bush’s reputation of a backstabbing weasel for letting Fitzgerald railroad Libby and not outright pardoning Libby in the first place.
Trump himself told the New York Times in July that he would consider it “a violation” if Mueller’s investigators looked into his personal finances. And the president’s personal attorney, Jay Sekulow, told POLITICO on Thursday he is primed to lodge formal objections with either Mueller or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein if the Russia investigation took a wide or unexpected detour into issues like an old Trump real-estate deal.
Rosenstein is another interesting case. He too, is neck deep in the Uranium One scandal. His choice of appointing Mueller, who knew about the Uranium One bribery schemes and didn’t report it to Congress, is making quite a few people go “Hmmm.”
In a case like Manafort’s, Mueller may be wise to hand it over to DOJ for prosecution, said Ronald Rotunda, a Chapman University law professor who served as a paid consultant during the Starr investigation.
“It is one thing to investigate if the president was – or his top aides were – in collusion with Russia in some nefarious way,” Rotunda said. “It is quite another to investigate if some former aide hasn’t paid his taxes.”
The whole case was brought for one reason. To pressure Manafort to flip on President Trump. The problem with that is, Manafort has nothing to offer since there was no collusion in the Trump campaign. Where there was collusion, was with the Democrats and the Von Pantsuit campaign. They were the ones who paid for the bogus dossier that started this whole collusion nonsense in the first place.
Now that more and more information is coming out on just how corrupt the DoJ was during the Obama/Holder/Lynch years, there have been calls for both Mueller’s resignation or removal, and also for the appointment of another special prosecutor to investigate…Robert Mueller.
President Trump has repeatedly stated that he has no plans to fire Mueller. I know that a number of Beltway Uniparty hacks and NeverTrumpers are pushing to make it impossible for President Trump to fire Mueller. However, President Trump never said anything about not arresting Mueller for his actions in covering up the Uranium One bribery scandal. That’s something Mueller and the others really need to worry about, especially since reports came out last night that Attorney General Session will NOT be recusing himself this time.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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