Even after the embarrassing Robert Mueller hearing in Congress last week, some Democrats ardently continue their efforts to impeach President Trump. While the hearing was painful, we learned that the biased Mueller team attacked Republicans while protecting Democrats, knew fairly early that there was no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russians to interfere with the 2016 election, and perhaps most importantly, that Mr. Mueller was probably a figurehead and not an active manager of the demagogic probe. The real problem is that we are left wondering who actually was calling the shots.
The origins of the politicized investigation centers on a shadowy character named Joseph Mifsud who entrapped an unwitting George Papadopoulos during the 2016 campaign. When the FBI caught up with Mifsud and interrogated him, Mifsud lied three times. That much was contained in the Mueller report, even though Mueller didn’t seem to know anything about Mifsud in his testimony before the Judiciary Committee.
The Mueller team chose not to indict Mifsud, though they pursued Trump associates for memory failures and contradictions. Mifsud directly lied to the investigators with impunity. His actions were the catalyst to the entire investigation misadventure. Similar to the bogus Steele dossier, demonstrably and flagrantly false in every aspect, the FBI relied on Mifsud to initiate an investigation into Carter Page, which proved to be an even bigger dud then the Democrats’ reliance on Robert Mueller’s public testimony.
When I asked Mr. Mueller when he personally knew that Donald Trump had not cooperated, colluded, or conspired with the Russians to impact the 2016 presidential election, Mueller was unable to answer.
Yet we know that by the fall of 2017, Mueller’s team had decided to not renew the FISA warrant being used to spy on Carter Page. That’s a pretty good indication that they were wrapping up the Russian election-conspiracy investigation. Further, in the fall of 2017, the Mueller cadre of partisan attack dogs shifted their focus from Russian interference to bogus claims that President Trump was interfering with the investigation.
The point: Mueller and his team knew almost a year before the midterm election that there had not been a conspiracy between the Trump team and the Russians. Rather than closing up shop, however, Mueller kept this a secret until after the midterm elections of 2018. Failure to reveal the clearing of the president and his team before 2018 assuredly impacted the election outcome. And, isn’t that the same thing that Mueller’s group ended up indicting a Russian IT outfit for doing?
The Russians were indicted for purchasing social media ads for and against candidates Trump and Clinton that attempted to sway the 2016 election through misdirected communications. Suppression by the Mueller team that President Trump and his campaign was cleared of collusion allegations was a blatant effort to continue the undermining of the president that was underway by corrupt FBI and DOJ officials as far back as 2015
And this brings us to what we didn’t learn from the hearing: Mr. Mueller admitted that he didn’t do most of the hiring of his team. He left that to his corruptly biased henchman, Andrew Weissmann, who immediately began stacking the deck with angry, anti-Trump prosecutors.
It was obvious from his testimony that Mueller didn’t seem to have much knowledge of the nuts and bolts of the investigation. Perhaps his aides were in control of the investigation. His No. 1 assistant was the pro-Clinton, pro-Resistance Andrew Weissmann. His No. 2 was Aaron Zebley. Zebley, you will recall was the attorney who represented — Justin Cooper, the gentleman who set up Hillary Clinton’s private server and then destroyed the evidence when Clinton was being investigated.
Perhaps Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was calling the shots. He was Mueller’s superior at DOJ. Rosenstein hired Mueller. During the week prior to Mueller’s hire, Rosenstein had a telephone conference and at least two meetings with Mueller where a potential special counsel position was discussed.
The point is that Mueller’s testimony in Congress indicates that he might not have been controlling the people who were trying to dig up dirt on President Trump. It seems most likely that Weissmann and Zebley, two partisan anti-Trumpers, were attacking the president in what resembles a palace coup.
Democrats continue to wander in the fantasyland of impeachment when they ought to be embarrassed by the Mueller hearings and be shocked at the abuse of the justice system to attack political opponents.
Biggs is a member of the Judiciary Committee.